Reflective Practice

Though highly personal at one level, effective work with mental models is also pragmatic, that is, it is tied to bringing key assumptions about important business issues to the surface. This is vital because the most crucial mental models in any organization are those shared by key decision makers. Those models, if unexamined, limit an organization’s range of actions to what is familiar and comfortable. Second, managers themselves, not just consultants or advisors, have to develop reflective and face-to-face learning skills, or else there will be little impact on actual decisions and actions.

Argyris’s longtime colleague Donald Schon of MIT studied the importance of reflection in professions including medicine, architecture, and management. While many professionals seem to stop learning as soon as they leave graduate school, those who become lifelong learners become what he calls “reflective practitioners.” The ability to reflect on one’s thinking while acting, for Schon, distinguishes the truly outstanding professionals:

Phrases like “thinking on your feet,” “keeping your wits about you,” and “learning by doing” suggest not only that we can think about doing but that we can think about doing something while doing it … When good jazz musicians improvise together … they feel the direction of the music that is developing out of their interwoven contributions, and they make new sense of it and adjust their performance to the new sense they have made.

Reflective practice is the essence of the discipline of mental models. For managers this requires both business skills and reflective and interpersonal skills. Because managers are inherently pragmatic, training them in “mental modeling” or “balancing inquiry and advocacy,” with no connection to pressing business issues, will usually be rejected. Or, it will lead to people having “academic” skills they do not use. On the other hand, without reflective and interpersonal learning skills, learning is inevitably reactive, not generative. Generative learning, in my experience, requires people at all levels who can surface and challenge their mental models before external circumstances compel them to do so.