Reflective practice
Donald Schön
1930 – 1997
Reflection-in-action is the counter-practice to retrospective sense: examining the framing while still inside the situation.
Read alongside: Sense · Shape
- Start with
- The Reflective Practitioner (1983)
- Where they resist the book
- Reflecting mid-action competes with acting. Schön is clearer that it happens than about how it is sustained under load.
Works worth the time
The Reflective Practitioner · 1983
Reflection-in-action: the thinking that happens inside the work, not in the review afterwards.
Read further
Where Schön appears
Organisations make sense retrospectively, and then act as though they knew.
Weick's sensemaking shows meaning being assembled after the fact from cues and plausible stories. Schön's reflection-in-action is the counter-practice: examining the framing while still inside the situation. Snowden's Cynefin adds the discipline of naming which kind of terrain you are on before choosing a method.
Judgement is an organisational capability, not a personal trait.
The learning organisation is easy to caricature and hard to build. What survives the caricature is concrete: forums where disconfirming information travels upward without cost, and where the reflective conversation is scheduled rather than hoped for.