Productive Reflection at Work

Learning for Changing Organizations

David Boud, Peter Cressey, Peter Docherty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134252947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book is an accessible entry point into the theory and practice of work reflection for students and practitioners. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, it covers management, education, organizational psychology and sociology, drawing on examples from Europe, the Middle East, North America and Australia.

It traces reflection at work from an emphasis on training, through a focus on how organizations learn, to a concern with the necessary learning groups to operate effectively. It emphasizes productivity combined with satisfying lived experience of work life and points the way to a new collective focus on learning at work.

Part I
Introduction

1 Setting the scene for productive reflection
David Boud, Peter Cressey and Peter Docherty

Is reflection just a self-regarding activity that distracts from work and separates individuals from their colleagues? Or, is it an integral part of good work? We want to suggest in this book that reflection is far from being an isolating act of solely personal benefit, it is a key to learning to improve production and to making life at work more satisfying. However, for it to fulfil this promise, reflection must be re-thought and re-contextualized so that it can fit more appropriately within group settings. It must also shift from its origins in concerns about individuals learning to learning within organizations.

This book takes the idea of reflection, places it in a new context and examines the implications of it for work and organizations. In doing so it builds on the traditions of reflection in education and professional practice and deploys them to new ends for work groups and organizations. It also contributes to debates about the re-design of work simultaneously to meet the needs of productivity and the quality of working life and to the agenda that discusses the construction of better jobs.

Many people have regarded meeting such different demands as a zero-sum game; in this, the dual goals of productivity and quality of working life appear incompatible. For them, improved production conjures up images of downsizing, work-intensification and treating humans merely as resources, whereas quality of working life has implied the opposite. However, existing changes in work have made possible new ways of thinking about this. The productivity-driven trends to de-layer and remove direct supervision giving responsibilities to work-groups to meet targets has created a context in which more decisions about the immediate environment and the organization of work are often made possible at the local level than in a traditional workplace. As workers have become more invested in their work and identify with it, they, not unproblematically, see that improvements both in their conditions and in production can be made by them, not as individuals but by a collective unit. It is not necessary to assume in this that work is organized in the form of semi-autonomous work groups: almost any unit of activity has features of these conditions that can be deployed to a greater or lesser extent.

Why choose reflection as the focus of this rethinking? The main influence on learning and change is our experience of the world and how we construe it. For work, our experience of it is the dominating feature. Reflection is a key human mechanism in understanding our experience and drawing lessons from it. This has been known for a long time and reflective practice is now a key component of courses for many professions and occupations. While it has been used in training programs, reflection has hitherto been neglected in the context of making sense of work experience for those in work, as distinct from those preparing for work. This neglect is a function of the dominance, in discussions about reflection, of those in the world of education who are concerned about promoting individual learning. This is now shifting and there has been increasing recognition of reflection for work. In a similar way that reflection on educational experiences was designed to lead to enhanced educational outcomes, reflection on work experience is becoming a key to fostering work outcomes, not least of which is sustainable and satisfying work itself.

The location and purpose of the book

How is the book situated? On what assumptions is it based? The book as a whole adopts the following viewpoint although its various contributors take up some positions that challenge these. Firstly, sustainable development for organizations demands that management balance the needs and ambitions of key stakeholders: customers, investors and personnel. Management’s efforts to achieve this must address not only static efficiency and effectiveness, such as productivity, profitability and competitiveness, but also dynamic efficiency and effectiveness, such as learning, competence development, creativity and innovation. While faced with growing complexity and unpredictability, many current management strategies and methods, such as lean production, lead to increased intensity in the workplace and decreased opportunities for learning and development and thus adverse long-term consequences.

Secondly, effective learning at the individual, group and organizational levels is achieved not through conventional programs but through acknowledging the learning potential of work and integrating learning activities in the workplace. This is not to deny a role for formal programs, but to acknowledge their limitations. An essential element in this learning is reflection in and on the work being carried out. This is what we term productive reflection. The book presents concepts, models, methods and concrete cases for effective reflection and learning, primarily in the social interaction between personnel in different contexts, such as teams, projects and cross-functional and cross-level forums.

More generally, the book is located at an interesting conjunction in the development of work. A number of megatrends such as globalization and radical changes in information and communication technology have led to increased complexity and unpredictability in the world of organizations. Many in management have met this challenge through increased rationalization and outsourcing to achieve more flexibility and reduce the responsibility of personnel. Two common names for this trend are neo-Taylorism and ‘the low road’ in which investments in personnel in terms of manning, skill and responsibility levels are kept to a minimum (Docherty et al. 2002). In many European countries workers experienced marked increases in work intensity during the nineties. This manifested in decreased control over their work and reduced opportunities for learning and reflection. This in turn means that essential learning must now take place at much faster rate. These changes are also leading to a blurring in the boundaries between work and ‘life outside work’, both in terms of where and when work and learning is carried out.

A parallel trend known as ‘the high road’ is characterized by a human resource intensive strategy with higher skill and discretion levels for personnel. This strategy gives priority to the development of individuals and groups with learning integrated in the workplace. This implies an increasing need for what we call ‘productive reflection’ at work. Productive reflection brings changes in work practice to enhance productivity together with changes to enhance personal engagement and meaning in work. These work changes include the greater decentralization of management and the flattening of hierarchies within organizations. This leads to the potential widening of employee capacity and competences. Allied with this is the need for employees to take on greater responsibility for the production of goods and services, to be critically engaged in quality enhancement, the timing of their creation and oversight of methods and processes. What this ‘high road’ trend spells out, however, is the impact that production changes are having across the whole gamut of occupations, from the shop assistant to the manager, from the shop floor to the designer. On the one hand, introducing the necessity of change towards greater work organization involvement and, on the other, new demands for work to be more meaningful and manageable by the worker. Productive reflection places the thinking and active subject as central to work organization today.

At the same time as these changes were happening there has been a parallel transformation in education practices for professionals, technicians and lower skilled employees. There has been a shift from the formal to the informal, from the classroom to experiential learning in the workplace. In part this parallels the need to develop in employees new skills and competences, but also to prepare them for open-ended learning processes and practices that can encourage reflection. Yesterday’s trainees in vocational education and training must now become lifelong learners with greater emphasis upon problem-solving, interpersonal skills and contextual understanding and capacity for reflexivity.

The above trends have also been apparent in recent debates about the centrality of learning at work. The explosion of literature about learning organizations is a testament to this with its appreciation of the need to deal with organizational complexity through the inauguration of individual, group and organizational learning structures. Allied with this is the critical contribution of productive reflection to organizational effectiveness and development and employee sense-making and development, in conditions of complexity. Productive reflection is a key to unlocking vital creative forces in employees (a new productive force) and at the same time a way of engaging workers in the creation of new identities, meanings and communities inside work (a new form of engagement), all of these are powerful intangible resources for the organization.

A further rationale for the book is provided by the growing recognition that forms of productive reflection are necessary for the longer-term sustainability of organizational outcomes. In this sense, the Taylorist use of human resources was instrumental and short term in its thinking. The exclusion of the active, thinking, reflecting subject has consolidated poor expectations, practices and productive outcomes. Productive reflection focuses the need to bring the active subject to the centre of work practices, to underline the importance of continuing learning and the necessity to prioritize personnel’s quality of life issues if the organization is to be sustainable in the long run. Hence the debate is not simply about new ways to improve workplace learning, it extends to the question of how to achieve better sustainability and renewal of organizational resources. That is, how can we improve the productive forces within organizations at the same time as we lay the basis for a more human and whole-hearted engagement?

The focus of the book

The book is part of a new wave of interest to address issues of reflection in the context of work. While there has been previous work on reflection in educational settings and reflective practice in the context of the work of individual professionals, none deals with the challenges faced by reflection in organizations and in a variety of work groups. The book joins Organizing Reflection (Reynolds and Vince 2004), that was published as we were going to press, as representing a move towards seeing reflection as a valuable perspective on organizational concerns. More importantly, this book and our own represent ways of bringing together insights from the often divided fields of adult and organizational learning to deal with pressing matters in the world of work.

A key innovation of our book is that it emphasizes the social collective aspects of reflection – people reflecting together in the workplace. Previously, reflection had been regarded as a way of fostering learning through focusing on personal experience. It may have been conducted with the help of other people, but it was essentially about individual learning; others were only involved to facilitate the process. The book repositions the discourse of reflection away from this individual focus towards one that places reflection of groups in organizations as central. This shift from the individual to the collective here marks an important new development.

Reflection is seen as an integral component of work, a necessary element in evaluation, sense-making, learning and decision-making processes in the workplace. It is through a focus on reflection, we suggest, that the needs of production can be reconciled with the needs of employees to have satisfying engagement with their work. As the identity of worker shifts to worker–learner in new forms of production, so reflection is a key element in working with the challenges to identity that are also involved.

The book consists of contributions from diverse range of international authorities in the areas of management (human resource management, organizational behaviour, organizational development and management systems) and education (adult and vocational learning, experiential learning) as well as organizational psychology and sociology. A particular feature of the book is that it crosses the boundaries of different disciplines and draws together different views of reflection to enable a secure grounding in academic thinking and working practice.

The contributors draw on their own research in organizations as well as their experience and scholarship to ground discussion of reflection in concrete settings and provide useful conceptual frameworks. They also link earlier conceptions of reflection to the ways in which it is being used today and apply it to different sites of practice: networks, teams, work groups and training programs.

How did the book arise?

The book was constructed from an international collaboration of researchers and scholars. They were brought together as part of a joint program for working life research in Europe. This program, named SALTSA from the initials of the collaborating organizations, is a joint activity of the Swedish trade unions and the National Institute for Work Life in Stockholm. As part of a regular cycle of collaborative research a group from SALTSA identified a number of key themes in contemporary working life. One of these themes related to the problem of not having time to think at work and the ways in which this inhibited learning and effective working. This was a theme that crossed sectors, types of work and the levels of training of employees. Work intensification had started to reach the stage at which it was inhibiting the conduct of work itself and was taking a toll on employees. We considered the questions: What could be done to address this problem? Was it an inevitable consequence of demands for increasing productivity?

An initial two-day workshop of researchers from different countries was convened to explore the nature of the problem. The researchers were drawn from a diversity of disciplines and orientations. In particular it drew on those with a background in adult learning and its application in work as well as those with a primarily organizational perspective. Following the workshop they, and others identified at the first meeting, met twice a year over a two-year period as an expert-working group. Countries eventually represented were Australia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Members of the group explored ways in which reflection can be used in work settings for the benefits of production and the quality of working life of those involved.

Having considered whether we should cooperate on seeking research funding or on writing, it was decided that a lot of relevant work had already been conducted and that a useful task would be to bring this together in a form that could stimulate wider debate. This led to the present book. Chapters were proposed and discussed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Underpinning themes and ideas
• Part III Productive reflection: differing contexts and practices
• Part IV Challenges and complexities
• Index