Uncertainty of this kind is a natural territory for Radical Conformity Principle 5 – Eyes Wide Open, recognising how quickly interpretation fills gaps that evidence has not yet resolved.
You notice it before you can explain it.
Your boss seems cooler. Access feels narrower. Conversations shorten. Decisions appear to be happening elsewhere. Nothing explicit has been said, but something has changed.
At that point the mind moves quickly to close the gap.
It starts to assemble possibilities. Perhaps they feel threatened. Perhaps you have done something wrong. Perhaps a stakeholder has fed back negatively. Perhaps your position is being quietly re-evaluated. The specifics vary, but the pattern is the same. The change is taken personally, and an explanation is selected.
Once that happens, uncertainty feels resolved. You now have a story.
The problem with the story
The problem is not which story you choose. The problem is choosing one at all.
From that moment, interpretation replaces observation. Neutral behaviour acquires intent. Silence becomes judgement. Distance becomes evidence. Everything new is filtered through the explanation already in place.
This is where situations begin to deteriorate.
Behaviour shifts to match the assumption being carried. Confidence hardens into defensiveness, or caution turns into withdrawal. Familiarity gives way to guardedness. Tone alters. None of this is deliberate, but it is noticed all the same.
The relationship responds not to your internal reasoning, but to your external behaviour.
What is actually happening
What makes this particularly dangerous is how plausible the assumption feels.
There is usually enough surface evidence to support almost any interpretation. A meeting moved. A message unanswered. A decision taken without consultation. Each detail reinforces the story already chosen.
Meanwhile, the actual cause of the change may sit entirely elsewhere.
Pressure that has nothing to do with you. A separate issue escalating rapidly. A difficult conversation looming. A demand from above that has narrowed attention. None of these announce themselves, and none are visible from your position.
But they shape behaviour just as strongly.
Where politics begin
When assumptions go unchecked, they do more than distort understanding. They provoke action.
Words are chosen differently. Silence is used where it was not before. Lines are drawn prematurely. Positions are taken that later feel difficult to undo.
This is how people create problems they never intended to create – not through incompetence or recklessness, but through meaning-making under pressure. The urge to explain discomfort is strong, and the explanations reached for first are usually the ones that centre the self.
Politics often begin here. Not with scheming, but with stories that harden too early.
Once behaviour starts responding to fiction rather than reality, the situation begins to move in directions no one originally planned. By the time the true cause becomes visible, the cost of the assumptions made along the way is already embedded in the relationship.
These moments matter more than they appear to at the time.
Not because the boss’s behaviour was significant, but because the story chosen in response to it often becomes so.
Colin Gautrey, January 2026