Developing Wisdom through Reflection

In 1988 researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership conducted the Lessons of Experience study of leaders in Fortune 500 companies. The researchers observed that “it is staggering to think how much experience is wasted simply because managers aren’t allowed or forced to stop and make sense of what happened.” More experience does not necessarily guarantee more learning. To learn from experience, we need to go beyond description and reflect on the experience we acquire.

To some of us, reflection might conjure up images of solitary activity—sitting under a tree, for example, or being alone in a room. This, however, is not the case. Reflection does not take place in isolation; instead, it is a process of active interaction with your experience and the world around you. It is a process of critically analyzing events and experiences to uncover underlying lessons, influences, motivations, and knowledge.

Reflection can both shed light on your experience and open a window for future action. It involves a conscious confrontation of the present with experiences from the past and implications for the future. Research has found that when executives reflect on their experiences, their learning increases significantly. The act of reflecting is one that causes you to make sense of what you’ve learned, why you learned it, and how the learning took place. Without reflection, your experiences can be piecemeal, disconnected, and potentially misleading.

The Move from Experience to Reflection

The process of reflection is not mechanical. It involves a search for personal meaning—relating experience to its context, connections, and discrepancies. The reflection process begins with an event. To learn from that event, you need to reflect on its context and consider the people, actions, assumptions, and insights that constitute the experience. What made the experience meaningful? What lessons did you learn from it? What would you have done differently? The move from experience to reflection is an iterative process—returning to the experience, drawing lessons from it, and considering how you might have approached it differently. You can use the worksheet on page 22 on an ongoing basis to facilitate reflection and learning from your experiences.

Reflection is important in the development of leadership wisdom because it enables you to learn from experience. There are many times when your automatic reactions to events are insufficient to encourage reflection. You should not rely solely on your natural process of reflecting on experience, but actively seek ways to ensure that reflection itself becomes a habit, contributing to your continuing development.

Reflection is not passive. It involves active probing, analyzing, synthesizing, and connecting. Reflection is not just thinking about what happened, but a thoughtful consideration of why things happened as they did and how your experience might be different when viewed from another perspective. Through reflective practices you can gain greater understanding of your environment. To meet emerging challenges, reflective learning can assist you in acquiring the knowledge and skills to make better judgments in ambiguous situations.

Two Types of Reflection

There are two types of reflection, both of which are important in moving from experience to wisdom. Surface reflection is reflection on behaviors and action; deep reflection is reflection on the assumptions and values which underpin action.

If we take the image of an iceberg as a metaphor for our experience, surface reflection is about understanding the tip of the iceberg—actions and behaviors that contributed to the experience and are also evident to other people. This would include reflection on things we said to other people or our reactions to the actions of others. Deep reflection, on the other hand, looks at the iceberg beneath the surface of the water, to consider the values and assumptions that underpin your action.

The difference between surface and deep reflection is described by Chris Argyris as single- and double-loop learning. Single-loop learning considers the behaviors exhibited during a particular experience, and double-loop learning involves reflection on the values, norms, and social structures which make them meaningful.

Surface reflection focuses on the immediate presentation of the details of a task or a problem, and deep reflection involves the questioning of contextual aspects within which the experience is situated. It requires questioning fundamental assumptions and beliefs that may challenge desired goals. The difference between surface and deep reflection is between expanding your capabilities and creating new ones. Whereas surface reflection allows you to interpret and develop generalizations about your experience that may be utilized in negotiating future experiences, deep reflection transforms your nature.

Surface reflection. Surface reflection is helpful because it forces you to think about experiences in a structured way. It encourages you to take a more thorough approach to the problem and prepares you for similar situations in the future. Surface reflection requires you to step back from the experience, reflect on the actions you took, and see from the perspective of the other. Such reflection is important to help you become more aware of your interactions with people and the environment around you.

Surface reflection is important, but it is only the first step. After considering the actions and behaviors taken in a particular experience, you can then consider the values and assumptions that led to such behavior. In this way surface reflection prepares the ground for a deeper kind of learning.

Deep reflection. The process of deep reflection requires you to identify and challenge your assumptions, imagine and explore alternatives, and apply reflective skepticism. These components of deep reflection will help you become more reflective, aware, and deliberate in your choices. Argyris describes this as double-loop learning, where you critically examine your interpretation of an experience.

Deep reflection helps you learn from past experiences and better handle future ones, by considering the perceptions and lenses through which you interpret experiences. You have certain assumptions that you hold in thinking about your experiences, and these assumptions are reflections of how you see yourself. Some of these assumptions can keep you trapped in behaviors you want to change.

To engage in deep reflection, you first have to be open to the possibility that there might be something on which you have to, or ought to, reflect. This means admitting that your passionately held convictions might be wrong, that you may not have all the answers, that there may be other sources of knowledge, views, or ways of seeing that you have not considered.

The practice of deep reflection is challenging. It is one thing to derive lessons and insights from experience and a different thing altogether to see something fresh, to understand it for itself on its own terms. Somewhere in your reflections you may reach moments of decision: Do I choose to be honest about this and its real consequences? Do I want to change? Am I really prepared to face the consequences of change? These become the central questions driving deep reflection.

Other questions follow naturally: What do I really want now? What must I do? At the heart of this process of reflection is your ability to get down to your will and to consciously face it and turn it. The challenge here is to unlearn the unconscious habits you bring to situations and relationships. It is through your own process of deliberate consciousness, of unlearning, that you can put aside what you bring and begin to free yourself from the power that your own past and will can exert on your ability to reflect deeply on experience.

The more you tell yourself or others about who you are and what you do, the more deeply ingrained these stories become in your subconscious. They become the scripts from which you think and act. Being aware of these assumptions is an important step in learning more about yourself. If you revise your vision of yourself to tell about the new behaviors you would like to integrate, then you send a message to yourself and change the script of how you want to be.

The vulnerability of not having answers and acting in habitual ways has to be faced in deep reflection. Where deep reflection is absent, there is the risk of making poor decisions and bad judgments. Without deep reflection, you may be convinced of your invincibility by your past successes and therefore fail to consider other viewpoints, with possibly serious consequences.

How to Develop Reflective Practice

How do you make reflective practice a habit with the demanding pressures of work and life? There are many ways to make reflective practice part of your daily routine. The process of reflection is like breathing; it follows a rhythm of taking in and putting out, of incorporating ideas and experience to find meaning and expressing that meaning in thought, speech, and action. Here are some suggestions:

Create a daily space for reflection. Find a regular time at the end of each day to reflect on the events that occurred, your response to those events, and the lessons you learned from them. You could have a fixed list of questions that you ask yourself to start with and move through the cycle of surface reflection to deep reflection.

Use a reflection journal. Use a notebook to write your reflections on your learning. A reflection journal can chronicle the thoughts, feelings, successes, and frustrations that are a part of your life’s journey. It can include your insights from experiences, questions on assumptions, and the views of others. Making journal writing a regular habit is a way to allow the process to gather strength and to work as a shaping and developmental force in acquiring leadership wisdom.

Share reflections with others. To facilitate your reflection, you could find a learning partner to talk through your experiences and reflection. By sharing reflections on learning experiences, you can acquire greater understanding of those experiences than by reflection as a solitary exercise.

Encourage a culture of reflection in your workplace. As a manager, you can also encourage reflective practices among your staff members. Many problems are so complex or persistent that it pays to revisit them periodically. And making inquiry and reflection part of office life would encourage your staff to apply reflective practice to a wide range of issues, not just the ones being dissected at meetings.

You can use the questions below to assess your reflective practice.