Hanlon's Razor is the heuristic "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance, incompetence, or error." It is a practical application of Occam's Razor to attributions of human intent β directing us to prefer the simpler explanation (mistake) over the more loaded one (bad faith) when both are plausible. Named after Robert J. Hanlon, it counteracts the Fundamental Attribution Error in interpersonal and organisational contexts.
The Ladder of Inference is a model developed by Chris Argyris and popularised by Peter Senge that describes the rapid, mostly unconscious process by which we move from raw observation to action through a series of inference steps. We select data, add meaning, make assumptions, draw conclusions, form beliefs, and take action β typically without awareness of the intermediate steps. The result: people in the same situation construct dramatically different realities and act on them with certainty, without realising how much interpretation shaped what they 'saw.'