Working with discrepancies

Discrepancies are what drive the reflective process. An essential part of conscious critical reflective practice is the active search for or deliberate generation of discrepancies to kick off the process. One of the challenges is that our active meaning schemas lead us to filter out information that is evaluated as irrelevant or distracting, even though this peripheral information may highlight deficiencies in our schemas. 

Many of the activities referred to as reflective practice could be more accurately described as activities designed to increase the chances of identifying discrepancies.

• Expectation chronicling, scenario planning, counterfactual thinking, episodic unpacking and cause-and-effect mapping can be used before an event to make your predictions more explicit beforehand so that discrepancies are easier to recognise when you come to reflect on it.

• Mindfulness practice and perceptual mode isolation can increase the amount and scope of information from our perceptions that is available for processing and can increase our awareness of the meaning schemas that influence our perceptions and behaviours, thus making it more likely that discrepancies become apparent.

• Perspective shifting and self-distancing and using feedback can also make us aware of information we may have filtered out from our first-person perspective.

• Paradoxical challenges, both-and thinking and randomisation can generate the same sense of disquiet, surprise or confusion that tends to accompany the identification of discrepancies, and so can trigger the reflective process.

• Incubation can allow time for diffuse, holistic processing via the default mode network, which may identify discrepancies that are not apparent in more focused attentional states when the meaning schema filters are more active.