1.5 - About University

15.4U NDERSTANDING O UR A SSUMPTIONS AND B IASESInspired 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. Thisincludes understanding the beliefs, assumptions, and mental models that human beings holdabout 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 opportunityto examine and possibly modify some of your own mental models. The ladder shows how wefocus, assimilate data, and draw conclusions. It describes a linear process, the Ladder ofInference, to aid our understanding of our complex mental processes—even though these processesare not linear in nature! The ladder is best understood by reading it in ascending order,from ➊, an initial experience, to ➏, taking action based on conclusions about this experience.T HE L ADDER OF I NFERENCE➏ You act on your conclusions.➎ You draw conclusions.Your conclusions based on your assumptions➍ You make assumptions.Your assumptions about what the person meant➌ You make sense and add meaning.How you make sense of the selected data➋ You select data from this experience.From all the data available, what you chose to take into consideration or consciousness➊ You have an experience.What you see, hear, and feel in a given situationChris Argyris, a seminal thinker in organizational theory,calls the Ladder of Inference “a common mental pathwayof increasing abstraction, often leading to misguidedbeliefs.” The ladder maps a human process thatoccurs in real time and usually out of consciousness.Understanding and making your thinking ladder explicithelps surface unspoken assumptions so they can bemeaningfully discussed. The ladder helps you understand,for example, how people might draw very differentconclusions from the same conversation. It alsoexplains how people might have difficulty clarifyingthe 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, ArtKleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard B. Ross, and Bryan J.Smith. Used with permission of Doubleday, a division ofRandom House, Inc.462 SECTION 15 TOOLS FOR TAKING CARE OF YOURSELF