I had a great opportunity to use the Ladder of Inference model last week.  We had our senior HR leaders together in Boston and we have a pervasive challenge as a group.  Roughly half the group has long tenure as HR leaders at the Company and the other half are rather new to the Company and bring expertise that we have not traditionally had in HR.  Both groups tell themselves their own stories.  The long-timers tell themselves " these new leaders don't understand how things work here and aren't cultural."  The  new folks tell themselves "these leaders who have been with the Company only know how WFM works and are resistant to any change."  These stories create a ton of headwind for us as we navigate an immense amount of change and create an environment that lacks trust.

We invested a couple of hours of our conference to team build around telling ourselves stories and used the ladder of inference as the tool to help us.  I won't pretend that all of our challenges are now addressed, but the exercise really helped build trust within the group.  It also gave everyone an awareness that when we tell ourselves stories, we are dealing with perceptions and that we need to have a more complete set of information to help us make better decisions.

Overall, the group got a lot out of this exercise as the ladder really resonated with them.

BOC