APPENDIX B

The Ladder of Reflection

Ever since organizational learning pioneers Chris Argyris and Donald Schön introduced a tool called the Ladder of Inference, countless people have appropriated it for their own purposes, calling it everything from the Ladder of Influence (a Freudian slip perhaps?) to the Ladder of Interpretation (by my sights, a bit more apt).¹

One reason the tool is so popular is that it opens a window onto how your mind works when you make sense of situations. And once you see how your mind works, you can never quite see things the same way again. All of a sudden you realize that what you see isn't necessarily the way things are, and what you take to be matters of fact are actually matters of interpretation—and pretty abstract interpretation at that.