My heart sank as Mr. Gotlieb, my 7th grade science teacher, placed my report on my desk. I had caught a glimpse of the bright red, all-caps letters as he walked by, but once the paper was in front of me, there was no mistaking them:
70% - FAIL
I had failed my science project.
But how??
My classmates had been awestruck during my presentation of the biofeedback rhythm device, pushing one another to take turns and see what it could reveal about the signals their bodies were sending. Everyone seemed engaged. They asked questions, and I had the answers. My write-up was thorough too. It had to be - I had stayed up all night finishing it!
Tears welled behind my eyes and came crashing down. I didn’t understand what was happening. It felt like I was being gutted like a fish. If I had been hooked up to the device at that moment, the reading probably would have looked as chaotic as my mind felt.
What I didn’t realize, and what Mr. Gotlieb later explained, was that I had conflated my results with my conclusion. I hadn’t distinguished between observable, measurable facts, and my interpretation of them.
I reported that heart rates were “fast” or “slow” instead of recording 92 BPM or 70 BPM. I described people as having fun, feeling stressed, or becoming relaxed as though the device had directly observed those things. It hadn’t. Those were conclusions I had drawn from the results.
That was why I failed. Not because interpretation didn’t belong in the report, but because I had presented my interpretations as observations.
I had blurred the line between what happened and what I believed it meant.
That lesson stuck with me. And over the years, it has come to mean far more than how to write a seventh-grade science report.
The distinction should be simple, right? Observation describes what happened or what we directly experienced, leaning as objectively as possible. And interpretation explains, evaluates, or assigns meaning to it.
Both matter because both give us information. But they’re not the same thing.
If my heart rate goes from 70 BPM to 92 BPM, that increase is the result. Stress is one possible explanation or interpretation, but excitement could also be another. Maybe I just ran up the stairs or heard a loud sound. The number alone doesn’t tell me why it changed or what it means.
Of course, everyday life is not a controlled science experiment, and what happens isn’t always conveniently displayed on a little screen.
And sometimes the thing we’re observing is happening inside of us. So we’re the observer and the observed at the same time.
“I got angry when my boss asked me to revise the report again” is an observation of your internal experience. It’s subjective because no one else can directly access your anger, but it’s still something you experienced, so it’s valid.
“My boss makes me angry because she doesn’t trust my judgment” is different. Now you’re explaining what caused the anger and assigned a motive to your boss. You’re giving her behavior meaning.
Sure, maybe your boss doesn’t trust your judgment. Maybe this is the seventh time she picked apart work she already had approved and you’re recognizing a real pattern. But it’s also possible that maybe she received new information or that the expectations were never clear. Maybe you’re the one already frustrated about something else and this revision request landed on top of it.
You really don’t know yet. That’s the point.
We can’t operate without interpreting. Our brains continually use prior information and prediction to make sense of what we perceive. Without assigning meaning to things, we’d never make a decision, learn from experience, diagnose a problem, or figure out what to do next. Interpretation has a job.
The trouble starts when we forget that we’re assigning meaning to things we observe. Your boss asking you to revise a report three times becomes, “she doesn’t trust me.” Someone interrupting you during a meeting becomes, “he doesn’t respect me.” The team missing two deadlines becomes, “no one here is accountable.” We stop treating these as possible explanations and start treating them as what happened. We conflate the two things - what actually happened and what we make it mean. One is observable, the other assigns value to it. But we smush the two together without even realizing it.
Then what?
Well, then we react to the disrespect. We let it fester, develop a grudge, cause us to look for more evidence that they’re disrespectful. We manage the supposed accountability problem by enforcing new policies, and we defend ourselves against the person who clearly doesn’t trust us.
Except none of those things are actually what we observed. They are what we made what we observed mean.
And if we get the meaning wrong, we may find ourselves solving a problem that doesn’t exist while the one that does keeps producing the same result.
Can we ever be perfectly objective? Probably not.
We choose what we notice and see things from our perspective. Our memories, experiences, beliefs, values, and emotional states come along for the ride. There is no removing ourselves completely from the observation.
But still, we can lean into objectivity. We can be more specific with our words. More concrete. More measurable when measurement is relevant. More independently verifiable when verification is possible. Less dependent on an inferred motive, cause, evaluation, or meaning.
Instead of “The team never meets deadlines,” we can say, “The team missed at least one deadline each week for the past 6 weeks.”
Instead of “She was so dismissive and disrespectful,” we can say, “She started responding before I finished speaking three times during the meeting.”
Instead of “No one knows what’s going on,” we can say, “Three people gave three different answers when I asked who had final decision making power.”
None of these observations gives us the full story, but they give us somewhere to start.
A missed deadline each week for 6 weeks in a row can reveal accountability problem, three different answers may expose unclear decision rights, repeated interruptions may be part of a much larger problem.
But before we judge, we need to investigate.
Now we can ask what else was happening, whether this happened before, where it happens, where it doesn’t, and what conditions may be contributing to the (observable) result. When we do that, we’re working with something other than the conclusion we walked in with. And that helps us better assess, evaluate, conclude and decide next steps.
When I catch myself becoming certain about someone else’s motives or about what a situation obviously means, especially when I’m feeling emotionally charged at the same time, I try to go back to that seventh grade science report.
What belongs in the results section? What specifically happened? What is observable? What did I directly experience? What can I quote, count, measure, record, or verify?
Then, what belongs in the conclusion? What am I calling this? What do I think caused it? What motive am I assigning and why? What story am I telling about what it means? Is that story helping me figure out what to do next?
Let’s say a bunch of your peers are saying things like, “Leadership is so toxic. They keep changing their minds and never ask for our opinions.”
Ok, there may be something very real underneath that statement, but it’s still an interpretation, a conclusion. And when the conclusion is all you have, it muddies the waters. It tells you how people have made sense of their work environment, but not enough about what’s actually happening inside of it.
So you dig further and find out that leadership changed the team’s top priority three times in six weeks. Two projects were paused after work had already begun and the people responsible for executing those projects weren’t included in the meetings where the decisions were made. When the third change was announced, your peers felt frustrated and stopped trusting that the new direction would last.
Now you have something you can work with.
Separating the observation from interpretation doesn’t tell you that your peers are right or wrong. It shows you which parts can be investigated. You can ask why the priorities changed. You can look at who is involved in those decisions and who isn’t. You can examine how the changes are communicated, what the disruption is costing the team, and whether this is a temporary response to new information or an ongoing pattern.
This gives you somewhere to go next. Just as the conclusion of a science project would.
This is also where my practice of Content vs Context comes in. It’s a tool I built to help people separate what happened from what they make it mean so that they can see more clearly and reclaim some power and agency, even when what’s happening feels very heavy and overwhelming.
The content is the neutral event. It’s what happened before we explain, evaluate, or assign meaning to it. We can also observe our initial response to the event like what we felt or noticed without treating that response as proof of what the event means.
The context is everything surrounding and shaping how we understand the event - our assumptions, history, emotions, beliefs, interpretation, and meaning you assign it.
We need both. Context helps us make sense of content and it can also help us decide what to do next. But the meaning we give it can mobilize or immobilize us.
Let’s say you applied for a promotion and it went to someone else. That’s the content. You might decide it means you’re not good enough, the company doesn’t value you, and you’ll never advance there. That context might leave you feeling defeated and unwilling to try again.
Or you might recognize that you don’t know why the decision was made yet. Maybe the other person demonstrated experience you haven’t had the opportunity to build. Maybe your work hasn’t been visible to the right people. Maybe the decision had nothing to do with your ability at all. That context leaves you with questions you can ask and information you can use.
Same content, different contexts. One context delivers the verdict and closes the inquiry. The other gives you somewhere to go next.
The point isn’t to force a positive interpretation onto something painful or pretend the painful feelings aren’t there. It’s to recognize the meaning we’ve assigned so we can examine whether it’s true, whether it’s useful, and whether it gives us power to respond or leaves us feeling powerless.
At 13, I saw “70% - FAIL” and thought it meant I was bad at science. That I was stupid.
But that wasn’t the result either. The observable result was more specific - I put my conclusions in the results section. I reported what I thought the numbers meant as though the numbers had said it themselves.
Mr. Gotlieb wasn’t teaching me to stop interpreting. He was teaching me to notice when I was doing it.
That may be the lesson we all need to remember now. Put what happened in the results section. Put what you believe it means in the conclusion. Then examine that conclusion before you start living, reacting, leading or making decisions from inside it.