Reflection in Action

Improvement in real time

Every year and every day starts with a plan. Perhaps the plan is only a rough agenda but there is always some idea of what is to be accomplished and expectations regarding actions that must be taken to meet whatever goals have been set. Then, reality enters the picture, and your day or year is nothing like what you expected. What do you do? Adapt. We do this so naturally that most of us take pride in the fact that regardless of what the world throws at us, we find ways to make progress toward our objectives. This is leadership 101, table stakes. If you can’t do this, you probably are in the wrong job.

Today, table stakes are not enough. Recovering from unexpected disruptions to your plans implies returning to the status quo as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Instead, the goal should be to use the disruption to adjust how things are done, with the goal of improvement rather than restoration. To do this, you need to add reflection in action to your repertoire. This process is described by Donald Schön in his book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action.

Reflection in action is distinct from reflection on action, which occurs when we try to understand something that went wrong after it happened. What’s inherently better about reflection in action is that we are learning and adjusting in real time, which means that we may prevent the losses that are associated with disruptions that we allow to play out before attempting to learn from them.

Reflection in action requires intention. It won’t happen by chance, although on occasion we can get lucky by trying something new in the midst of a crisis that leads to a better way of doing things. Schön describes the practice as being in conversation with the situation, almost like a back-and-forth engagement rather than detached problem solving.

The conversation begins with recognition that what is happening isn’t what was expected to happen. Recognition can be difficult because our commitment to being right limits our effort to collect data and clouds our judgment regarding the data we do collect. An alarm going off isn’t responded to immediately because we want to believe that the alarm is in error. Before we respond, we need to check it out; is it really warning us of an impending disaster or is the system sending a false alarm?

Once we determine that there is in fact something going on that we didn’t expect, we can either take immediate corrective action to return the system to normal operating conditions or become curious. We wouldn’t do this in the face of a fire alarm, of course, but we might in situations where there is no imminent threat.

Becoming curious is essential in shifting the focus from recovery to learning and innovation. If we admit we didn’t plan for this to happen, we must also admit that we don’t fully understand how the system operates or how it could potentially operate. We need to interrogate the causes of the disruption, formulate hypotheses about how the system actually works, and experiment with new ways of operating that we think will result in a better performing, more stable arrangement. Some of our experiments will work while others will not. Each experiment tests but never proves our theory of how the system operates. We can never be certain that we understand the system completely, or that new innovations won’t come along that allow us to make further improvements. Therefore, Schön argues, we shouldn’t think of reflection in action as an approach we adopt only when confronted by a problem but rather continuously. We should always be tinkering in the name of learning, undertaking experiments that provide greater understanding of the world in which we work. If this sounds a lot like six sigma or continuous improvement it should, since these processes were designed to enshrine practices that feature reflection in action. Since we don’t reflect in action as a normal course of living, it helps to be aided by processes that impose regular practices to follow.

Although I have heard many discussions about the applicability of six sigma to executive decision making, I have rarely observed it being practiced at the most senior levels. Executives are for the most part self-confident individuals who believe, based on their past experience, that when disruptions occur, they will be able to deal with them. But is that really the case?

We could point to the high rate of failure in startups and also in acquisitions as evidence that there is more to learn. But what about in large corporations? For the most part, we get by. But then, there are times when we don’t, and people start saying things like, “They are too big to fail.” That should be a reminder that while we have a great deal of experience from which we have learned a lot, we don’t know it all.

Now, with possible changes we are likely to confront from artificial intelligence, climate change, global conflict, supply chain disruptions, economic recessions, as well as upside innovations that will transform our lives for the better, we have a lot more to learn. The principles we used to design stable organizations in the past won’t hold in the years to come. We need to learn new principles, not through a once-and-done shift to a new era of organizing, but through incremental adaptation in real time. That learning will come about by mastering the art of reflection in action.