Academic Leadership

Academic Leadership: Fundamental Building Blocks

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6.6 Learning New Behaviours

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An important function of the Integrator role is your ability to find ways to learn new

behaviours if current ones are inappropriate or ineffective.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this activity is to improve your

understanding of your assumptions and reactions in

interactions with others related to your work as an Academic

Coordinator.

The ‘Ladder of Inference’ is a conceptual and practical tool for ‘tracing’ our

reasoning, and therefore assists us in improving our understanding of our assumptions

and reactions. Dick and Dalmau (1999) trace its origins back to language theorists. It

has been used extensively by those interested in organisational effectiveness, systems

thinking, and conflict resolution.

Several versions of the ladder have been developed over the years, but the

underlying premise of each version is the same:

• If people were to labour over each inferential step between incoming information and
  their consequent actions they would be cognitively swamped. Instead, people must
  abstract data from background noise and make automatic inferences in order to take
  effective action in a timely manner.
  This can be arrayed on a ‘ladder’, from concrete observations at the bottom through
  progressive levels of abstraction and, finally, action. Note that there is also a recursive
  feature in the ladder, where our beliefs about the world affect our selection of the things
  we pay attention to in the first place. This is illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Ladder of Inference (based on Ross, 1994, p. 243)