The Ladder of Inference

Not knowing about The Ladder of Inference, imagine you’re the leader of an important project with high visibility. The project got stuck and people lost trust that the project will be successful. You are engaged and reputation is at stake but fortunately you have an idea how to bring the project back on track, but you need is additional budget. Therefore you arranged a meeting with important stakeholders. At the meeting stakeholders following your presentation and things seem to go good. Except for Simon.

You know Simon for some time from previous collaborations. Simon seems to pay not much attention and starts looking out of the window. You start thinking Simon doesn’t believe that you can bring the project back on track. As you remember previous work with Simon you noticed he seemed to not follow your ideas often. Finally you conclude that Simon doesn’t believe in you to bring the project back on track. Close to the end of the meeting Simon asks “What are the alternatives?”, which usually means we need to do something else in your organization’s context.

The other stakeholders seem to rethink. You believe that was it for your project and maybe even harm your reputation within the organization. Wrapping up you decide to not include Simon in any of your work in future. Bad luck for you as Simon is very popular in the organization.

What has just happened?

Let’s look at the situation objectively and consider only the observable data. Simon just looked out of the window from time to time and asked a question during the presentation.

Inside you some more things happened. First of all you just selected some observable data from what actually happened. Simon has not looked out of the window all the time. He also looked at you and the other participants. You made assumptions about what Simon may think “Simon doesn’t believe that you can bring the project back on track”. Then you added meaning “When you think back on previous collaborations with Simon he seemed not to follow your suggestions or ideas often”. Further you assume that “Simon doesn’t trust you”. Your conclusion is that Simon is not a good person to work with. Finally you decide “you will not include Simon in any of your work”.

Everything apart from the observable data was your own perception and interpretation of what happened. A person with different background might have come to entirely different assumptions and conclusions. Maybe it’s a habit that Simon starts looking somewhere else while thinking intensively about something. His looking out of the window could have also be a sign that he seriously thought through your suggestions.

How to work with The Ladder of Inference

Let’s have a closer look at the ladder of inference and how to work with it. The picture below is taken from the Wikipeadia page about Chris Argyris who developed the concept of the ladder of inference. I stumbled upon the ladder of inference first in Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (a book with tools for practical application of what he describes as a learning organization in The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization).

Being aware of The Ladder of Inference is already useful. With that you can start to question your selected data, meaning, assumptions and conclusions. You can use each of the steps of the ladder to actually verify and test the your selected data, meaning, assumptions and conclusion. In the situation with Simon above you could have asked explicitly what Simon thinks about your presentation. The answer provides you new data which might lead to a different action from your side.

Profit from the awareness of your internal processes that comes with The Ladder of Inference. Use that to questions and validate your assumptions, beliefs and actions.