Tell of a conflict that you recently encountered. It could be a conflict at work, in the news, or one involving a personal relationship. After explaining the conflict, choose one of the four presented critical analysis tools from this week, and analyze the situation using the tool.

This assignment should be very detailed and specific in terms of how you analyzed the different aspects of the conflict. It should be at least 800 words in length.

Analysis of my Conflict at Work – Using the Ladder of Inference
     I faced a conflict with my supervisor at work several weeks ago. I work as a software developer in my company. Three weeks ago, I was assigned a task to develop a new feature for our product. I reported back to my supervisor that this task requires an enormous amount of time to finish but he was unwilling to allocate that much time to me and told me to initiate the work to reevaluate the time needed for it. After doing researches and implements for one week, it’s confirmed that more time is necessary to finish the job; however, my supervisor still didn’t understand the situation. For the following two weeks, I had have worked overtime every workday in order to catch up with the deadline. The reason why it takes so much time is because I had to co-work with my colleagues in the U.S. Because of the time zone difference, our communication is not as efficient as we do in my office. One of us has to work at night in order to have a real-time discussion. Without the face-to-face talk, we have to rely on emails but this form of communication is time-consuming and prone to introduce extra misunderstanding. When I finished my task after working arduously for three weeks, I found there is a conflict about how much time is required for the task between my supervisor’s thought and mine.
     I choose to use The Ladder of Inference to analyze my situation (The Ladder of Inference, n.d.). There are seven thinking stages defined in the Ladder of Inference: Observing Reality, Selecting Reality, Interpreting Reality, Making Assumptions, Forming Conclusions, Adopting Beliefs, and Taking Actions. I’ll examine my situation in terms of these thinking stages.
     The task assigned to me involved understanding the current software system and create a new feature based on the existing coding style. In Observing Reality stage, both my supervisor and I see the same requirement which is a new feature to allow our clients to enroll for our newest product. The requirements for this feature is listed clearly and I will be the one who implements it. We all come to the same page at this stage.
     However, in the Selecting Reality stage, my supervisor thinks the time for this task should be decided by his experience instead of my observation. He had been in this industry for more than ten years. Therefore, he expects the time needed for this task should be the same as others that he was involved. For me, I did a deep analysis of this requirement. I found that this software project was created by developers in the U.S. so I need to talk to them in order to understand how this project works. Because of the time zone, communication demands more time and co-working with overseas colleagues needs more time for communication, too. Nevertheless, this information was ignored by my supervisor. With hindsight, I should have informed my supervisor my situation more often and used another way to explain the situation to him.
     In the Interpreting Reality stage, my supervisor considers the progress for this task was moving too slow. The expected progress was not seen and there must be some reasons for that. However, since my supervisor chose to use only his own judgments and experience rather than taking the current situation into account, he didn’t see the need to readjust the schedule for this task. In his opinion, the task shouldn’t be that difficult to accomplish and it should have been finished according to the schedule.
     In the Making Assumptions stage, since my supervisor has considered that we were behind the task schedule, he made an assumption my work was not good enough to catch up with the schedule. Then, he started to look for how to improve my work. He asked how I did my work and questioned why I didn’t ask for help if I couldn’t finish on time. However, these questions did not improve my work a lot because what lacks is time and I asked for help in the whole process of working on this task. It became very difficult to shift my supervisor’s attention to the insufficient time allocated to me.
    In the Forming Conclusions stage, my supervisor concluded that I wasn’t doing good for this task for the first week. In the Adopting Beliefs stage, I think because this is the first time in which I couldn’t finish my job on time, it won’t form a belief in my supervisor’s mind, yet. However, if my supervisor never questions his assumptions or conclusions afterward, it would create a vicious circle in light of his view on my performance at work (Ed Muzio, 2011). For example, if he has a belief that I can’t deliver new features on time, he will incline to look at the information that supports this preexisting idea more (Confirmation bias, n.d.).
    In the Taking Actions stage, my supervisor decided to have meetings with my team more often. Before we have two meetings per week, now he asks us to join the meeting four times a week. This solution doesn’t really help increase our productivity but impede it because it takes us more time to participate in the meeting and even prepare data for reporting our progress. It would be advised for my supervisor to be more cautious and considerable at the stage of Selecting Reality. Because the data he obtains in this stage will dramatically affect his thinking in the subsequent thinking stages in the Ladder of Inference.
References
The Ladder of Inference. (n.d.). In MindTools. Retrieved from https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_91.htm
Ed Muzio. (2011, January 26). The Ladder of Inference Creates Bad Judgment [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9nFhs5W8o8
Confirmation bias. (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
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