More data rarely tells you who you’re not reaching. Empathy and humility do — and they’re the precondition for every framework that follows, including the ladder of inference.

This piece is a kind of prequel to The Argument Isn’t About Facts. It’s About the Ladder. In All the Difference by Susan MacKenty Brady, Stuart D. Kliman and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Leslie C. Smith, the ladder of inference doesn’t show up until after a section on empathy and humility — because the ladder only helps once you’re willing to climb down it, and that willingness starts somewhere else entirely.

A rollout dashboard can lie to you without a single wrong number on it.

I’ve watched this exact shape happen with internal AI tools more than once: adoption climbs, the steering group is pleased, the completion metrics go green. Look closer and the tool is being used almost entirely by one type of person, usually whoever was already comfortable interrogating a system before trusting its output. Meanwhile the people the tool was actually meant to help have quietly gone back to doing it the old way, and nobody in the room asks why, because the headline number already looks like success.

The dashboard wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t the whole story.

Empathy is what makes you look

Empathy gets filed under “soft skills” more often than almost anything else in leadership, which is strange, because it’s the thing that makes you notice a gap exists at all.

Without it, a flat adoption curve for one group sitting next to a steep one for another just reads as data, unremarkable, filed and forgotten. You have to care enough about the people behind the flat curve to go and ask what their week actually looks like before there’s a story to find underneath the number.

Empathy isn’t feeling sorry for whoever the rollout missed. It’s being curious enough about their actual experience to go and find out.

Humility is what makes you trust the answer

Empathy gets you looking. Humility is what stops you from deciding you already know what you’ll find before you’ve looked properly.

Empathy gets you looking. Humility is what stops you from deciding you already know what you’ll find.

It’s an uncomfortable position for most leaders, because the instinct in a review meeting is to arrive with an answer, not a question. Humility means holding your own explanation for “why this isn’t landing with them” loosely enough that someone closer to the problem can replace it with a better one, and not quietly resenting them for it.

That’s a harder ask than it sounds. Most leadership training rewards conviction. Almost none of it rewards the sentence “I might be missing something here,” said out loud, in front of the people who report to you.

The pattern shows up at any scale

Peter Church, a chief people officer profiled in All the Difference, describes a nonprofit crisis hotline that looked, by the numbers, like it was serving its community well — steady call volume, engaged staff, a diverse workforce behind it. A closer look showed the calls were coming overwhelmingly from one narrow demographic, while entire communities the organisation existed to serve stayed almost silent.

The fix wasn’t a better website or a louder campaign. It was trust, rebuilt through the channels those communities already relied on rather than the ones the organisation had assumed they’d use. As Church puts it, “seeing the story is fundamentally about empathy.”

Swap a crisis line for an AI rollout, a change programme, a new operating model, and the shape barely changes. The metric that looks healthy is usually measuring the people already inclined to engage. The silence is where the real story is sitting, and silence doesn’t show up on a dashboard as a problem. It shows up as nothing at all, which is exactly why it gets missed.

Why this has to come before the ladder

The ladder of inference is a genuinely useful tool for catching the moment you leap from a fact to a belief. But a tool only gets used by someone willing to turn it on themselves, and willingness isn’t a technique. It’s a disposition.

You can teach a team all seven rungs in an afternoon. Without empathy pulling their attention toward the people the current story doesn’t account for, and humility making room for the possibility that their own read is incomplete, most of them will still climb straight past rung one to a comfortable belief, framework notes and all.

A tool only gets used by someone willing to turn it on themselves, and willingness isn’t a technique. It’s a disposition.

Empathy and humility aren’t a warm-up act for the real analytical work. They’re the reason anyone bothers doing the analytical work honestly in the first place.

Where it actually starts

Seeing the full story was never a data problem first. It’s an empathy problem, then a humility problem, and only after both of those, a framework problem. Get the order right and the ladder of inference becomes a tool people actually reach for. Get it backwards, and it’s just another slide nobody applies to themselves.

Sources used

• MacKenty Brady, S., Kliman, S. D., & Smith, L. C. (2024). All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value. Harvard Business Review Press.