Encyclopedia of Leadership

462 SECTION 15 TOOLS FORTAKINGCARE OFYOURSELF

15.4

UNDERSTANDINGOUR ASSUMPTIONS ANDBIASES

Inspired by Chris Argyris, Peter Senge, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, and Roger Fisher.

Leaders need to understand what makes themselves, as well as those around them, tick. This

includes understanding the beliefs, assumptions, and mental models that human beings hold

about the people and the world around them. This tool enables you to inquire into, challenge,

and check your own assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs. It also gives you the opportunity

to examine and possibly modify some of your own mental models. The ladder shows how we

focus, assimilate data, and draw conclusions. It describes a linear process, the Ladder of

Inference, to aid our understanding of our complex mental processes—even though these pro-

cesses are not linear in nature! The ladder is best understood by reading it in ascending order,

from , an initial experience, to , taking action based on conclusions about this experience.

THELADDER OFINFERENCE

You act on your conclusions.

You draw conclusions.

Your conclusions based on your assumptions

You make assumptions.

Your assumptions about what the person meant

You make sense and add meaning.

How you make sense of the selected data

You select data from this experience.

From all the data available, what you chose to take into consideration or consciousness

You have an experience.

What you see, hear, and feel in a given situation

Chris Argyris, a seminal thinker in organizational theory,

calls the Ladder of Inference “a common mental path-

way of increasing abstraction, often leading to misguid-

ed beliefs.” The ladder maps a human process that

occurs in real time and usually out of consciousness.

Understanding and making your thinking ladder explic-

it helps surface unspoken assumptions so they can be

meaningfully discussed. The ladder helps you under-

stand, for example, how people might draw very differ-

ent conclusions from the same conversation. It also

explains how people might have difficulty clarifying

the basis for their decisions.

Rick Ross illustrated the ladder in Peter Senge et al.,

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. From The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook,by Peter M. Senge, Art
Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B. Ross, and Bryan J.
Smith. Used with permission of Doubleday, a division of
Random House, Inc.