Time for Reflection

Sitting in Starbucks recently, I paused for a moment to reflect on some essays I was reading by Charles Handy and as I scanned the room it was remarkable to see how every single person was engaged in some form of activity. People were reading, staring at their 'phones, chatting - but not one person was just sitting and reflecting. I put my book down. I reflected. It was hard work.

Have we lost the will to reflect? In former times (forgive me if I'm romanticizing the past now) I imagine people (at least those who weren't slaving in the mills or poor houses) had time to do more than chat, instead there was a culture that valued active engagement in discussions about ideas and having some time alone without distractions to just… think. Now, we have any number of distractions and a culture that demands we look busy on a fulltime basis (ever feel uncomfortable in an elevator or at a party with nothing to make you look occupied? Those ubiquitous TV monitors serve a function you know).

Also, brain work consumes a lot of energy - something like 20% of our daily calories. Aside from the fact that it is good that we work those neurons to stop our dearly beloved and very necessary hippocampus from shrinking on us, it is tiring work - so maybe we like to avoid raw thinking time pretty much as we do physical workouts.

Yet reflection is the time we take to learn from what we or others have done, make sense of the world and figure out how to do things better in the future. I observe many senior executives moving swiftly from meeting to meeting, reading and commenting on documents scanned at speed and existing on 4-5 hours sleep a night. Their lives are consumed by events, and the time for reflection and learning is lost to them. Whilst they are in control to the extent that they decide what events will fill up their schedule, they are clearly not choosing to cram in reflection time and may well seem to an outside observer (of a reflective bent, naturally) that they are, to all intents and purposes, completely out of control. Sumantra Ghoshal and Heike Bruch drew attention to this problem in a 2002 HBR article in which they said that only 10% of managers spent their time in a purposeful, reflective manner - you could allow them to be out on this number by any reasonable factor you like and it would still make you read it twice to check your eyes weren't tricking you.

Similarly, I see so many training courses skinnied down to the basics because of a fear of productivity loss back at the workplace. Training itself becomes a series of highly structured activities strung together over a shortened program, with little or no reflection time involved. No surprise that the retention rate and application of workplace learning is, all too often, pitifully low.

How about we decide to make reflection a major part of our working lives? Imagine if each employee had to write down what they had learned in the past year in preparing for their performance evaluation? What if CEOs started to spend 15 minutes at the end of each day asking themselves 'What did I learn today and what could I have done better?', and then encouraged their subordinates to do the same? I would guess that we would improve performance, increase adaptability, get more control over how we spent our time and even start to enjoy our jobs more. Not a bad combination of corporate and self interest. Think about it.