Reflective Powers What? Why? What? How?

Our capacity and capability to reflect is such a precious thing. Helping us to maximise potential as well as to minimise risk and to make life less stressful. ?

Recent global events, cultural, social and technological shifts and a range of other factors are increasing the need to reflect in order to make wise choices. They are also piling on the pressure, giving us less time to think and crowding our mind-space when we do get that time. “Send” or “Spend”, “Regret”, “Moral Regret”, and the many other types of regret we feel from poor choices can all be reduced with reflection.

I’ve deliberately avoided prefacing “Reflect” words with “Self” as, although self-reflection is a highly valuable and essential element of reflecting, I believe collective reflection is underappreciated and can be equally powerful. Moreover, if you have arrogant or narcissistic tendencies, then reflecting alone without the calibration of others may ?only serve to amplify those unhelpful traits!

Balancing the need for Agility and responsiveness with rigour is tough, yet? fundamental to making wise choices. Especially when the stakes are high. Many decisions go wrong, even when we have chosen the right thing to do, through poorly thought through execution. Our individual and collective reflective powers can not only help us to make good choices but also to maximise the outcomes arising from them.

Often the dominant driver to reflect is a focus on eradicating failure rather than adopting a

Maximising Mindset and learning from success.?As many solutions arise from considering what has gone well as well as what has gone?badly. Especially in turnarounds. Deciding what to focus on,?playing to strengths,?liberating talent and unleashing?unloved and?underinvested businesses and processes is much easier if you’re on the look-out for good as well as bad. ?

When it comes to reflecting on specific situations and reflection more generally I find four simple ?questions helpful What? Why? What? How? ?

What?is reflection??

Definitions of reflection in the context of our thought processes tend to focus on thinking about things that we or others have done, as well as situations that we have encountered. The general aim being to look back, to learn and to do something differently as a result.

In Physical ?Science, reflection is defined as “The return of light or sound waves from a surface”, with two main types “Specular”: Light reflected from a smooth surface at a definite angle, and “Diffuse”,: From rough surfaces that tend to reflect light in all directions. My experience suggests that a lot of our human reflections are diffuse!

Reflecting on things from different angles can be helpful in calibrating our thoughts. Which triggers another thought. In Maths the angle of incidence, the angle that a ray or wave approaches equals the angle of reflection when light or sound waves hit a flat surface. It seems logical that the better you approach something the better you will deal with it when you encounter it, and the more that you can get yourself straight the more predictable and controllable the result is likely to be. Tennis players are masters at this in their racquet positioning. ?Reflecting upon prior experiences beforehand and getting ourselves in the correct position can help us achieve an improved result next time. ??

Why can reflection be so powerful??

Potentially through:

• Boosting self-awareness: enhancing our understanding of strengths and weaknesses and our real impact on others.? ?
• Helping us to understand: making sense?of what's happened and why. ?
• Learning: for ?individual or collective?improvement
• Contributing to building a healthy culture: and in avoiding Arrogance
• Helping to build alignment: as well as knowing if you haven't got it when you think you have!
• Swifter recovery and more rapid replicating and scaling of success: from ?poor choices or benefitting from replication and scaling of successful ones.

What? can we specifically do to increase our powers of reflection? ?

Apart from using the What? Why? What? How? approach and doing all we can to increase our individual or collective self-awareness there are several other well-established frameworks that can be used to help us effectively reflect. ?For example: Bain’s? 5 R Framework (Reporting, Responding, Relating, Reasoning and Reconstructing with its emphasis on reasoning – making sense of what happened, ?The Gibbs framework with its emphasis on what we were thinking and feeling at time and how that might help guide future action, Kolb’s ?active experimenting approach?to enable us to learn more swiftly learn and adapt.

Whatever approach or framework we use it’s important to ensure that we have the time to regularly reflect, in a place, at a time and with the time that’s conducive to doing so. My own two favourite places are while travelling or walking.

If we haven’t had it, getting training on giving and receiving feedback can also help.

As implied earlier, reflecting doesn’t need to be a solo sport. When reflecting collectively, apart from travelling or walking with others, as a Chair I love those 15 mins we set aside at the end of each board meeting to reflect on how we did and to ask whether we rushed or took too long over anything, made the? best use of the wisdom in the room, how we left the executive feeling etc. ?

The other very specific thing to ensure is that we don’t confuse worrying with thinking. Worrying is a perfectly normal thing to do but thinking things through and genuinely reflecting is so much more useful.

Figuring out What happened in a specific situation?

Improving our powers of observation and being an active rather than passive listener and observer helps enormously when figuring out what happened in specific situations. ?Doing so means that we see and hear so much more. “Listening to what people think as well as what they say” can be incredibly helpful.

Clarity over what’s a fact and what’s an interpretation is also useful. Leap Confronting Conflict’s FIDO (Facts, Interpretation, Decision and Outcome) technique increases our ability to respond thoughtfully to achieve a better outcomes, especially in highly pressurised situations.? By starting with figuring out what the facts are and what you can interpret from them and other inputs you may have you can slow yourself up enough to avoid a hasty reaction. This also enables us to work out what outcome we want and what might be realistic in the specific situation. Then, finally, motivated by having our eyes on the prize, making the right choices to achieve it.?

Working out why something happened??

Understanding why something happened is as useful as being clear what happened.

High self-awareness helps enormously. Low self-awareness can be a granite anchor on moving forward.

Knowing as much as we can about the context in which we are engaging, understanding the objectives of others, their behavioural characteristics and preferences, what we think they believe our objectives and behavioural characteristics are, is helpful in achieving this.

What hard data do we have to guide us? How reliable is it and how data driven and savvy are those we are interacting with? ??

Cassie Petrie ?from SAP Concur regularly discusses data and the issues that come from not analysing it effectively. She believes that failing to use data effectively leads to poor decision-making for a business. It means missed cost-saving opportunities, and inefficient processes.

But also, if we don’t have the visibility over data, it is difficult to reflect on the decisions we make and their outcomes.

We may feel we are data driven and rational in our decision making, but are we? If we are how do we act with others who are more instinctively driven? Do we really understand the stakeholder map and where the power lies?

We may feel that we are also empathetic, have good antennae and listening skills but do we? If we do then how do we interact with those less empathetic. ?I’m travelling a lot at the moment and overheard a woman in the lounge the other day at Heathrow obviously trying to stop a colleague abruptly resigning. “Look Sally a ******* he may be but I actually think he’s got a really good point if you can look beyond the horrible way he said it”. ?Her next call was to Mr Wit who she gave a masterclass in messaging, saying that although he had a great point he completely blew his credibility with a number of colleagues over the way he spoke to Sally. She then gave him some fantastic tips on how to learn and recover from the situation.

Deciding What we do as a result of our reflection and How?

Having figured out what happened and why, the answer frequently emerges as a result. The more sophisticated, especially those who have mastered the art of coaching, call this self-discovery. But what happens if it doesn’t and we end up with a dilemma situation where all ways forward appear to mean discomfort or pain for us or others? ?

The stakes matter here. Many reflections that we have are about fairly minor things but it’s important not to diminish their importance. In aggregate and over a long period these marginal individual gains are capable of delivering significant benefit. Arrogance is a judgement slayer ???in this and so many other regards. The arrogant often feel that their overall brilliance means that they don’t have to bother with such small things but for most of us mortals it matters a lot.

No matter what the stakes we need to be clear what our choices are. Reflection helps us not only to do this but to expand the possibilities. In doing so we need to avoid the dangers of overthinking and focus on what we want to achieve and whether it is material and worth the effort. ?

Finally, a little trick that I use to trigger me to R-E-F-L-E-C-T, before any big decision or after a moment I feel has gone well or badly. To hum the iconic R-E-S-P-E-C-T by Aretha Franklin and go loud on the line “Work out what it means to me”!

Patrick Dunne?OBE

Experienced Chair, author of the award-winning book Boards and co-author of Five Generations at Work: How We Win Together, For Good

This article has been sponsored by SAP Concur industry-leading technology that automates travel, expense and invoice spend processes. You may find their latest Travel and Expense Predictions 2025 blog of interest.

The fee will be donated to Leap Confronting Conflict Leap Confronting Conflict a charity which gives young people and the adults in their lives the skills to effectively navigate conflict.

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