A surprisingly accurate model to improve your communication skills

It may be coincidence, but the two best tutorials I attended at Agile DevOps East both ran on the same day. The first one focused mostly on agile transformation, but briefly touched on the leadership topic. This one, let by Jennifer Bonine, took this further by focusing on being a better leader by understanding people. To break the ice, she started her session by having the group spend five minutes to meet as many people as possible using a couple of pre-printed questions. This was fun and such, but the real reason was her notion that better connected teams outperform others by 3 times. And inter-personal communication is important. According to a survey, 91% of the business issues are not caused by (lack) of competencies, but by communication issues. They are often caused by a lack of trust. We seem to emphasize the thing we don’t like and ignore the things we do like. This is caused by cultural ideas, life experiences and the influence of what others have said about us. This is called distortion of reality.

To understand how to break this vicious circle, she shared a model called The Ladder Of Inference that can help us understand how people react to situations. It all starts with perception, something you see, hear, feel or smell. What happens next is that you interpret this. You give it meaning based on your beliefs and values. Then emotion kicks in. You start to feel a response as a result of that interpretation. But that’s not all. That emotion feeds into judgement. You evaluate the situation…