Reflective practice is the cornerstone of developmental evaluation and organizational learning and yet is one of the least discussed (and poorly supported) aspects of these processes. It’s time to reflect a little on reflection itself.
The term reflective practice was popularized by the work of Donald Schön in his book The Reflective Practitioner, although the concept of reflecting while doing things was discussed by Aristotle and serves as the foundation for what we now call praxis. Nonetheless, what made reflective practice as a formal term different from others was that it spoke to a deliberative process of reflection that was designed to meet specific developmental goals and capacities. While many professionals had been doing this, Schön created a framework for understanding how it could be done — and why it was important — in professional settings as a matter of enhancing learning and improving innovation potential.
From individual learners to learning organizations
As the book title suggests, the focus of Schön’s work was on the practitioner her/himself. By cultivating a focus, a mindset and a skill set in looking at practice-in-context Schön (and those that have built on his work) suggest that professionals can enhance their capacity to perform and learning as they go through a series of habits and regular practices by critically inquiring about their work as they work.
This approach has many similarities to mindfulness in action or organizational mindfulness, contemplative inquiry, and engaged scholarship among others. But, aside from organizational mindfulness, these aforementioned approaches are designed principally to support individuals learning about and reflecting about their work.
There’s little question that paying attention and reflecting on what is being done has value for someone seeking to improve the quality of their work and its potential impact, but it’s not enough, at least in practice (even if it does in theory). And the evidence can be found in the astonishing absence of examples of sustained change initiatives supported by reflective practice and, more particularly, developmental evaluation, which is an approach for bringing reflection to bear on the way we evolve programs over time. This is not a criticism of reflective practice or developmental evaluation per se, but the problems that many have in implementing it in a sustained manner. From professional experience, this comes down largely to the matter of what is required to actually do reflective practice or any in practice.
For developmental evaluation it means connecting what it can do to what people actually will do.
Same theories, different practices
The flaw in all of this is that the implementation of developmental evaluation is often predicated on implicit assumptions about learning, how it’s done, who’s responsible for it, and what it’s intended to achieve. The review of the founding works of developmental evaluation (DE) by Patton and others point to practices and questions that that can support DE work.
While enormously useful, they make the (reasonable) assumption that organizations are in a position to adopt them. What is worth considering for any organization looking to build DE into their work is: are we really ready to reflect in action? Do we do it now? And if we don’t, what makes us think we’ll do it in the future?
In my practice, I continually meet organizations that want to use DE, be innovative, become adaptive, learn more deeply from what they do and yet when we speak about what they currently do to support this in everyday practice few examples are presented. The reason is largely due to time and the priorities and organization of our practice in relation to time. Time — and its felt sense of scarcity for many of us — is one of the substantive limits and reflective practice requires time.
The other is space. Are there places for reflection on issues that matter that are accessible? These twin examples have been touched on in other posts, but they speak to the limits of DE in affecting change without the ability to build reflection into practice. Thus, the theory of DE is sound, but the practice of it is tied to the ability to use time and space to support the necessary reflection and sensemaking to make it work.
The architecture of reflection
If we are to derive the benefits from DE and innovate more fully, reflective practice is critical for without one we can’t have the other. This means designing in reflective space and time into our organizations ahead of undertaking a developmental evaluation. This invites questions about where and how we work in space (physical and virtual) and how we spend our time.
To architect reflection into our practice, consider some questions or areas of focus:
- Are there spaces for quiet contemplation free of stimulation available to you? This might mean a screen-free environment, a quiet space and one that is away from traffic.
- Is there organizational support for ‘unplugging’ in daily practice? This would mean turning off email, phones and other electronic devices’ notifications to support focused attention on something. And, within that space, are there encouragements to use that quiet time to focus on looking at and thinking about evaluation data and reflecting on it?
- Are there spaces and times for these practices to be shared and done collectively or in small groups?
- If we are not granting ourselves time to do this, what are we spending the time doing and does it add more value than what we can gain from learning?
- Sometimes off-site trips and scheduled days away from an office are helpful by giving people other spaces to reflect and work.
- Can you (will you?) build in — structurally — to scheduled work times and flows committed times to reflect-in-action and ensure that this is done at regular intervals, not periodic ones?
- If our current spaces are insufficient to support reflection, are we prepared to redesign them or even move?
These are starting questions and hard ones to ask, but they can mean the difference between reflection in theory and reflection in practice which is the difference between innovating, adapting and thriving in practice, not just theory or aspiration.