Climb Slowly on the Ladder of Inference
““Assumptions are the termites of relationships.”
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Once you truly listen to the people around you, you start to hear surprising things. And once you’ve heard what’s been said, the challenge is to make meaning of what you’ve heard, using your newfound data effectively to support your larger goals.
As you listen, you’ll get a lot of static mixed in with the signal. It can be difficult to make sense of conflicting information, and to sort anecdotal and empirical data from perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes. While confusing, all of these kinds of data have value, and must be weighed appropriately before leaping to action.
And the impulse is to leap. Today’s world puts a premium on acting fast. Especially if you’ve taken the time to listen, you may quickly become impatient to act on what you’ve learned.
But acting too hastily has costs. Jumping to conclusions can be worse than making sure your facts are correct and your plans are wise. Even the best leaders struggle to maintain the right balance between observation and reflection on one hand, and hypothesis and action on the other.
As we interpret data and move to action, we all go quickly through a series of mental steps known as the Ladder of Inference, a concept developed by Harvard Business School Professor Chris Argyris. Each of the steps in Arggyris’s model is discrete, but in practice many of us tend to fly through them in a blink of an eye. Understanding this process can help you guard against the impatient habit of jumping to conclusions, and support better decision-making.
At the base of the Ladder of Inference are all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, ideas, and emotions that swirl around us every minute of every day. In a way, each of us is like a fish swimming in a vast sea of such data. Just as the fish is oblivious to the water, you and I are oblivious to almost all the data that surrounds us throughout our lives.
You are able to observe some of that data through your senses – sounds you can hear, wavelengths of light you can see, smells you can detect, emotions you can feel, and intuitions you can articulate. From all of the input that’s available, you select only the most interesting stimuli to notice, and filter everything else out of your awareness. Without realizing it, each of us is constantly ignoring data that appears useless or inconsequential, sensations like the feel of your shoe pressing on your foot, or the sound of a passing car.
When interesting data gets through you start to make meaning of what you’ve observed by applying the lessons of your past experiences and the values of your culture. For example, you might wake up one morning to the smell of burning food, and recognize from your past experience that something important might be taking place in your environment.
Since we almost never have all the data we need to fully understand a situation, humans have become extremely adept at filling in the blanks by making educated guesses and assumptions. In fact, we are master blank fillers. When you or I see a familiar letter or number missing a detail, we make the leap and identify the figure as if it were whole; this is why Captcha systems on the internet are so effective at distinguishing between people and computers. Or more practically: You might smell that burning food, and quickly infer without any further information that a family member has neglected their breakfast on the stove.
As the fog of confusion clears, you are able to assemble enough relevant data to draw conclusions. This is the deeply satisfying moment at which your uncertainty diminishes, and your hypotheses harden into “facts.” When the smell of burning food is added to the sight of smoke coming from the kitchen, you become confident in your conclusion that bacon is burning in the kitchen, and that a crisis might be developing.
Over the course of your life, you’ve strung together similar facts and experiences, assimilating them into your own personal wisdom and set of beliefs. Perhaps you’ve been able to remove burning food from a stove before, so for you rushing-in to help might seem like an option. Another person who was burned in his or her past might conclude that the only available course of action would be to flee.
At the top of the Ladder of Inference is whatever action you might take (or not take) as the result of ascending each of the previous steps. Whatever you do, or fail to do, produces a result, which in turn creates new data that you can observe through your senses. Thus, the process of climbing the ladder begins all over again.
There’s a lot to consider here. First, it is useful to remember that what much of what each of us thinks of as “fact” doesn’t actually derive from some irrefutable trove of cosmic truth, but is often the product of our own capabilities, experiences, choices, and attitudes. Every person climbs their own personal Ladder of Inference. No two people have the identical capacity to sense the world in the same way, and each of us filters our data through our own unique sieve.
So once people start sifting, selecting, imbuing with meaning, and filling-in the blanks based on their cultural perspectives and personal habits, every conclusion starts to look a little less solid. It pays, therefore, to hold your perception of what is and isn’t a “fact” just a little more lightly than perhaps you may have before.
And since each of us brings our own set of filters, experiences, and assumptions to the task, we should shouldn’t be surprised when well-meaning people will come away from a single set of circumstances with completely unique understandings. We see the world differently because each of us is looking through our own distinctive lenses.
I see leaders overlook struggle with this kind of dissonance all the time. The leadership team of a small company with whom I’m working has been squabbling for months about whether their current financial difficulties are a momentary downturn in the market, or a warning of a deep crisis just ahead. The CFO sees a crisis and insists on deep staff cuts to align costs with revenues. The CEO sees opportunity and wants to raise salaries and build capacity to compete for future projects. Each looks at the other with confusion and contempt: How, they each have asked me in private, can the other be so blind to the facts? How can their colleague fail to see the action this circumstance requires?
Their situation reminded of the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, in which a group of blind men encounter an elephant for the first time. One blind man approaches the trunk and declares, “The elephant is much like a snake!” Another man touches the tusk and says, “The elephant is much like a spear.” A third man touches the elephant’s tail: “The elephant is much like a rope!” The fourth man touches the elephant’s side, and says, “No, you are all wrong. The elephant is much like a wall.”
Of course, each man is correct and all are wrong. To some degree, an elephant is like a snake, a spear, a rope, and a wall, while in sum it is nothing like any of those things. Each man in the parable climbs his own Ladder of Inference to draw a set of conclusions based on their own data and assumptions that are both poignantly accurate and utterly useless.
The challenge for you as the change agent is to honor and respect the range of individuals’ insights (including your own), holding each conclusion lightly while still seeking the bigger picture. Doing so is the best way to discern the elephant that may be standing right in front of you.
