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Every person's story is messy, including yours. Working together will always be a challenge.

AI advice about work relationships carries the bias the humans taught: the idea that each story is simple.

You can learn to accept the messy without understanding the whole story of every colleague.

Ask anyone the plot of Romeo & Juliet, and I'd bet you get a version of boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, warring families tear them apart and ultimately both end up dead. Ok, maybe you get: they make terrible decisions, relying on third parties in the pre-digital age to pass vital messages between them, because of their warring families. And end up dead.

But that isn't how we hold stories, so we reduce them to something easier to carry. And so does AI, probably because it reflects an even simpler version than humans can hold. I personally love AI, but all of us have seen it reduce things from complexity to simplicity, sometimes to laughable effect. But we do have to consider its teacher.

As humans, we crave order. We see patterns and predictability, because we want to reduce risk. We learn that from an early age. The safe way home, the faster commute. It's deeply embedded in our survival instincts. Sometimes that requires overriding even rational signals. We trust people that we used to believe in longer than we should. We keep doing something that stopped working, because for so long it was the least risky move.

We're also incredibly self-interested.........

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