When Assumptions Take Over: How to Pause, Visit Other Lands, and Reconnect

You’ve likely seen it happen: someone shows up late, avoids eye contact, and stays quiet. It’s easy to assume a story—they’re disengaged, upset, maybe even disrespectful. The truth? You don’t actually know. But your body’s already reacting, your mind’s made up, and the interaction has shifted course.

This is what Chris Argyris describes as the Ladder of Inference: a model that shows how quickly we go from observing to assuming to acting. I’ve written about it before as a powerful tool for creating inclusive environments (read more here). This post offers a fresh take by pairing it with one of my favorite systems coaching tools: Lands Work from Organizational Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC).

Together, these tools help individuals and teams slow down reactive thinking, explore different perspectives, and build connection across differences.  

The Ladder We All Climb

Here’s how the Ladder of Inference works. In mere seconds, our brain moves us through seven steps:

1. Observable Data –  What we see or hear
2. Selected Data – What we notice or pay attention to
3. Added Meaning – The interpretation we bring
4. Assumptions – The story we create
5. Conclusions – What we decide is true
6. Beliefs – What gets reinforced over time
7. Actions – What we do (or don’t do) based on that belief

These shortcuts can be helpful, but they also make it easy to act on assumptions—especially in fast-paced or emotional moments.  

Seeing More Than One Land: Using Lands Work

Lands Work helps us recognize how people experience the same moment differently, shaped by their unique values, culture, and lived experience. This tool asks us to imagine that each person is operating from the perspective of their own “Land.” 

When someone’s behavior confuses or irritates us, it’s often because we’re seeing it through our own filters. The mistake we make is assuming our land is their land. Take silence in a meeting. In Your Land, it might signal disinterest. In Their Land, it could mean reflection, hesitation, or uncertainty. 

By mapping both lands—and then exploring what might exist in Our Land (the shared space)— we can move from assumption to awareness. It’s not just about empathizing; it’s about shifting toward greater clarity, respect, and trust.

Lands Work invites us to pause, get curious, and visit someone else’s land and ask:  

• What’s the weather like in their land today?
• What values or experiences shape their reaction?
• What might they be seeing that I don’t?

Try This: A Lands-Based Reflection Exercise

To help slow down the ascent up the ladder, try the following:

1. After setting team agreements for the meeting, ask team members to reflect on a recent tension or misunderstanding.
2. Have participants write down what happened (Observable Data) and the story they told themselves (Assumptions).
3. Ask to get curious and explore the other person’s land: What might be true in the other person’s land? What values or norms might explain their behavior?
4. Get into pairs or small groups, and ask: If you visited their land, what would you be curious about?
5. Finally, invite them to name what they want to carry into the shared space you create together (our land).

Traveling Across Differences

There’s a Spanish saying I love: Cada cabeza es un mundo—every head is a world. Stated another way, each person in our workplaces, our families, and communities carries with them a diverse land, filled with their own way of communicating, experiences, orientations, perspectives, and tolerances for risk, ambiguity, or feedback.

When we make these differences visible—and treat them as landscapes to explore rather than problems to fix—we build more compassionate, adaptable relationships.  

So next time you feel yourself climbing the Ladder of Inference, pause. Ask: Am I reacting from my land? What might be happening in theirs? That small moment of curiosity can change everything. 

Further Exploration

The Ladder of Inference - The Systems Thinker

ow we act depends on how we understand the situation we are in. Our understandings often seem obvious to us, as if they were given by the situation itself. But people can come to very different understandings, depending on what aspects of the situation they notice and how they interpret what is goin…

The Systems ThinkerThe Systems Thinker

The Fifth Discipline

MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES IN PRINT • “One of the seminal management books of the past seventy-five years.”—Harvard Business Review This revised edition of the bestselling classic is based on fifteen years of experience in putting Peter Senge’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas of the Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning blocks that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations, in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create the results they truly desire. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will: • Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them• Bridge teamwork into macrocreativity• Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets• Teach you to see the forest and the trees• End the struggle between work and personal time This updated edition contains more than one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies such as BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, and Saudi Aramco and organizations such as Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank.

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CRR Global | Systems and Team Training for Coaches

CRR Global is an ICF-certified coach training organization & consultancy firm - home to the world-renowned Organization & Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC™).

CRR Global