Make Time to Reflect and Adapt

We’re all so busy. We’ve got our heads down, responding to what’s important, what’s urgent in front of us. So what we tend to do is jump from what we’re noticing into action. What we need to do is add a layer of interpretation in the middle. An opportunity to step back, and say, “What are we noticing?” How can we untangle the chaos that we’re seeing? Sort through the observations and experiences we’re having to consider multiple interpretations and create meaning from them. Once we’ve done that, we’re ready to adapt and take action in response.

“We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.”

When we do this, we get much more benefit than from just accumulating more information. Accumulating information and experience is great up to a point, but then we need to do something with it. It’s only when we stop that our brain can forge connections between the information and think about what to do next. Reflection creates an opportunity for us to grow, to look at what to do, and find out if there’s a better way of doing something. It’s good for both our work and our emotional and mental health.

• A Harvard study found that people who reflected at the end of the day, just for fifteen minutes, for only ten days, improved their productivity by 23 percent. It's interesting to see the numerical benefit of reflecting.

• A different UK study found that commuters who had dedicated a small part of their commute every day to reflecting were more happy, productive, and less burned out.

PAUSE WORK TO REFLECT

Input and experience are great, and often it fuels a dopamine burst to keep doing something and keep working on something, but at some point we hit a point of diminishing returns of accumulating more experience and gathering more input. We’re much better served to stop for a while and reflect on what we’ve been doing, and notice what’s been going well or what’s been challenging. This gives our brains a magical opportunity to start connecting the information and experience that we’ve had, and you might find that new insights emerge.

SELF REFLECTION

Self reflection is when we take time independently to think about ourselves and how things are working. Maybe to think about how things have been going, and what could go better. If you were cooking a recipe that turned out horribly, you probably wouldn’t go back to the same recipe book again. You’d probably make some alterations or maybe choose a completely new recipe. But interestingly with our work, it’s really hard to disentangle what we're doing from what we keep doing.

How do we reflect? Take some time out of the week, put some time in your calendar perhaps. You might choose to sit or stand or take a walk. Some people find it really useful to write. Maybe you’re someone who gets further by talking to a colleague or friend. Experiment and see what works for you.

It’s really useful to have some questions to prompt yourself, to help you dig into it:

• How have I shown up this week?

• How did my attitude or way of being impact the situations that I stepped into?

• Have I had any feedback this week that I could act on?

• How did that meeting go?

• What gave me energy?

• What did I feel wrung out by?

• What am I really pleased with?

• What have I learned?

TEAM REFLECTION

Team reflections are when we all stop our work for a moment, come together, pool our collective wisdom and put our questioning hats on to think strategically about how things are going. There are a few different formats you can use for this, or make up your own.

After action review

This is very simple. It’s four questions you can ask together as a team.

1. What did we expect to happen?

2. What actually happened?

3. Why was there a difference?

4. What have we learned?

Pre-mortems

This is an opportunity to tap into what you or your team already know but are probably too polite to bring up. You’ve heard of the phrase "post mortem," and that’s when you try and dissect, after something has died, what the cause was. And the pre-mortem is anticipating that something might die or fail and trying to understand why that might happen.

So you sit with your team and say, "Imagine that this project has failed terribly. What happened? Why?" Then get every team member to write down ten things, ten reasons why they think that might happen. Then you can compile the list, and that will represent your collective wisdom on this. You can then prioritize and address or at least talk about the first few. This means that you’ll be able to go in with your eyes open.

USE LEARNING TO MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT IF, WHERE & HOW TO ADAPT

When we’ve taken time to adapt, we’ve taken in what we’ve observed. We’ve tried to make those connections between what we’re learning and our experience. Now is the time to take that accumulated knowledge and insights and move forward into a decision and action. Something that’s very clear and confident. You don’t have to worry too much because this won’t be the last decision that you make. There will be time to adapt later. So make a clear decision and then move into action.

Now when we’re talking about action and adaptation it could be that what you decide is that what you’re doing is working perfectly well and that’s great. But what we are talking about here is an intentionality. So being quite clear about why we’re doing something.

Another type of action might be a new hypothesis to test. You know, maybe we’re going to go away and get more information, so we know what to act on next time. It might be that we’ve found a better way of doing something, so let’s try something different.

What we’re NOT looking for at this decide point is a step-by-step plan for the next year or whatever. We’re looking for that first step, to start moving in the right direction. And then guess what, we’re going to come back and we’re going to reflect again, so we can take the time to think about what we’re learning, decide and act.

DIVERSITY IS POWERFUL IF EVERY VOICE MATTERS

Current research shows that diverse teams that represent a wide variety of perspectives are smarter. They produce better work and outcomes. Working with people different from you is a brilliant challenge for your brain. It helps you overcome stale ways of thinking and sharpens your performance up against the edges of other people. It’s also fantastic for the concept of emergence. When you put people together, what you can produce magnifies massively and groups can come up with ideas that individuals couldn’t, even those same individuals. So we have a fantastic opportunity to understand why diversity is powerful. But it is only powerful if every voice matters. If every voice around the table speaks up and is listened to.

How can we make sure every voice matters? How do we tap into the power of diversity?

TAP INTO A DIVERSITY OF OPINIONS

To tap the power of diversity, we all need to speak up to make sure we can hear a diversity of opinions. Notice whose voice you haven’t heard yet. Express gratitude for people’s contributions. Notice them, acknowledge them. If you hear someone speaking negatively about someone else, step in, don’t let those things go unchallenged. All of us can do this, and all of us can listen with the intention of curiosity, to be open and interested.

DIVERSITY NEEDS INDEPENDENCE OF OPINIONS

For diversity to be powerful we also need independence of opinions. We need to make sure that the comments or consensus in the room is not shaped just by the first person to speak, and that is surprisingly hard because we’re pack animals. Belonging is really important to us. Even unintentionally we can get pulled towards the norm and it can feel like a threat to say what we really think. So much that we can even forget what we really think. So one tactic, one way around this, is...

...after you’ve put a topic, perhaps have people write down on a piece of paper what their opinion is, to notice what they really think.

You don’t necessarily need to share these or have them collected, but it helps anchor the discussion so that people can refer to them later as “oh yeah, that was my idea,” before the discussion has gone off in one particular direction. So that's one way it will help challenge the bias of group think.

BE INTENTIONAL IN SOURCING ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES

When we say “seek out different perspectives,” we can be intentional about the types of perspectives that we’re trying to incorporate into the conversation.

• Think about who might have less power but perhaps more information or experience about a particular topic. How can you invite them into the conversation and create the space and safety for them to speak up?

• How can you make sure that, for example, the conversation isn’t led by a manager or the most experienced person? It’s fine, it just means the conversation might get pulled in a particular direction.

• Perhaps you can identify someone to play the "devil’s advocate," to take an opposite position to what the group’s thinking. That’s a brilliant way of moving away from confirmation bias and group think.