القائمة الرئيسية
Contrary to popular belief, studies have shown that people do not always learn from experience, that experience does not help us filter out misinformation, and that the belief that we are highly experienced can prevent us from doing our jobs, seeking evidence other than what we know, and questioning our assumptions.
In short:
- Human-centered leadership requires self-awareness, which can be difficult to teach.
- The Ladder of Inference provides a model for increasing self-awareness in leaders and has many additional practical applications.
- The Ladder of Inference supports leadership fitness by developing balance and resilience.
Developing Self-Awareness Using the Ladder of Inference
A recent study by Harvard Business Review highlighted the importance of human-centered leadership (HCL), but convincing leaders to change their behaviors or even see the need for change can be a challenge.
Additionally, human-centered leadership is a complex and multifaceted topic, which begs the question: Where do I start? Helping leaders develop self-awareness may be a good starting point.
Research suggests that only about 15% of people have adequate self-awareness, and less than a 30% correlation exists between people’s actual and perceived competence.
The same research shows that a leader’s lack of self-awareness negatively impacts decision-making, collaboration, and conflict management.
Self-awareness, a key component of emotional intelligence, is a cornerstone of human-centered leadership because it enables leaders to develop a deeper understanding of themselves and their impact on others.
Leaders with strong self-awareness are in tune with their emotions, strengths, and areas for development, allowing them to make informed decisions and navigate complex situations with clarity and integrity.
So, self-awareness is important, but how can you help leaders build it? A good first step is to teach them how to use the Ladder of Inference, a model introduced by Harvard professor emeritus Chris Argyris.
Ladder of Inference
The Ladder of Inference shows how people unconsciously construct mental ladders of assumptions and beliefs based on their observations and experiences.
This process happens quickly and often unconsciously, leading individuals to sort through information, make interpretations, and take action, all of which can be influenced by biases and past experiences. It represents what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 processing in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
- System 1 is automatic, fast processing that requires little energy.
- System 2 is rational, conscious, and effortful processing.
Kahneman explains how System 1 makes educated guesses to reach quick conclusions, but he doesn’t show any record of how it arrived at its conclusions.
“System 1 doesn’t keep track of the alternatives it rejects, or even the fact that alternatives exist.” The problem is that the guess it makes may be wrong (the conclusion is also wrong), but you will believe it unless System 2 evaluates it.
This often doesn’t happen because System 2 is “lazy” or often distracted. Using the ladder, we can use System 2 to guide our conclusions and provide a framework for analyzing them while detecting and correcting more incorrect conclusions.
Selecting Data from Available Information
Imagine a ladder leaning against a wall in a water pool representing data or facts. The amount of data in any given situation is greater than our brains can handle, so filters are applied.
Two people looking at the same data will filter and retain different data, but no one will process all the data completely or in the same way. When you step onto the ladder's first rung, your brain selects and sorts the data, keeping some and discarding others.
Adding Meaning to Selected Data
As you move up the ladder, our brains interpret the data using the filters and lenses of our biases, perspectives, and ways of thinking. Think of yellow-lensed glasses.
When you first put them on, everything looks yellow; then your brain adjusts, and everything looks normal until you take the glasses off, and then everything looks green. What you were looking at hasn’t changed, but the way you looked at it has.
Interpreting Data and Making Assumptions
On the next ladder rung, you interpret the data and begin to make sense of it. You make assumptions and fill in the gaps. Have you ever read an email and realized that you hear the author’s voice and tone in your head? The tone of voice you hear is likely an addition to your interpretation, and context, experiences, and culture heavily influence our interpretations. This is also how you interpret a situation: good or bad, threatening or rewarding, good or evil.
Drawing Conclusions from Assumptions
You have reached a conclusion or inference as you approach the top of the ladder. From where you stand, your conclusion is obvious, self-evident, and important.
Your conclusion seems like a fact, and you can’t imagine any other sane person coming to a different conclusion. Because of this certainty, when we share our brilliant insights with others, we don’t feel the need to explain how we arrived at them because the validity of our conclusion is so obvious to us, but unfortunately, it’s not necessarily obvious to anyone else.
Adopting Beliefs Based on Assumptions
Complicating matters further is the profound influence of our mental models—our values, assumptions, and deeply held beliefs about the world—on the way we each ascend our ladder of inferences.
To visualize this concept, one can also liken these mental models to the sides of a ladder, providing structure and coherence to our thinking process.
For example, people adopting a “think positive” mindset often conclude that the world is good. On the other hand, those who have an “expect the worst” mindset tend to filter and judge events in a way that reflects their negative outlook.
This is how different people standing in the same data set can end up with their ladders hitting different walls and come to vastly different conclusions.
Applying the Ladder of Inference to Raise Self-Awareness
Self-awareness should increase the moment a person learns about the ladder. The fact that a mysterious and often unconscious process is brought to awareness is the first step in raising self-awareness.
It’s like breathing. If you don’t pay attention to it, it happens automatically. However, when you notice your breathing, you can control it. It moves from Kahneman’s System 1 to System 2, from automatic to deliberate.
The second step is to slow down the process and examine how we climbed the ladder, which is an act of self-reflection. What data did we select? What data did we reject? What assumptions did we make? What biases might have influenced the process? Reflecting on our thinking process and examining our assumptions can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our interactions with others. This is the beginning of self-awareness.
The Ladder of Inference is easy to learn and apply. Most people can remember a time when they jumped to a conclusion that turned out to be wrong. Ask them to climb back down the ladder to that conclusion to analyze their reasons. Also ask them to think about the consequences of making the wrong conclusions.
Continuous awareness and evaluation of our ladders should lead to the realization that many of our conclusions seem like facts and are actually opinions. However, some learners may need help understanding this. It can be uncomfortable to realize that many of the things you thought were facts are actually opinions, so your ego will resist.
Why is it important to convince leaders of this realization? As we noted earlier, most leaders overestimate their competence, so making them less certain of their conclusions is helpful.
Certainty is the enemy of curiosity. Knowledge is an obstacle to learning. Why to learn what I already know? Research shows that two consequences of rising to the leadership levels in a company are a loss of empathy and an increase in arrogance. The antidote is self-awareness and curiosity. The ladder of Inference supports both.
How the Ladder of Inference Supports Leadership Fitness?
Leadership fitness, like physical fitness, requires strength, balance, flexibility, and endurance. The Ladder directly supports balance and flexibility.
Part of balance is the ability to read situations more accurately by challenging the unconscious interpretation processes that lead us to ignore some signals in favor of others, i.e., disabling unconscious bias and default behavior patterns through metacognition, or thinking about your thinking.
After deliberately disabling these thinking processes, leaders demonstrate greater balance by deliberately choosing leadership behaviors. The ladder is a tool that helps leaders make implicit thought patterns explicit, allowing for analysis, choice, and correction in leadership style.
The ladder supports flexibility by interrupting habits. Does a person have the option to act differently without noticing their default thinking? Maybe, but the chances seem slim. Imagine that you are driving home from work, tired and hungry. Traffic is terrible, and someone cuts you off. For most people, the automatic response is to call the other driver an idiot.
However, these are conclusions. If this assumption process is interrupted and assumptions are evaluated using the ladder, you may realize that the person who cut you off may not be evil or lacking in intelligence and that there are many alternative conclusions possible.
You may also realize that you have mistakenly cut off others and that you are neither evil nor stupid. Now that you have access to different ways of acting, you can choose to send positive thoughts toward this person, hoping that he or she will get where he or she is going safely.
Before understanding the ladder of Inference, you had only options; after understanding the ladder, you have new possibilities for acting. This is flexibility.
In conclusion
The ladder of Inference is a simple but powerful self-awareness tool that can be used in many situations to increase leadership balance and flexibility and to support human-centered leadership.
