Nigel Cassidy: The power of reflection. Is this the missing link in helping learners to be knowledgeable and skilful doers? Now it's disappointing all around when workplace learning goes in one ear and out the other, and what a waste of that training budget when people just don't seem to get how what they've been taught applies to them and their role. No wonder productivity stays the same. It seems pretty obvious that learning has to sink in and ferment before people will probably question and direct what they do in future. As educators first pointed out a century ago, we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on it. So isn't it time to start building this essential, reflective practice into our learning? Joining us to point the way, Fiona McBride is a learning and development consultant who started her career in HR but found her passion was in management, learning, and development, and especially building managers' skills and personal styles. She's also a yoga teacher. Hi Fiona.

Fiona McBride: Hi. 

NC: Sue Murkin is Learning Delivery and Associate Lead here at the CIPD. In her time, she's worked for Richard Branson and Anita Roddick on government funded projects for disadvantaged youths and champions a coach approach to managing and leading. Welcome, Sue.

Sue Murkin: Good morning, Nigel.

NC: And we have an organisational development change professional with over 20 years' experience, most recently in coaching and coach supervision. Clients of her own Fushia Blue consultancy have ranged from Scottish Ballet and Mazda to Penguin Random House. It's Julie Drybrough, Hello.

Julie Drybrough: Good morning.

NC: So Julie, should we just start with the obvious, really? Why should we spend valuable work time reflecting at all? Why does reflecting matter? In your experience, what's the evidence that it actually works?

JD: So I think it speaks to the point you made in the intro about, we learn through, not just through experience, but we learn through reflecting on the experience. So for me, the power of inviting people to stop, think about what happened, think about what could be done differently, what worked, potentially, what didn't work, is an essential part of moving people forward. It's an essential part of getting people to try different things. It's an essential part of any change because it's that definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different outcome. So for me, this is where the reflective part of practice is incredibly important. There is evidence out there that reflective practice does support and even if you just look at the really basic stuff, like Kolb's learning cycles, it's in there. You plan, do, think, check, all of that stuff. So I don't know any other way to do this other than have reflection as a key part of anything that I design. I work quite closely with Fiona, have done for a number of years and she and I talk about it often. It's like, what's the reflective point here? What's the time that we need to spend with learners?

NC: Fiona, I was wondering myself before this podcast, if there's a modern malaise of not bothering to make time for reflection. If you think about politics, a lot of people's actions seem to be dictated by their world view rather than thinking about their experience and finding out about things.

FM: Yeah, and I think there's something in this about there's, when there's a lot going on and when we're running to keep up with everything and we also get by sometimes being on autopilot that then that opportunity for reflection and pausing, taking a breath, thinking through what's just happened is really hard. Or we just miss that opportunity.

NC: Absolutely, and Sue, I was also struck by something you said that people might confuse reflection with just fretting.

SM: I think that there's two things here and I'm, and it ties into exactly what Julie and Fiona are saying. I think that art of just stopping and thinking about thinking is something that we need to readdress and re-educate ourselves on and the value of it. Just recently, when we were having ACE our annual conference, I was looking at some research by Kane who was saying that, actually, it's not change management we need. We actually deal with change really well, but it's the pace of change and I think that Fiona's right. We've gone on autopilot because the pace of how we're living, not just at work, but per se, is just so fast we, potentially, feel that we don't have the luxury to actually stop and think about our hearts and our minds' connection and what was I feeling when I was doing that? Or what was I thinking when I was doing that? And I think that what's happening is that to try and keep up with pace and what we're doing, we're fretting about stuff. Oh, I haven't done that. Or I didn't quite understand that or, oh, blimey, they're doing it like that and I'm not sure I am and we're fretting in the moment rather than actually just taking a breath, taking a step back.

NC: Well, in a way that, the fretting is a pretty good indicator, isn't it, that something hasn't sunk in or that the, you've learnt something which is disturbing or doesn't match with what you are expecting? Julie?

JD: Yeah, I want to come back to that because, quite often, when we talk about reflection, the language moves into things like feeling, fretting. We're cogitating or, and in this part of the conversation, I think if we're talking about politics or main discourse or modern malaise, as you're talking about Nigel, it's often that the information that's in front of us is we, we're not getting the opportunity to see the broader picture. So we're plugged into social media channels and algorithms that often tell us what we already think. So unless you pause and reflect and think about your bubble, the information that you're you're working with, you'll just continue. You'll continue to think that way, you'll continue to read what you read, see what you see and I think we have a genuine challenge in our discourse, in our mental discourse and our social discourse about opening those things up, and for me, that's part of where reflective practice comes in because you can stop and begin to evaluate whether the information that you're continually getting is the only picture or whether there may be other pictures out there.

NC: And one other thing, Fiona, I just wonder whether some people, in the light of what we said, especially maybe bosses, might feel reflection is for wimps. There's something a bit touchy feely about the word reflection, which makes people, which puts people off. Maybe they might think it's a luxury for thinkers.

FM: Where do I go with that? 

JD: We'd hate to be seen as wimps, Nigel. We want to respond to the question. 

FM: So like many things that we do in our world, there are people that are fully on board and there are people that struggle to connect with it. I think when it's used well, when it's considered, when it's used as a tool within your practice, it's very powerful. There's a real strength in pausing. Even if it's for a second before making that next decision or thinking how to go about that next piece of work, there's a real strength in being honest about your impact and what you're trying to do and if it's working.

JD: So I think you're right. I think there, that sometimes is out there. The notion that the reflection is this, it's wimpy. It speaks to a narrative in learning about soft skills and things being pink and fluffy, and there's a whole school of thinking, a narrative that sits around that type of work and how that's seen in practice. In my experience, it's actually the very opposite of that. It is much, much tougher to reflect on your own behaviour. It is much, much tougher to sit and work out what your impact has been. So you're intending to do something, but perhaps your impact has been different. For me, anyway, reflective practitioners are amongst the most resilient, the most pragmatic, the strongest because they have done the work. They have sat and been able to reflect on and look at things across the piece. So I always think it's a bit of a cop out. So if somebody decides to say what, it's a bit wimpy, it's a bit emotional. I'm like emotional is quite hard. That's why people don't like to do it, and to say, wimpy is a good way of not having to do it. So I love the dodge, but I'm not buying it.

NC: So Sue Murkin, in our everyday lives, we do have an instinct for reflection, don't we? We think could I have done this better? How could I have handled that situation differently? And we know that in the professions, doctors and nurses, it's part of their practice, isn't it, to reflect and report on what's happened? But how universal is it in the workplace? You've got the big picture at CIPD. To what extent would you say reflection is built into our L&D at the moment?

SM: Built in and undertaken, I think is two different things. So I would say that there is an absolute evidence and trend to build in reflection when you are building learning products, but is the work done? That would be the question I would ask and the reason I'm saying that is because I read all the feedback forms that come back from learners, regardless of them being through a company, product or a, our open courses and it's really sad how many people say, I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with this, or I'm not sure how I'm going to implement this, and I sometimes could be screaming at those feedback forms because if there's a person or an organisation that has invested in a person to learn, actually, the responsibility, doesn't just lie with the learner. That manager should be talking to that person and saying, what resonated with you with that learning? What's the first thing you need to do? Actually, what was quite difficult for you to grasp? It shouldn't just be, I've invested in that person, they've done the learning. They should do the reflection, now I'm onto the next learning product or project.

NC: Are you seriously saying that people fill in these forms and then those conversations don't take place?

SM: Well, I can't say they don't take place, but the very fact that people reflect in the feedback to say, I don't know what I'm going to do with this, rather than I need to speak to my manager next about this, indicates to me that there's still some way to go to support people reflecting in the workplace.

FM: That resonates with me. When I think about clients that I support, it is that there's the real good intention. Isn't and there's that willingness to take something and do something differently, but it's about the environment enabling that or allowing for it.

NC: Can you think of any specific examples, Fiona, of people, organisations where you've gone in and tried to help what's been going on here?

FM: One example springs to mind, and I was doing quite a simple management development programme. So with a group of new newish managers that were starting out in their careers as managers and part of the programme was we were meeting for half days, like once a month. So we had like a half day, every month across six months, and I was asking questions like, before you go into one to ones or before you start your strategy conversations, what are you doing to prepare? And the constant comeback was, well, we just have to keep, we just take the message. We just, we have to get on with it. We have to just move forward with it and I'm like, well, OK. So how do you sense, make sense of it for yourselves before you take that out into your space with your teams or the people that are waiting to hear from you? And there was a bit of oh, yeah, and people stumbled and got a bit stuck with it, which was really interesting. So rather than try and show or bring in some, I don't know, crazy massive reflection model or some, huge, extensive, reflective practice idea, we talked about what if you had two minutes? What if actually, before you had that next conversation, you stopped for two minutes and you just thought, how is this landing with me and what is important for me to discuss next? And so even just that one, two minute of reflective practice is better than none, I would argue, and then throughout the programme we then actually built that up. So in the end, I had them, or they wanted to, going out and about for half an hour walks with each other, reflecting and sharing and problem solving and thinking things through. But it took time to build, you know?

SM: Can I just piggyback on that Nigel? Because Fiona's so right and I watch a lot of the virtual classrooms that we run at CIPD and I would say it's almost like a silent game of dare. So we talked about building reflection into the actual learning environment. It's the time when the facilitator will ask that question of whatever the question is, where someone would need to reflect and it just goes into that horrible deadly, tumbleweed moment, almost like, who's going to be the first to speak? Almost like, oh my goodness, who can't cope with the silence enough? And it's, and it they're all fine if it's about talking about a model or talking about something else, but as soon as it's, but how will you do this as a manager? Or what would you need? It goes really silent. I can see Julie's really nodding away though as well.

JD: Well, I'm nodding, but I'm also the, I'm having a response because the silence, you can't interpret what's happening in that silence.

SM: That's true. Quite often that silence is people are going actually, yes, that question is a good question. So, I work as a coach. I work with a lot of people. We need to get comfortable with that silence. We need to be able to say to people, take three minutes or two minutes. What I do in pretty much everything, management leadership courses. We'll ask the question and then I use writing because obviously that's a big part of my own practice. Take a pen, take a piece of paper, take two minutes and just write to yourself for a couple of minutes until you find your words, until you find what the, those thoughts. That silence, I think a lot of facilitators get very nervous about that silence.

SM: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

JD: And particularly online because it's weird online, it's this Zoom doom. So a lot of what we've done in the last couple of years, and again, Fi, and I have worked a number of times in the last few years, is we help people fill the silence, but with writing or drawing or whatever. They're doing their own work. They're doing their own reflection because otherwise they're filling up the noise for us and I don't mind what you've learned. I'm very hopeful that I've designed it well enough and I've put enough good models in front of you that it's relevant and you're going to take something forward, but I can't predict how you're going to use it particularly, or who in your team is going to benefit because you've had a light bulb moment. So I'm, I absolutely hear you Sue and I'm like, enjoy the silence. Just encourage that discomfort in the moment because that's where the learning's happening and our facilitators should revel in that silence. They should be, oh, this is really good. I've asked a good question.

NC: But I think you're both agreed you have to bring the group or the individual to that point and what happens next is, is going to be, hopefully, useful, whatever happens.

JD: You hope so. If you design it well enough then yeah, for sure.

FM: There's a lovely quote that, I read a couple of years ago and now I just write everywhere and have in every notebook from Rumi, which says in silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves, and there's so much in that for me, it's everything that Julie just said. You've probably got a decent quote from Julie anyway, but that's, it's that, isn't it? It's that, just see what's there. See what comes up.

NC: We talked a lot about the process of reflection. I just wonder if we can get anything from any of you a bit more on the practical thing of what you do as an L&D professional or just a manager trying to improve the uptake of knowledge from training.

SM: In a lot of our self directed learning. So, it's in the moment, any time, any place, anywhere where you want it, it's digital. We tend to use the three what's. So, what? So what? Now what? You've just got to really keep it simple.

FM: I did some writing for one of the essential insights modules and we had this lovely summary chapter at the end of the module, but I then, reading it through when it was almost done, like, why are we asking questions at the very end? Why aren't we peppering them through? So at the end of every section, there was one or two or three very simple, what do you currently do now? Or what are you thinking about this chapter? Or if you action things that we've talked about in this chapter, how are you doing it and how does it connect to what you're hearing? So just having those points throughout the module, rather than just in one place, and when Julie and I design together, we tend to, and Jules, I know you'll come in on this too, but we tend to do reflection at the very beginning and then we pepper it throughout in different ways and then we of course have an end piece as well.

JD: Yeah, so it's, pre questions at the start of the session, what do you want out of this? What's brought you here today? Even if your manager sent you on the course, you, you've been told you need to, what would be a good use of your time? How, what can you get out of this? So that's like pre reflective stuff.

NC: Do you think we are in danger of underestimating how boosting reflection levels in an organisation might require humility on the part of the trainer or the manager? If they're the official distributor of knowledge, if you like. They run the training, they believe themselves right all the time about how things are taught and how things are done.

JD: I think there's an art, Nigel. I think when you first start out and you're training and you're facilitating, you're quite nervous. You're a bit like you want everyone to have a really good time. You want everyone to learn and you hold a lot of the responsibility yourself. I think the more experienced you get, the more able you are to trust your learners and to trust that they will do good things if you've got the right design and you've pulled the right stuff in for them. Do I think we underestimate it? No, I don't. I don't think it's underestimated. I, for me, it was interesting because I was thinking about this before we came onto this podcast and part of me goes, it just, we just did it, don't we? When I was, when I first started out, it was one of the things I was taught as a trainer.

NC: Well, Sue's implied that doesn't always work or at least the information is there that they don't know how they're going to use it.

JD: Yeah, it's a really tricky one because the other thing is what I find is they think they're answering an exam question. So a good way to get people to tell you what they actually think is say to them, this is not an exam question. You can't get it right. I need to know what you think, not what you think you should think, and that is often a moment with hope where it changes what they'll tell you. Because if you say, what are you going to learn? Many people will go, gosh, I've got to come up with a really good answer and it's, if you can give some freedom and let them go, and the other thing is genuinely, if 40 folk have not learned what you, as the facilitator or trainer wanted them to learn, you have to reflect on that. You need to take that away and do your own work on what's, what are you spending your time on? So I think, without getting too deep into the warp and the weft of it, I think it is important. It is significant and I do think it's appreciated within the Learning and Development and the OD community that it's an essential skill. It's an essential piece.

NC: And at the same time, I wondered if there are barriers that we haven't talked about for people to share their reflections. I was thinking, for example, about learners who might think it's not in their own interest to reveal their true fears or their deficiencies.

JD: To my point before, people can feel performance pressure, so telling them it's not an exam question. There can be trust issues. I think sometimes we have different spaces for different types of reflection. So the reflection that you do at the end of a course might be different from the reflection that you would do with a coach, might be different from the reflection that you do with your team, might be different from the reflection that you do with, at the end of a project. Or, if you, if you're doing a postmortem of something that's not gone terribly well. So barriers are around maybe trust and permission and time. Time's a barrier, for sure.

FM: I think as well, I'd add to that around just the ability to be reflective, a lot of people find tricky, maybe because they haven't had, they don't get the opportunity to do it very often. Or they're not even sure where to begin or if there's a right way, like going back to the exam point that Julie mentioned. So actually designing in and being quite smart as a facilitator or a trainer, ways that really help people to be reflective without even maybe making it a big deal. Let's all be reflective now for the next half an hour could probably, yeah, freak people out. So there's some lovely techniques and tools that are out there. There's the Liberating Structures facilitation techniques and there's one called 1-2-4-All. So you start out by asking a question and you give everybody a minute to think on their own, and maybe you provide them with a post it note and a pen, or, say, grab a bit of paper and just brain dump where you are at with X. And then you turn to the person next to you and you work in a two. So you work in a pair and then two pairs come together after a couple of minutes and share their thinking and then you come back as one group, and it's a really nice way that people don't feel like they have to have all the answers or don't get too stuck in their own head because it's quite swiftly moving along. There's a pace to that thinking time, which often people find really helpful.

NC: Sue Murkin, are we in danger of making this too complicated?

SM: The more simple you make something, the easier it is to embrace. So if you make something complicated, by the very nature of that, people won't do it. So I'm probably, I'm absolutely reflecting on myself. It has to be simple because as soon as there's any element of, I don't get this, I won't do it.

NC: So Julie, simplifying things without dodging the question?

JD: Yeah, do that. I think Sue's absolutely right. I think keeping things incredibly simple benefits everybody. There's a lot of complexity in the world. There's a lot of noise out there and if we are trying to land learning in courses or we're trying to support behavioural change or a mindset shift, those are complicated processes. Synaptic changes and all of that stuff are complicated in the moment and so keeping the reflection simple helps. So I think anything, the classic one that I use is what went well? And what would you do differently? Look at things through an appreciative lens, sometimes. Make sure you're not always looking through a deficit lens of these are all the terrible things I did. What are the things that we can build on? And then, you've got a learner who feels enabled and responsible for their own development, which is what you want.

FM: I do think this comes back to, though, about doing our own work first. So if we're talking to each other, learning professionals, facilitators, trainers, there's something in this for me about do your own reflective practice in some way, shape or form. Get comfortable with it and different ways of doing it and you'll notice what you find useful and if you're talking about it with other colleagues, with other people in your networks, hearing how other people do it and yeah, find that comfortable level with it and then build it in some way, little and often, I think there could be a huge impact in that for yourself and for your practice as a professional.

JD: I just want to build on that as well, because Nigel I'm thinking about, we worked together with a client probably about eight years ago now and the, we were running a leadership program and it ran over about four or five months. There was different modules, there was different elements to it and the feedback that we got from the client was this is just not quite landing. People are going on it, they're having a very nice time, but we're not seeing anything off the back of it, particularly. We're not seeing any great change and one of the things that we did was we, we sat with a client and we reflected on what was in there. So we looked end to end at the design, the models, and what had happened over the years is different trainers had been involved in it. Different people had been delivered, delivering it and they put in their own little bits and we ended up, when you looked at it from end to end, there were something, I think, maybe 40 separate models.

FM: I think it was 52. I don't know why 52 sticks in my head. I'm sorry, but it's like, it was a lot. It was a lot.

JD: It was a lot, and so we sat with the client and said, well, would you be able to remember 52 models or 52 bits of information? And bear in mind, like some of those models were, oh, you've got to remember four Cs and three Ps and there's this here and the next thing. So within those 52, there was numbers and so this point about simplification --

NC: And how many did you keep about a dozen?

JD: Yeah, pretty much. We did a few things really deeply --

NC: Yes.

JD: And they got different results, right? So there's a big point in there about that stuff.

NC: We're coming to the end of our time. Sue, resources available, CIPD, any just thoughts on how people can get started on reflecting better?

SM: Yeah, and I think that you don't even have to rely on resources. I think the biggest resource is yourself and it's just being able to, what did I do well? What would I have done differently? We've been using that question in our one to ones with our team members as part of our one to one reviews and it's not about what did you do well and what did you do rubbish? It's what did you do well? Let's face it, some people do have that propensity to be really self-critical so they can see what they've done, potentially not very well, but they really can't see what they've done well. So I think that opening up that side as well is really important. So what went well, what might have you done differently? And, but what did you learn from that? Because let's face it, most of us learn from our absolute biggest mistakes, don't we? So yeah, it's, I think, don't look external, look internal.

FM: I think, just building on Sue's point about looking in. So yeah, tapping into your emotions and how did I feel when it went well? Or if I wanted to do something differently, why? What did I feel? What was coming up for me in that? And so use yourself as a data point, as much as other data points that you'll have around you.

JD: And I want to, I just want to nail home the wimp point from earlier and say that if we take Sue's example of, we learn from our biggest mistakes often, you have to be a strong person to be able to sit with your mistakes and learn from them. So reflective practice is not for wimps.

SM: Yeah, well said, Julie.

NC: Thank you very much to all three of our guests, that's Julie Drybrough, Fiona McBride and Sue Murkin. I should mention, we did do a past podcast quite recently on learning transfer, which touches on some of these issues. So people might like to listen back that CIPD podcast and there's also last month's eye opening edition on men's health if you didn't hear that. So please subscribe where you get your podcast so you don't miss out but until next time, when we expect to be talking about some of the big issues facing us all at work right now and how HR can respond or help with them. Meanwhile, compliments of the season and it's goodbye from me, Nigel Cassidy and all at CIPD.