Key Point Summary

As a leader, you may find yourself pulled between making decisions quickly and making them well. You need to be able to draw on the wisdom of experience and reflection to find the right course. Two techniques that will help you acquire wisdom are inquiry and reflection.

Inquiry turns your energy outward through your dialogue with others. It exposes you to other people’s valuable learning from the significant events they have experienced. You should use care in selecting individuals to ask for input, choosing people who, among other things, are fair, experienced, introspective, intuitive, and empathetic. You can make a general inquiry into a person’s lessons of experience, or you can ask about events related to a situation that is bothering you now. When asking others about their lessons of experience, you should pay attention, hold judgment, paraphrase and summarize what the person says, and share your own thoughts.

The second technique, reflection, directs your effort inward, creating an internal space for you to understand and learn from your own experience. 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. You should use both surface reflection, on behaviors and action, and deep reflection, on the assumptions and values which underpin action. Creating a daily space for reflection, using a reflection journal, sharing reflections with others, and encouraging a culture of reflection in your workplace will help you make reflective practice part of your daily routine.

With inquiry and reflection on a variety of experiences, you can develop your capacity to make wise choices. You will begin to see a broad range of possible responses and wisely choose the ones that will work best.