For years we’ve been told that deliberate practice is the key to getting better at ‘anything’. But it turns out that deliberate practice is only really effective in well-structured, stable, ‘kind’ learning environments. Learning maths, learning to code, or learning a new language all take place within kind learning environments. So does playing sports or chess. The rules of the game are fixed, the outcomes of actions are evident and feedback is fast, clear and actionable.

But much of business, leadership and life isn’t like this. As Heraclitus told us “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man“. Many of the more challenging situations that we experience, and their context, will be different the next time from the last time. It turns out there is another type of practice that can help us in these more ‘wicked’ learning environments that hasn’t gotten the air time of it’s well-publicised counterpart. It’s called reflective practice.

When our environment is constantly changing it isn’t just the person who works harder and practices more deliberately that succeeds. Let’s dig into the limitations of deliberate practice in the workplace, and how reflective practice can help us instead to make better decisions and accrue wisdom in business, leadership and life.

The limitations of Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice is a focused and systematic approach to improving skills and achieving expertise. It involves repetitive practice of challenging tasks, continuous feedback, and a structured effort to go beyond current abilities.

Want to learn a new language fast? Want to be a better financial modeller? Want to be a better coder? Want to be a better presenter? Deliberate practice is critical for mastering these types of technical skills.

In business, deliberate practice can be very helpful in the earlier stages of our career, as we grow our foundational skills. But as we become more senior and our responsibilities increase, the nature of the challenges we must navigate become trickier and more complex. The job of a leader is not to be the expert with the right answer. It’s to set strategy and direction over the long term, and to make often seemingly impossible decisions and tradeoffs with imperfect data and intuition.

Should we halt our expansion into China? Should I fire my Chief Product Officer? What valuation should we raise our Series C at? In these wicked learning environments deliberate practice has increasingly less utility, to the point where being tied to deliberate practice as the methodology for our development will hold us back.

What is reflective practice?

Deliberate practice takes place in advance of an activity and relies on repetition and immediate feedback to generate a feedback loop for enhanced improvement. Reflective practice, on the other hand, involves thoughtful consideration of our experiences, actions, and their outcomes by thinking back on past experiences, situations, or events after they have taken place.

In it’s simplest form, reflective practice might involve regularly setting aside time to think deeply about our experiences. You might do this alone in your head, through journaling, or in reflective conversation with a coach or mentor. By whatever means, reflective practice allows you to:

1. Explore what happened in a particular situation
2. Examine why we acted the way we did
3. See patterns we’ve not noticed before
4. Consider alternative approaches
5. Evaluate the outcomes of our actions
6. Apply these insights to future situations

At it’s core, reflective practice acknowledges that experience alone does not necessarily lead to learning. Learning requires active engagement, reflection, and intentionality to transform an experience into meaningful knowledge or growth.

A brief history of the theory reflective practice

We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.

John Dewey

The importance of reflection is as old as learning theories themselves. John Dewey proposed his theory of ‘learning by doing’ in the 1920s. Part of that process is critical reflection on action, as a process of gaining a deeper understanding of the conditions shaping one’s thinking and acting.

John Kolb published his experiential learning theory in 1984. It included a four-stage learning cycle that included a version of reflective practice:

1. Concrete experience allows learning from real-world situations and events and serves as the basis for reflection.
2. Reflective observation encourages learners to think and reflect critically about their experiences.
3. During abstract conceptualization, learners form new ideas or modify existing ones based on their reflections. This process of deriving meaning and creating personal theories from experience feeds directly into mental model formation.
4. Through active experimentation, learners apply new insights to future situations to improve future performance and decision-making based on past experiences.

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action

Donald Schön published The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action in 1983. He challenged the existing paradigm of Technical Rationality, which views problem-solving as a linear application of theoretical knowledge. In doing so, Schön’s book became one of the definitive texts on reflective practice, specifically as a critical component of professional expertise in complex environments.

In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to practitioners as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations that are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. In order to convert a problematic situation to a problem, a practitioner must do a certain kind of work. He must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense.

Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner

Schön says that professionals must engage in a continuous process of learning, adjusting, and experimenting in real-time, in order to learn how to navigate ambiguous and dynamic situations effectively. He called this Reflection-in-Action.

After the event, practitioners must Reflect-on-Action – analyse their actions and decisions retrospectively to derive lessons for future practice. This process fosters deeper understanding and skill refinement. It is Schön’s version of reflective practice.

Together, it leads to Knowing-in-Action, the type of tacit knowledge professionals develop through experience. This implicit understanding, often difficult to articulate, forms the foundation for effective practice and decision-making in uncertain scenarios and the type of executive mastery being studied here.

How does reflective practice work?

The world does not play fair. Instead of providing us with clear information that would enable us to ‘know’ better, it presents us with messy data that are random, incomplete, unrepresentative, ambiguous, inconsistent, unpalatable, or second hand.

How We Know What Isn’t So, by Thomas Gilovich

And so we come back to the problem of deliberate practice, which only works well in stable environments where feedback is fast and rich. Outside of such environments, reflective practice allows us a space in which to create our own feedback loops, to continuously improve our decision-making processes, and develop the type of adaptability and insight necessary to navigate complex, uncertain situations effectively:

1. Keep learning in the absence of clear feedback – in the act of reflective practice we can analyse our decisions and actions retrospectively, deriving lessons for the future even in the absence of clear, external feedback about the past. Just because a feedback loop hasn’t yet been closed, doesn’t mean we can’t imagine, plan and prepare for what might happen next. Was firing your CPO a good idea? It’s too early to tell, but here’s how you might know that it was, or wasn’t. Here’s what you’re going to do now to compensate for them leaving.
2. Frame and reframe problems – in wicked environments, problem definition is often as challenging as problem solving. Asking “what’s going on here” allows us to frame and reframe problems and hard situations from multiple perspectives, uncovering insights that might be missed in a more linear problem-solving approach.
3. Observe patterns and polarities we’ve not noticed before – the brain is a pattern-making machine. We see and think in patterns, naturally categorising information in order to help us understand and makes sense of it. Whilst our ability to notice patterns can sometime get us in trouble, it can also help us see increasingly complex patterns and connections. We also develop the ability to see things not just in distinct black and white terms, but rather to appreciate them on a spectrum with more nuanced shades of grey in between. It’s often only by effortfully reflecting on situations that we notice these patterns and polarities that others might miss.
4. Leverage and refine our tacit knowledge – initially we build our knowledge and proficiency explicitly, based on teachable, learnable, conceptual facts we store in our memory and which are fairly static in nature. As we progress, we acquire more tacit knowledge, which is hard to express or extract, formalise or codify. Like Schön’s Knowing-in-Action, it’s abstract and messy, such that we often can’t even put into words what it is we know and why we know it. It includes personal wisdom, experience, insight, and intuition. Given all this abstraction, the act of reflective practice provides a fertile ground for us to wallow in the complexity of a situation and gain further ideas or insights that come to us in flashes we can’t put our finger on.
5. Move from technical expert to adaptive leader – reflective practice moves beyond the application of pre-existing knowledge to embrace a more adaptive approach. Rather than asking ourselves what conventional wisdom, best practice or the playbook says we should do next, we’re acknowledging that, as it relates to the challenge we’re confronted with, there is no established way of doing things. There is no Right Answer, just shades of grey that we, as senior leaders, are responsible for navigating.
6. Get more comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, and navigate it more effectively – in undertaking reflective practice, we’re acknowledging the complexity and unpredictability of real-world settings. The act of reflective practice itself is to learn to sit with and hold the ambiguity, which goes against natural human wiring.

How to do reflective practice

The good news is that the barriers to undertaking reflective practice are limited, so long as you can find the time to do it (often the biggest impediment for leaders). With that in mind:

1. Set aside regular time for reflection
2. Use guiding questions to structure your thoughts e.g., What happened? Why? What did I learn? How can I use this experience to improve?
3. Consider keeping a reflective journal or log
4. Surround yourself with a close circle of peers, mentors and coaches whose inputs you trust, and seek feedback from them continually
5. Capture critical insights from your reflections and apply them to future situations

Choosing to engage in deliberate practice or reflective practice is not an either/or decision. You should do both; engaging in deliberate practice to build more repetitive, technical skills in areas you know you still have weaknesses and engaging in reflective practice to help you navigate hard challenges and do the deeper, transformational work that your next level of development requires. That’s why both deliberate practice and reflective practice are part of the suite of activities recommended in my Accelerating Executive Mastery >> series.

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