Reflection in Action

Hey there! 👋

I recently completed my Masters in Design Management, and while it’s been quite surreal, there have been quite a lot of takeaways from the 3 years of learnings that I use in my work today. Here’s something I want to share with you that I’ve learnt in this course.

If you or your organisation is a practitioner of scrum with the use of sprints, I’m sure that you would have heard of the term “Retrospective”. Usually, this means the team would go through together:

• What was done

• What went well

• What didn’t go well

• What we learnt

• What we can do to improve

However, in my experience, stand-ups are used as status updates more than a reflection. And retrospectives don’t do the reflection until the work is usually done. And since it doesn’t take into consideration anything that is happening while the work is on-going – this means it’s more of reflection on action. We don’t actually reflect on how we are doing that work, while doing that work.

With that in mind, I want to discuss Reflection in Action—something that I’ve picked up and still doing today.

Reflection in Action

Reflection in Action involves synchronous procedures, that is, when things are happening, the reflective behaviour is carried out at the same time. This is also known as Action Research.

If you do this on your own on a daily basis, you would find that your analytical skills become more honed in as your are purposefully thinking clearly and systematically about the different experiences you have gone through during your daily work activity or similar situations and drawing conclusions.

 This covers 6 stages:

• Description of the experience

• Feelings and thoughts about the experience

• Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad

• Analysis to make sense of the situation

• Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently

Action plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future, or general changes you might find appropriate.

The way I would do this is to have a set of questions that help me streamline my thoughts.

• What’s my goal for my upcoming task?

• What do I need to achieve this goal?

• How can I work towards achieving this goal?

• Did I share or work closely enough with my colleagues?

• How did I perform in this task?

• How can I improve in my next task?

These questions are not meant to be answered superficially. For example, if you have a task to design a button, your goal is not to design a button. Your goal is to think what the impact of this button could do. This is in line with one of my previous emails that I’ve sent to you, where I mentioned about articulating the value of design. The more you do this, the better you will get at it.

Reflect: As it’s coming to the end of the year, I would urge you to take this opportunity to do some reflection of your accomplishments this year. Reflection in Action is one of the things that is easy to adopt, and can help you develop a habit of reflecting on how you are doing things while doing it—not when it’s over.

Mentor’s Notes

The other things I do is really get feedback for how I did. It could be a session where I ask my colleagues what they think my weaknesses are. Keep in mind that these are feedback to be better. Do not get emotional or upset over feedback. If someone says that I’m poor in communication, I would try my best to find out why, and where I’m having a lapse in communicating properly.

These feedback can really help you frame perspectives and make things clearer for you, allowing you to make better decisions in your work.

While this newsletter project started only few months ago, I hope that each of these newsletters bring you the most value that you can really utilise in not just your work, but also in life.

I thank you for following me in this journey, and I do hope to have better content planned out for the future.

P.S. Yes, as always, please share it with your friends if you think it’s useful.