Understanding the ladder of inference is useful for making sense of how we get tangled up in our beliefs about “truth.” The concept of the ladder was originally articulated by leadership expert Chris Argyris and later made popular in Peter Senge’s classic business book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.
The ladder is the process by which we take in information and make sense of it for ourselves. Knowing about it can help you understand where those pesky blind spots you learned about in Week 2 (Self-Awareness–How Are You Showing Up?) come from and why they are so hard for us to see. Let’s take a closer look.