Nobody mistakes confusion for understanding.

It is easy to recognize confusion. Confusion is unclear, incoherent, disorienting, unsettling — the very opposite of understanding.

But how do we distinguish misunderstanding from understanding? After all the essence of a misunderstanding is that it appears to be an understanding.

So how do we detect a misunderstanding? What is the tell-tale sign?

That’s the problem: there isn’t one.

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As long as we believe that misunderstanding announces itself as confusion — or that misunderstanding happens when we try to interpret “reality” and make a mistake — if we think interpretation happens after we perceive reality — we will fail to do the one thing necessary for uncovering misunderstanding. To uncovering misunderstanding we must seriously consider the very real possibility that what we fully and clearly understand might be wrong.

Most of us are oriented toward trying to see how we are right. The key to becoming more and more right, though, is trying to see how we are wrong, and then correcting that wrongness. We will never exhaust our wrongness, but this is how rightness is approached.

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It is not about right vs wrong. It is about right vs even more right.

It is about a one right vs wrong and another right vs wrong in open dialogue discovering a new and overwhelming shared rightness.