Two people walk out of the same meeting with different stories about it. One heard a decision. The other heard a discussion that never closed, and plans to raise the subject again next week. Ask either of them and you get an honest answer, and the two answers do not match.
Managers tend to treat that gap as an error to trace back to its source, on the assumption that one account is accurate and the other is spin or a lapse of memory. Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato has spent a career in business and organisational leadership and has also written a novel about a family that cannot agree on its own history. He has come to distrust the assumption.
“Writing has made me more comfortable with the idea that two people can experience the same moment and both be telling the truth.”
The novel is Three Days Grace, published by Indigo River Publishing on 12 May 2026 and distributed by Simon & Schuster. Set in Paris, it explores family, memory and the things people leave unsaid. Bradley-Silverio Donato, an American who has lived in the city since 2019, wanted readers to come away with questions of their own, rather than be told who to believe.
Honest and incompatible
He states the principle in plain terms. “Two people can remember the same relationship completely differently,” he says. A novel can hold both memories at once, moving from one character’s head to another’s without asking anyone to concede. A workplace seldom offers that luxury, and the pressure to settle the record can push a manager into a ruling before the facts are in.
The office version of the problem will be familiar to anyone who has run a team. A project slips, and the engineer remembers raising the risk while the product lead remembers hearing reassurance. A department gets restructured, and one group experiences the change as overdue while another experiences it as a demotion. If you treat each clash as a contest with a winner, your staff learn that the safest account to give is the one that matches yours.
Bradley-Silverio Donato makes a modest claim about this. Leadership, he notes, requires understanding that different people can experience the same event in very different ways, and fiction demands the same understanding from a writer. The practical move for a manager is to collect both accounts before ruling on either, and to accept that the ruling may have to make room for two truths.
The step before speaking up
He has written about the organisational side of this before. In a Forbes Business Council column published on 27 August 2026, he argued that organisations, like families, decay around what nobody says out loud. The column dealt with the cost of the unsaid. The idea of two honest accounts sits one step earlier in the chain.
Before a colleague will say the difficult thing, they have to believe their version can be heard without being ruled false on arrival. Many people stay quiet at work after deciding their account will lose. A manager who can hear two conflicting stories and treat both as evidence removes one of the main reasons for that silence.
He keeps the novel out of the management seminar. The book is fiction, and his professional life and writing life run on separate tracks. He does see the same muscles at work in both, observation and empathy chief among them, and he traces both back to a single habit.
“Both leadership and fiction begin with the same thing: paying attention to people,” he says.
For a manager, paying attention to people includes paying attention to the version of events you did not see. The person across the table may be wrong about the sequence and right about what it did to them, and a leader who can hold both at once for long enough will learn which of the two matters more.
Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato is an American novelist and writer on leadership who lives in Paris. Three Days Grace is published by Indigo River Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster.
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