Big Idea of the Week

The Reflective Practitioner

I finally finished Donald A. Schön’s book “The Reflective Practitioner”. It was on my reading list for quite a while. It’s somewhat academic. Not an easy read for sure. The book is a wealth of thought-provoking case studies and research on how professionals solve real life problems. I wish I had read it two years ago.

I came across Schön’s name by accident. A friend of mine mentioned him to me and I did a little search. It turned out that Schön’s background is fascinating. He was trained as a philosopher at Yale and Harvard. After went through the Army years, he joined an industrial research and consulting firm Arthur D. Little, latter worked for government for some time, and ended up as a Ford professor of Planning and Education in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. What interested me the most was his diverse experiences. None of his jobs seemed to be built up on his previous job. But somehow he found a consistent theme in all his work and he developed great insights across many professional fields. “The Reflected Practitioner” is his best known book. I picked it up to answer two of my questions. What is professional competence? And how do we acquire it? This book articulates something I understand but could not put into words. It also pointed out something important that I wasn’t aware of.

Schön emphasized the role of problem setting in professional practice. He went so far as saying that “problem solving can be viewed as a part of the larger experiment of problem setting.”

To understand Schön’s view on professional practice and professional competence, we need to understand two important concepts. Knowing-in-action and reflection-in-action

·        Knowing-in-action. It is something we know how to do but can’t describe, at least, not in the way that others could perform at the same level as we do by following our description. One example is bike riding. Knowing-in-action might include pattern recognitions and some kind of spontaneous judgment. It is something we don’t have to think about before or during the action, both physically and mentally. Most people are not aware when and how they pick up these skills. 

·        Reflection-in-action. That is, we think about what we are doing while doing it. Surprises, both unwanted and desirable, could make us stop and think. Also we have to think when the problematic situation we face is so complicated, so uncertain, so unstable, so unique, and with many contradicting requirements that no pre-existing theories or techniques could help us address the situation as it is. Pulling out a manageable problem to solve from the large amount of messy and conflicting information is not part of the technical knowledge most of us got from formal education. In this case, we can’t rely on knowing-in-action, and thinking and action are interweaving.

The skill for reflection-in-action is the major part of the professional competence, as Schön saw it. Schön introduced it as “A reflective conversation with a unique and uncertain situation.” You set your initial problem as making something or understand something. Your problem setting determines your focus, what to pay attention to and what to leave out. It also prescribes your strategies and the direction of actions. Problem setting reflects your understanding of the situation. By imposing your understanding to the situation, the situation might talk back to you through the consequences of your effort, especially when they don’t match your expectations. To evaluate the surprises, you reflect on the way you define your problem, try to surface and critique the implicit strategies and theories in your effort. You examine your feeling for the situation, and you dig out the value and appreciation system underlying your judgment. You might also reflect on your role as you implicitly set for yourself within the larger organizational context. The results of your reflection could point you to any of the following directions: reframe/redefine your situation/problem, using generative metaphor and what if approach to make new sense of the problem. The results of your new effort will feed the new reflection. Thus an iterative loop is in place till the solution is satisfying.

For a well defined problem, we can judge how good the solution is. But how can we tell whether the problem setting is effective? Here is Schön’s for evaluation:

·        Can I solve the problem I have set?

·        Do I like what I get when I solve the problem?

·        Have I made the situation coherent?

·        Have I made it congruent with my fundamental values and theories?

·        Have I kept inquiry moving?

In practice, the ends and means are usually interdependent. Schön proposed two approaches to keep the investigation moving. One is to use What-if approach; he called it on-the-spot experiment. Let’s change the situation this way or that and see what happens. It is a way to probe the situation for understanding and to change the situation at the same time. You can carry a few lines of inquiries concurrently without commitment. The results of these inquiries could help you set new directions. Another one is to use generative metaphor, that is, you model the unfamiliar on the familiar. You see one as similar to the other when the two were initially perceived as very different. Here is one example. One day, my daughter Chloe complained that her friend so-and-so had this wonderful toy and she should have it too. I said no. I was not going to encourage her to give in to the peer pressure. She was upset, trying to find more persuasive reasons. To my surprise, in a few minutes, she said: “You know, mom, you are my biggest toy.”  “How so?” She said: “You are huggable like my teddy bear, I can ride you like my horse, I can wrestle with you, I can order you to watch me dance, I can…” On and on she went. Finally she said: “If I can’t get the other toy, I will have to play YOU.”  So Chloe found the similarities between her mom and her toys while ignored the differences, one of which could be this new found toy might have a free will and doesn’t always comply to her wishes as her other toys do. By using the toy as a generative metaphor, Chloe generated a new perception which opened up some new options for herself. She got me to play with her for a few hours as she liked.

Generative metaphor could be the bridge between our prior experience and the current unique situation. The more experience we have, the more we can pull out from our repertoire as generative metaphor. Reflection-in-action is one way to help us enlarge our repertoire. The important question is: what types of experiences are most desirable to accumulate? Schön pointed out four categories

·        Frame analysis: learn where to pay attention in problematic situations and what should leave out in setting your problems, learn what types of strategies and direction of actions you should follow after you set your problems, learn how to evaluate the appropriateness of your role, how to interpret the observable data from your experiments, and how to be aware of any other alternative frames.

·        Repertoire-building: be able to describe and analyze images, category schemes, cases, precedents, examples, etc. Not just focus on the starting position, the action taken, and the results achieved to see the logical linkage between features of action, outcome, and context, but also try to dig out the real path that leads from the initial problem setting to the final outcome.

·        Methods of inquiry and overarching theory: something you can use as a springboards for making sense of new situations, such as system thinking, process thinking, etc.

·        Process of reflection-in-action: in Schön’s fancy words, “take into account the cognitive, affective, and group dynamic effects.”

The book doesn’t include research on how the professional experience is acquired. From personal experience, two approaches work the best. Reflection and learning from the experts. Reflection can be in the form of dissecting past and current experiences or in the form of teaching. I noticed many times that only when I was forced to articulate to others, I became aware of what I understood intuitively. And something I could articulate becomes more accessible to me in the future when I need to use it again. Learning from others is somewhat tricky. One way to learn from the experts is to use them as coaches. Listen to the feedback carefully and nondefensively, evaluate the new perceptions and options suggested, and imitate intelligently. Another one is to watch carefully how experts ACTUALLY do things. Some of the tacit knowledge the experts have often are not accessible to them consciously. To get the most out of the experts, we have to observe astutely and ask probe questions. In this sense learning is not passive and incremental. It is active and can be transformational.

Stress and Recovery

My interests toward most sports are close to zero. But I find sports performance psychology fascinating. I am always curious how top performers/experts in various competitive fields were trained and why they could perform as good as they do under tremendous pressure. I have followed James E. Loehr’s work for some time. I like his ideas. His ideas confirmed my basic belief that most of the important skills in life are not inherited. They can be learned and improved upon if we can find a way to sustain our motivation and if we understand the mechanism of good practice. 

I believe Loehr’s research and practice have profound implications in how we should view and take advantage of stress. Be able to thrive on stress will make it possible for us to live a happy, balanced, productive, and fulfilled life.

Here is Loehr ‘s big idea. Stress exposure is not the problem. Without stress exposure, there is no growth. What do you think happens to a broken arm protected in the cast?  Completely free from stress for a few weeks, when the cast is removed, do you expect the arm to be stronger or weaker? Stress is a problem only when the volume of recovery doesn’t match the volume of stress. With excessive stress and insufficient recovery, our adaptation threshold is exceeded and our system, physically, mentally, and emotionally, simply can’t respond appropriately, and serious harm could be done. On the other hand, with too much recovery and not enough stress exposure, we gradually lose the capacity to handle stress and our adaptation threshold is lowered. The balanced life is an oscillation between stress and recovery and the stress level has to be high enough to maintain our capacity and progressively higher to ensure growth.

One of Loehr’s most important discoveries is Trained Recovery. In Loehr’s early sports research, he wanted to find out what made some tennis players top performers and some just good ones. For tennis players with the same level of technical skills, he didn’t observe any measurable differences when they are playing the points. What he did catch were the between-point differences. In the 25 seconds allowed between points, the time necessary for the players to move to the appropriate position on the court, top players have a much disciplined sequence of thoughts and actions. Their movements, gestures, and rituals in between-point help them recover from the stress of the previous point and help them maintain their ideal performance state in the most effective way. In other words, after you get your techniques well trained, what can make you or break you, to a large extent, depends on how well you use your down time to recover.

For most of us, the good news is our recovery time is usually longer than 25 seconds. So how can we enjoy the trained recovery in our own lives? Our challenge is to find high quality recovery time and good recovery strategies to match the stress level in our life. To start with, we need to allow ourselves to have high quality breaks and down time. It’s easier said than done. I remember when I was doing computer programming, I could sit in front of the computer for 5 to 6 hours straight till my eyeballs can’t move and my brain felt like mashed potato. I usually started to make stupid mistakes after two hours. I knew that when I started to curse the computer and I knew I needed a break. But I simply didn’t want to get up and walk around. Discipline and will power alone doesn’t ensure that I work most productively even if I know how. The only way to get there is through forming healthy habits and establishing carefully crated rituals. For example, I could use a kitchen timer to remind me when I need to get up and take a break, or I can write a program to force the computer to save my work and reboot every so often till I get used to taking breaks. Using down time well is even more important and difficult. It requires us to be fully present in the moment. How many of us feel that we can’t turn off our brains at the end of the work day? I sure can’t from time to time. It takes planning and discipline, ahead of the time. When we feel exhausted after a full day’s work, especially if we didn’t take high quality breaks through the day, we have little mental/emotional energy left to decide how best to spend our non work time. Habits and rituals are probably more reliable in this case as well. I remember a decompress ritual shared by a friend. When he gets home after work, he would ask his kids to shake off his stress. His kids literally jump up to him and shake his whole body for two minutes. That became a ritual and bonding experience between him and his kids.

Loehr argued that stress response is emotional response. To be able to use our recovery time well, we need to take control of our emotions. Stress control is ultimately emotional control. There are two parts in emotional control. The ability to summon positive emotions at a moment’s notice, regardless of the circumstance; and the ability to handle negative emotions so that they don’t intrude into the trained recovery time, especially under great pressure and after making a mistake. In other words, emotional control is the ability to summon appropriate emotions for the given context and delay experiencing the inappropriate emotions when necessary.

The ability to summon positive emotions at will takes practice, lots of practices, daily and consistent effort. The foundation for this skill is self-awareness. We need to be aware what we are thinking and what we are doing when we are in a positive emotional state. With practice, the images of what we did and the thoughts we had when we experienced positive emotions can become the triggers for accessing future positive emotions on demand. The basic techniques for practicing are visualization and controlling our thoughts and attitude.

Personally, I found that the strategy for dealing with emotional discomfort is the same as that for physical discomfort. It is called Detachment. You become an observer of what you are going through, you make a mental note here and there for you to review later, and you just watch without interference. You treat your negative emotions as messengers who tell you some of the true needs you should fulfill in the most constructive way, as soon as you get a chance. Then you let them go. You don’t allow the negative emotions to control your thoughts and actions.  I first learned this when I had to deal with the pain of child birth. I used pain mediation when my first child Chloe was born. She came out drowsy and can’t suck on her own for a couple of days. Scary experience. So I refused to use pain medication when my second child came along. Looking back at Chloe’s birth, when I felt the pain was intolerable, what got me was not the physical pain itself. It was the fear of the unknown. I didn’t know how much worse it would get and how long it would last now that I already can’t breathe freely. The second time around, I turned my fear into my curiosity. I was curious how bad it can get. I watched the pain comes and goes, wave after wave, and imagined myself riding on the ocean waves in a small canoe. Without fear and anxiety, I truly enjoyed the ride. Pain was just another physical sensation, though not the most pleasant one. By itself, it was not unbearable. Later I learned to use the same strategy to handle emotional and mental stress and found it quite effective. When I feel overwhelmed, for whatever reasons, I try to pause and say “It’s interesting. I am curious how bad it can get”. That always gives me a little distance and perspective to regain my sanity.

Many of us have excessive emotional/mental stress and insufficient physical stress. It’s easier to control the stress and recovery level in physical training. Since the responses for physical stress and emotional stress share the same biochemistry and neurochemistry, we will be able to respond to emotional/mental stress better if we have a good physical foundation for recovery.  One interesting point in Loehr’s books is his first priority in physical training. Core muscles. The strengthened core muscles could help us with our posture and help us breathe better in cardiovascular training. The goal is to do 200 curl-ups in sets of 25 every day. I started a few days ago and I am still sore.

The Power of Feedback

I came across Joseph R. Folkman’s book “The Power of Feedback” a few years ago when I was searching for good fonts and good page design. Every page of this book pleases my eyes. I refer to the hardcover edition. I am happy to report that the book content didn’t disappointment me either. The book is not entertaining but it is well written and very accessible.

The author assumes that you will get negative feedback in the course of your professional life. The book talks about how to handle your emotional responses, how to assess the critical feedback intelligently, and how to make change happen and make change stick. 

Many of the principles and strategies laid out in the book are common sense. However, I did find two important insights.

·        Forming impressions. According to the author, before we make people judgment, we don’t pay attention to each trait individually; instead, we bundle up traits and behaviors into an overall impression, a stereotype label. “Many of the traits, attributes, and behaviors fit the type, but others do not. But, because we tend to hold the bundle together, we do not closely scrutinize the attributes that do not fit.” Here is one example from the book. People often think that a very intelligent person is also well read. In reality, it doesn’t have to be so. “Our perceptions are also heavily influenced by position, status, roles, and responsibilities. We have expectations of how people ought to perform, and we tend to judge them based on those expectations, frequently ignoring the specifics of the situation.”  The book also talked about the effective ways to change other people’s perception of you. Interested readers should refer the book for details.

·        Companion skills and cross training. The author claimed that the efforts required to develop a competency into a profound strength are very different from the ones required to improve performance from poor to good. When people are already good, and when they “attempt to build strength, they end up doing nothing, because they can’t figure out how to improve any further.” They noticed in training athletes, “the way runners move from good to great is through cross training: They lift weights, swim, watch their diets, and do a variety of other things to build their strength.” In their research, they found that “people who were the most effective in performing a particular competency also tended to be effective on a series of companion behaviors.” “Companion skills may be used to create an extremely high level of competence.” One example particularly interests me was about technical expertise. “Suppose you were creating an action plan for improving your technical expertise. A typical action plan might include actions such as taking a class, reading a book in the field, or going to a conference or seminar on the subject. These actions make a lot of sense if technical expertise is a weakness.” I was very frustrated that the author didn’t make any suggestions on how to move from good to great in this area. Through the book, no companion skills for technical expertise were mentioned anywhere. Further literature search returned nothing. I decided to make up my own list of companion skills. Here they are: computer literacy, mentoring and developing others, awareness of one’s own thought process, various types of sense-making and problem-solving methodologies, and information search capability. What do you think? Do you have anything to add or subtract?

How to get quality feedback is an important topic left out in this book.

I first encountered the feedback idea in Peter Drucker’s memoirs “Adventures of a bystander”. Drucker mentioned that his only two first-rate teachers were both in fourth grade. One of them used feedback to guide him. He was given a note book and was told to “Put down each week at the beginning how you expect to do and then how you are actually doing.” Drucker formalized this feedback approach in his book “The Effective Executive” and extended the time frame from a week to half a year if I remember it right.

The central concept of Drucker’s approach stuck with me. In both professional and personal development, to make any progress, I need to know two things: expectations/ideals I strive toward and where I stand against those expectations/ideals. Feedback is a powerful tool for me to gain clarity in both of those areas. Some of our ideals are emerged and some are refined from the feedback. In this sense, feedback is a source of information about ourselves and is not limited to the 360 degree feedback and performance appraisal. There are at least three categories of feedback

·        Drucker approach: We live more consciously and try to become a more objective observer of our own performance and behavior. We record and compare our expectations and our results and learn from the difference and other unexpected observations. Army’s After Action Review belongs to this category. This approach is very effective if we can set up a process/system to keep us honest with ourselves.

·        Informal feedback from others: we become astute observer of other people and decide what we want to imitate and what we should leave out. As long as we pay attention, the opportunity of learning this way is unlimited.

·        Formal feedback from other people: both solicited and unsolicited. Though other people’s perceptions might not be more accurate than our own, with multiple perspectives we might find something that is closer to reality. However, high quality formal feedback is not always each to get. By high quality, I mean analysis and examples on top of the opinions.

I made it an annual practice to solicit feedback from people who had a chance to observe me in the past year. I generally select people with supervisory experience, people I trust, people I respect, people who cares, people who have some traits I want to have, and people who are serious observer of others. If you happen to find a serious people observer, you are in for a treat. I usually asked specifically for criticism and request people to share with me their observations, their advice, and some analysis on why they give me such advice. I asked for criticism for two reasons. First, I often get important and unexpected insights from critical feedback. Second, it’s simply easier for me to deal with the worst and think the rest could only get better. I might change my approach slightly this year. I came across a Harvard Business Review article titled “How to play to your strengths”1. In this article, a Reflected Best Self exercise was mentioned. The big idea is to ask exclusively for positive feedback. You pick a few people who know you professionally or personally, in the past or at present. Then you ask them to provide information about your strengths. You request specific examples, especially examples that were meaningful to them when you use your strengths. After you gather all the information, you search for a few common themes. Together with your self-observation, you can reach a self-portrait that is who you are at your best. When we understand what our best possible self is, we can make many positive changes. “Knowing your strengths also offers you a better understanding of how to deal with your weaknesses—and helps you gain the confidence you need to address them.”

According to my experience, the best way to handle emotional response, both my own and others, is to separate the information gathering stage and information processing stage. We have to remember it’s very uncomfortable to criticize, especially face to face. During the information gathering stage, the most important thing to do is to encourage the feedback provider to talk freely. A good approach is to discipline myself to think “that is very interesting”, not “that is terrible”, no matter what I hear. At the back of my mind, I always know that my mistakes, failures, and other embarrassing moments are all raw materials when I want to develop my humor skill in the future. It’s not easy. But with practice, it’s achievable.

I don’t believe people, as well as businesses, have to be flawless to succeed at any endeavor. But it’s not wise not to be aware of the flaws. We may decide consciously that we want to focus our growth in one or two areas for the moment and leave the rest for the future. The most critical thing in the processing stage is to decide what exactly we should change and improve. We may change for two reasons: to make ourselves better and to make life easier for people around us. Since ultimately we have to live congruently, our outside image has to fit who we truly are inside, we have to filter all the feedback through our personal criteria. As Nathaniel Branden, the father of the self-esteem movement, pointed out, “of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.”

1. “How to play to your strength” by Laura Morgan Roberts, Gretchen Spreitzer, Jane Dutton, Robert Quinn, Emily Heaphy, and Brianna Barker, p 75-80, January 2005, Harvard Business Review

Made to Stick

Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath is one of those rare books that I bribed my kids to go to bed earlier and get up later as soon as I started reading. It was such a pleasure to go through and it had such a huge impact on my thinking. I will remember some of the examples and case studies for many years to come. Hopefully I will pause and catch myself more often before I commit another one of the communication sins mentioned in the book.

Here are a few things that hinder the effective communications that I could personally relate to.

·        The curse of knowledge. After we have learned something, we don’t remember what it’s like not to know something or be able to do something. For example, when my older daughter was two, we tried to teach her how to count. She knew how to recite numbers. However, she had a hard time to match numbers with objects. One object she would count as one, two as two, then three, four, five, etc she would also count as two. I was at my wit’s end. I simply didn’t understand why she can’t get it and I didn’t know how I can make her get it. Knowing and not knowing seem to be two discrete states that can’t be connected easily. After you know something, a one way switch is flipped and you are not accessible to the state of not knowing anymore. This is one of the most important points we should be aware of when we communicate. With the curse of knowledge, often we are also tempted to share all we know and in a single setting, we are tempted to share the tips and conclusions which emerge from months of hard work, without providing the necessary context, without much supporting evidence or examples, and nobody will be able to figure out how what we said is relevant. Once in a while we might state what we know so accurate, to the point of useless to others.

·        “Bury the lead”. A concept borrowed from journalism. Inverted pyramid structure of ideas/information is how good journalists use to write their pieces. You read the first sentence/paragraph and you know most of the story. That first sentence/paragraph is called the Lead. This is something I saw myself doing over and over. I got lost in the abundance of information and tried to organize that information in a logical fashion. In other words, I worry more about presentation and less about the core message, the most critically important element that I really wanted to convey. There are two other manifestations of “burying the lead”. One is “starting with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience.” The remedy is to “work to make the core message itself more interesting.” Another one is “tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.” 

·        Decision paralysis. This one is on the receiving end. Research shows, when people are uncertain about something, when they are presented with many options, even if they are all attractive, they will delay their actions or decisions, or even take the route that is not very attractive. So if you want your audience to act on your message, you need to reduce the amount of information in your idea.

The main point of the book is that you can study success and get better yourself. Here is the best part. Successes share some common traits and you can identify them and create a template or checklist. One interesting study quoted in the book is about systematic creativity. According to the study, surprisingly, people who were given the creative template for ads produced ads that were judged more creative compared to people who were given other types of creative training, such as free association. The authors said it better. “If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.” The book lay out the requirements and common traits shared by useful and lasting ideas, the sticky ideas as the authors call them. It also shows you what the core message is like, how you can find the core message, and communicate it effectively.

In their framework, there are two stages in making the ideas sticky. First, the Answer stage, you use your expertise to find the most critically important idea and make it compact. Then, Telling Other stage. You need to construct your idea in the way that makes your audience pay attention, understand and remember, agree and believe, care, and be able to act on. The checklist for making your ideas sticky is:  simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and stories. Every one of these elements is rich and powerful and is usually under applied.

Take simplicity for example. Be simple does not mean to dumb down or just sound bites. Be simple means you only keep the most critically important element. Not only you strip away anything that is not essential, but also you leave out some important but not the most critically important elements. Be simple also means that the expression of the idea is so compact, so concise, so clear that it is memorable and its meaning is not open to interpretation.

The book is very thought-provoking. Many points and observations struck me and made me pause and reflect. Here are a few of them.

·        Presentation. “The goal is not to summarize; it’s to make you care about knowing something, and then tell you what you want to know.” When we give a talk, we are often so passionate about our subject. We assume you feel the same way about the topic. See, we know so much. We just want to give you all the facts and conclusions. We assume you will pay attention. You have to. Our talk is not mandatory. You come to our talk by your own free choice. It’s a waste of your time not to pay attention, don’t you think? We put in little thoughts on how to get your attention and how to hold your attention. However, “To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “what information do I need to convey?” to “what questions do I want my audience to ask?””

·        Using numbers and statistics. Without using numbers and statistics, and equations by the same token, our ideas seem to be wishy-washy, hand-waving. But numbers alone don’t convey much. Most people don’t have an intuitive feel about the magnitude and relevancy of pure numbers. Numbers and statistics are useful only if you can use them to illustrate relationships in the right context.

·        Concreteness. The authors observed the difference between novice and expert. “If concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction? The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly”. “Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level.”

·        Availability bias. People believe something is more likely to happen or to be true when it’s easier to remember.

·        Motivation. We tend to think that we are motivated by higher and nobler desires and other people are motivated by more materialistic and base desires.

Overall, this is a book worth digesting. The language is fluid. The layout and the fonts are very pleasing to the eyes in the hardcover edition. The book is well researched and full of intriguing examples. I think it’s a must-read for people who want their ideas to have impact. There is an Easy Reference Guide at the end of the book. It is a very useful refresher after you read the book. The Notes section is worth reading as well. There are a lot of fascinating studies and papers plus insightful comments. The index is well prepared. I could flip the page in the index section and linger on one or two entries and see what they remind me of.