Upward laddering on goals and values

Key features

•Swift, powerful, and systematic

•Easy to learn at a basic level

•Often produces useful unexpected insights

Upward laddering starts from specifics and works up, using a sequence of questions, to the participant’s core goals and values.

Method

What you need: Pen and paper

The two items can be almost anything. Some common choices are:

•Two sorting criteria from a card sorts session

•Two everyday objects

•Two objects or concepts from the participant’s field.

Tip: If they start giving a long explanation, ask them to slow down, and make it clear that you’re going to write down their exact words.

The picture below shows how this is recorded.

•The two items used as a starting point are Job A and Job B.

•The double-headed arrow between them is the laddering notation for “Which of these two would you prefer, and why: Job A, or Job B?”

•The upward arrow above Job A is the laddering notation showing that Job A was preferred, because of Better pay.

Ask the participant why “better pay” is important to them.

Tip: Never assume that the answer is obvious; a key strength of this method is that it finds unexpected results.

•You get uncomfortably close to the participant’s core personal values or fears; if in doubt, stop sooner rather than later.

•The participant can’t think of any more upward goals.

When you reach the top of a particular chain, you can start again with another two items as your starting point.

Tip: Always start each chain as a new fresh diagram; if you try to fit more than one chain into a diagram, it quickly becomes unmanageable.

Where next?

You can analyse the results in various ways, including content analysis on the goals and values that different people use.

Other methods that fit well with upward laddering

•Downward laddering on explanations, to find out what the participant means by a particular term.

•Downward laddering on sub-goals, to identify other ways of reaching a goal.

•Graph theory and facet theory, to give more powerful insights into the results.

Copyleft Hyde & Rugg 2021