51 Seven Ways to Improve Your Conversations Opinions are often mistaken for the truth. Whenever you hear
someone – maybe yourself – saying that something is ‘a well-
established fact’, you can be certain that they are voicing an
opinion.
Adversarial conversation stops the truth from emerging.
Arguing actually stops you exploring and discovering ideas. And
the quality of the conversation rapidly worsens: people are too
busy defending themselves, too frightened and too battle-
fatigued to do any better.
The Ladder of Inference The Ladder of Inference is a powerful model that helps you move
beyond argument. It was developed initially by Chris Argyris (see
The Fifth Discipline Handbook
, edited by Peter Senge et al, Nicholas
Brealey, London, 1994). He pictures the way people think in
conversations as a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder is
observation; at the top, action.
• From your observation, you step on to the first rung of the ladder by selecting data . (You choose what to look at.) • On the second rung, you infer meaning from your experience of similar data. • On the third rung, you generalise those meanings into assumptions . • On the fourth rung, you construct mental models (or beliefs ) out of those assumptions. • You act on the basis of your mental models. You travel up and down this ladder whenever you hold a
conversation. You are much better at climbing up than stepping
down. In fact, you can leap up all the rungs in a few seconds.
These ‘leaps of abstraction’ allow you to act more quickly, but
they can also limit the course of the conversation. Even more
worryingly, your mental models help you to select data from
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