Reflection-Action Integration

REFLECTION AND ACTION

Teams need practical support to integrate learning with their daily work. Doing this well starts with appreciating the realities of people's work and identifying where and how specific learning approaches such as improved reflection can make a practical difference. People in support roles can help line managers sustain these practices.

“Reflection gets a bad rap in business because we don’t have the discipline to connect reflection and action,” says Ilean Galloway, one of the senior managers in the organizational development department at Intel’s New Mexico site. “People say they don’t have time to just sit around and talk, and they’re right. But we also often don’t have time to think. I live in a very networked, interconnected work setting. In a global organization, people are literally working around the clock, solving problems by e-mail at midnight with a colleague on the other side of the world. But I think physiologically, technology has gone beyond what we as human beings are capable of doing. I am not sure how much real understanding is being developed through the use of e-mail, pagers, and cell phones. These devices are great for communicating and generating actions on routine issues. But when complex challenges confront us, they can seduce us into thinking we understand the situation. In reality, complex challenges require a different approach, one that allows us to pursue deeper, often hidden, meanings; surface underlying assumptions; and make connections between parts of the entire system. Then we can make sense of the situation and achieve shared meaning before taking action.”

To counteract this decline in critical thinking, Galloway regularly gets together with different teams she supports, often for a day or longer. Although she sometimes has to “force people to take the time, afterward they are always grateful for the opportunity.”

Making these sessions valuable, she has learned, comes from “discipline on the back end of it.” She explains, “We have one consultant who said, ‘Peter Senge has got it all wrong, people don’t have time to sit around talking.’ I don’t really agree with that. What we don’t have time for is reflection for its own sake. Reflection that [isn’t] connected to action is what [makes] people think they don’t have time for this. Part of my job has been to help teams develop more discipline on seeing where we have arrived and making sure we all follow through. Then, people have plenty of energy for reflection. One team I worked with went to a bed-and-breakfast for three different one-week meetings. The place had a train caboose on the property, where we would meet at critical points. The time there became symbolic for them. Later on, people would call me and say ‘We’ve got to go to the caboose’ when they knew they had some important thinking to do.”

Galloway’s colleagues at Intel have also learned that reflection does not mean agreement on everything. She says, “Our aim is to build real shared understanding and commitment to what we say we will do. What reflection says is that we hear everything. It does not say we’re going to attend to everyone’s needs. This is something that is a big part of Intel’s culture—we call it ‘disagree and commit.’ When I was at another company you committed but you couldn’t tell your team that you didn’t agree with the decision the team was being asked to implement. At Intel, when you represent your team in a decision making forum, you can go back to your team and say, ‘Look, we talked about this, and I had a different perspective. They heard my perspective and we’ve agreed to do this. We are committed to implement the decision, but we’ll have a checkpoint to make sure these actions are achieving the results we intend. If they aren’t, the decision and actions can be revisited.’”