Making Your Thinking Transparent
Image: by Chris Ryan via Canva
"We see things not as they are, but as we are"
- Immanuel Kant*
I recently wrote an article about the Ladder of Inference. This is a model originally proposed by Chris Argyris, and became extremely popular after it was included by Peter Senge in his bestselling book The Fifth Discipline**.
The Ladder of Inference demonstrates how what we assume to be factually correct is very often not. Between “reality” and our decision to act, come a number of filters, and our natural tendencies - of finding meaning, making assumptions, of creating a narrative, and jumping to conclusions. Our conclusions strengthen existing beliefs and create new ones, and these beliefs are in turn both the basis for action, and lenses through which we see the world.
This means that how we act on information often has very little to do with the information itself, but with the story we are telling ourselves about it, and the beliefs that we live by. Also, since we look at the world through the lenses of our beliefs, we rarely see things that don’t agree with our beliefs.
The Ladder of Inference is a useful model to understand our own thinking, make our thinking transparent to others, and to help others explain their thinking to us. It is a simple and intuitive model, and once you understand it, you can see it apply in a number of situations in your own life. In workshops where I teach this model, participants find it useful in understanding a number of issues that crop up in their day to day communication.
If you would like to learn more about the Ladder of inference, please read my earlier article, which also links to several useful resources that you may wish to refer.
What are some stories you can share about how listening with empathy made an impact?
Please leave a comment below or send me an email, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.
*Foot note: This quote has ambiguous origins. It has been variously attributed to Anais Nin, Steven Covey, Immanuel Kant and many others. Research by Quote Investigator, a popular website by Garson O Toole that investigates the origin of widely used quotes, failed to identify with certainty the origins of this particular quote. My attribution to Immanuel Kant is based on the fact that that when I first read this quote, it was attributed to Kant, and the QI article associates this particular set of words most closely with him.