Every business relationship, with a client, supplier, employee or partner, stands on three things: how much the two sides like each other, what they agree on, and what actually passes between them. When one of the three is low, the relationship starts to grind, even if the other two are in good shape.
Three corners of one triangle
The booklet's source calls these three things the cornerstone of every living association, the shared basis of everything people do together. The booklet names them affinity, reality and communication.
When a relationship stalls, the natural move is to explain it through the person's character: they are busy, that is how they are, it will pass. According to the booklet that explanation is almost always wrong, because it describes the person and says nothing about what happened between the two of you. The three-corner view swaps it for a sharper question: which of the three dropped? Once you know, the repair is far shorter than it looks.
The three are corners of the same triangle, and you do not pass through them one after another like stages. Each corner leans on the other two, so you cannot work on one as if it stood alone.
Suppose a regular client you like, who agrees with you about what your service includes, and who finds it easy to talk to you. All three corners are high, and that is what a healthy relationship looks like.
Now suppose a supplier you like a lot, but the two of you understand the word urgent differently. The personal side is fine, and still one low corner is enough to create constant friction between you.
What each corner says
Affinity is how much one person likes another. The source defines it as how close a person is willing to be with someone else, and it uses the word for fondness as well as for any other emotional attitude.
Reality is whatever appears to exist for both sides, and its definition is very short: “reality is basically agreement.” What two people agree is real is real between them.
Communication is everything that actually passes between the two. In human relationships the source ranks it the most important of the three, and calls it “the solvent for all things.”
To see what this looks like in a business, here are three relationships where a different corner is low.
Two partners like each other and talk all day, but they have no agreement on what counts as success for the business. Affinity is high and communication is high, reality is low, so the arguments never end.
A client fully shares your view of what is needed and finds you easy to talk to, but does not really like you. He will keep working with you exactly until someone cheaper turns up.
An employee likes you and shares your view, yet keeps problems to himself. Here the broken corner is communication, and you find out about every fault late.
From outside, the three look like three unrelated problems: endless arguments, price sensitivity, surprises at work. In each one, only a single corner dropped.
All three together make understanding
Here is the part that turns this from a matter of friendship into a matter of business. According to the source, the three together make up understanding.
This explains a common experience: you explain something to a person three times and it still does not land. An explanation covers communication alone, one corner of the three. If there is no agreement about the subject itself, and no reasonable attitude between the two sides, you can repeat it again and again and it will never turn into understanding.
The source puts the same idea in management language. A real group needs a management that looks after all three corners, because the three together are what holds the group up.
So when you hear yourself say that someone does not understand, stop for a moment. According to the booklet this is almost always the wrong diagnosis, and before you explain again it is worth checking whether the problem is that they do not agree.
Suppose an owner explained a new procedure to an employee four times and it never stuck. The fifth time he first asked what the employee thought of it, found out that the employee was against it, and from there the explanation took two minutes.
Or a client who seems not to understand your price. When you check, she understood it perfectly well and simply did not agree with it. These are two different problems, and another explanation solves only one of them.
What the booklet adds
This chapter of the booklet comes with two exercises: a build exercise and an analysis exercise. The whole booklet is organised around these three corners. It moves from what they are to how you identify which one was cut, and what you do after you have identified it. In the chapters after this one it explains how a fall in one corner pulls the other two down, and what a break looks like from outside.
A relationship that stalls usually stalls on one corner while the other two still hold it up. So the first question to ask is which corner dropped.
The booklet is general knowledge about communication, not legal advice for a business dispute. The repair also depends on the other side.