The Year Will Not Explain Itself

On Reflective Practice, and Why Experience Alone Does Not Teach

We tend to assume that experience teaches. Put in the years, the thinking goes, and the lessons arrive on their own.

They rarely do. Experience hands us raw material. What we make of it depends on whether we ever stop to look.

Reflective practice is the discipline of stopping to look. It is the habit of returning to what happened, asking what it meant, and deciding what to do differently because of it. It is ordinary work, and most of us skip it, because nothing on the calendar asks for it and everything else does.

What the research found

In one field study, new employees at a business process outsourcing firm were split into groups during their training. One group spent the last fifteen minutes of each day reflecting on what they had learned. The others kept working. On the final assessment, the group that stopped to reflect scored 23 percent higher.

They did less of the work and learned more of it.

Donald Schön, who studied how professionals think, drew a line between knowing in action and reflecting on it. Skilled people carry a great deal of knowledge they have never put into words. It works until the situation changes. Then a habit that served for years begins to fail quietly, and only reflection brings it to the surface where it can be examined.

David Kolb’s model of learning puts reflection in the middle of the cycle: an experience, then a look back at it, then a new idea, then a test of that idea. Take the second step out and the cycle stops being learning. It becomes repetition.

Why it gets skipped

Reflection loses to urgency whenever the two compete. A full inbox makes a claim on us. A quiet hour makes none.

There is also the matter of what we might find. Looking back at a year means meeting the decision we would make differently, the conversation we put off, the pace we kept while knowing it was too fast. It is easier to keep moving. Motion feels like progress, and for a while it passes for it.

The cost comes later. A year lived without review tends to be repeated. We carry the same patterns into January and call it a fresh start.

What practice looks like

Reflective practice is plainer than it sounds. It needs three things.

A fixed time. Reflection that waits for a free moment keeps waiting. Fifteen minutes at the end of a day. An hour at the end of a week. A full day at the end of a year.

A question worth answering. A blank page is harder than it looks. A good prompt gives the mind somewhere to start: what held, what drifted, what we are still carrying that is finished.

A record. Thinking that stays in the head circles. Writing it down turns it into something we can return to, disagree with and build on.

None of this depends on temperament. It depends on structure, which is why it helps to borrow one.

Don’t just read about reflection. Practice it.

The Evergreen Journal is built for this work: seven practices, each with a short reading, an activity and room to write, and a guided audio experience to go with them. See the Evergreen Journal.

On Friday, November 13, we are holding The Resilient Leader: A Strategic Reset, an analog day at the Willows in Villanova, Pennsylvania, with no slides and no screens: one working day to take stock of the year and decide what to carry into the next. Pilot guests attend at no charge. Reserve a seat.

Sources & Further Reading

Di Stefano, G., Gino, F., Pisano, G. P. & Staats, B. R. Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance. Harvard Business School Working Paper (2014).

Schön, D. A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books (1983).

Kolb, D. A. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice Hall (1984).