The Ladder of Inference

by Seth Sinclair

Creating awareness is the essence of how coaches help clients to learn.  For me, creating awareness is the process of helping leaders step outside of themselves to get a more complete and objective picture of what makes them tick.

What kinds of things should leaders be aware of about themselves that they normally may not consider?  The list includes understanding how they are perceived by others; their assumptions and guiding beliefs; their personal values; whether their current mindset is fixed or open; their decision making style; the way in which they process and experience emotions; and their personality type.

Coaches help leaders dig into each of these areas to help them better understand why they do what they do.  Sometimes, coaches create this level of awareness during their coaching sessions, using tools like powerful questions—questions that make the person required to answer them think and reflect before responding.  Powerful questions play an important role in creating awareness, because a good coach will ask the kind of questions that will bring the leader to a deeper understanding of his or her goals, objectives, and current situation.

Other times, a coach will utilize assessments tools to provide leaders with objective data that can build perspective, open areas for discussion, and facilitate goal development.  These include psychometric tests designed to measure knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and personality traits. 

A common example is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which measures preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.  360-degree assessments, which enable a leader to gather performance feedback from peers, direct reports, supervisors, customers, and others, are another useful tool to gather data and expand an individual’s self-perception.

An important concept related to creating awareness is called the “ladder of inference.”  The ladder of inference, developed by organizational psychologist Chris Argyris, describes the process each of us use hundreds of times a day to process what we see and feel, and to decide what action to take based on our observations and emotions.

The ladder of inference is a powerful tool to help people understand how and why they think as they do about an issue—their thinking and reasoning process.  It helps leaders recognize their tendencies to make claims and statements about the world they assume to be true, and expect others to unquestionably accept, but with which others may actually disagree. It also helps people understand why they think differently about various issues, and enables them to better empathize with others’ thinking.

Let’s review the ladder of inference together.

At the bottom of the ladder, on the first rung, is the pool of information that represents all of the raw information that could be relevant in any situation, what we might see or understand if we saw and understood absolutely everything that was going on. 

On the second rung is the way that we make selections from the pool, or our “selected reality.” None of us can notice everything, and we see things selectively based on our beliefs and previous experiences.  What’s important here is to understand that others may take different information from the pool based on their experiences and beliefs.

On the next rung, we describe to ourselves what we believe is going on, our “interpreted reality.” This tells us what the observations we have made on the previous rung mean to us.

On the fourth rung, we apply our existing assumptions to what we have observed and felt.  The things we have previously learned about similar situations have a powerful influence on how we interpret and evaluate what we see.

On the fifth rung, we draw conclusions based on our assumptions, using the facts we have interpreted and the assumptions we have made.

On the sixth rung, we develop beliefs, or theories, based on these conclusions. As humans, we seek consistency in understanding our experiences by weaving past and present experience into coherent actions.

And on the final rung, we take actions that seem right to us based on our beliefs.

What the ladder shows is that our beliefs have a major influence on how we select the facts we are going to use in making decisions.  We “jump to conclusions” when we miss important facts and skip steps in our reasoning process.  

I encourage leaders to understand their own ladders of influence, so that they can get back to understanding facts, and use their beliefs and experiences in a positive way.  My hope is that they will expand their “fields of judgment,” instead of limiting them.  The construct helps them draw better conclusions, improves their ability to analyze data, and enables them to better validate and challenge other people’s conclusions.

My goal is to provide leaders with better awareness so they can slow down reactions that might otherwise be on auto-pilot.  Better awareness gives them more control and allows them more choices. A self-aware leader is one who is able to identify and employ the most skillful response possible to any situation or challenge.

There are a number of good descriptions of the Ladder of Influence on the Internet and I have drawn from a few of them in this article.  If you’ve got a few minutes, you might want to check out this humorous video by Trevor Maber on TedEd: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/rethinking-thinking-trevor-maber. Enjoy!