Reflective Work in the Workplace

Mirror, mirror on the wall – how much do I really want to see?

Executive Master Thesis, INSEAD

Andrea Bogusz January 18

th, 2013

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract 3

Introduction 5

The Value of Reflection and What it Means 7

Case Background: the organization, the program, the stakeholders 14

The Stakeholders’ View on Reflections 26

The Consultants 27

The Participants 40

Conclusions 48

Bibliography 51

Appendix A 55

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ABSTRACT

Purpose:

Reflective work is recognized as a key element in learning, be it for individual, team

or organizational development. Additionally there is a strong correlation between

such work and other elements conducive to learning, namely “content/input”

(knowledge), “action/activities” (experience and experimenting). The purpose of this

paper is to look at the interconnectivity of these three elements with a focus on the

concept of reflections. By looking at the perceptions and reactions of various

stakeholders in a corporate development program, I will explore the role that

reflective work played in that learning initiative. My aim is to find out how reflection is

perceived , what type of reflective practices are used in corporate learning, and what

the underlying reasons could be for their use or neglect.

Design-methodology/approach

This work is a combination of literature review, surveys, narrative and a case.

Findings

Engaging in reflective work that goes beyond the traditionally established practices of

instrumentally-driven debriefs of an experience poses a challenge in the corporate

workplace. This challenge seems to be grounded in the commercial and power

relations between different stakeholders as well as in the more human and

subconscious defenses against uncertainty and tension.

Research limitations/implications

In the literature, there is limited research on the defense mechanism deployed by

stakeholders involved in corporate development initiatives. This is particularly true for

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accounts that explore more of the subconscious defenses against critical and

clinically-oriented reflections. Hence, future research needs to focus on collecting

more actual examples from the workplace, particularly the corporate workplace. This

could lead to a further differentiation of defense mechanisms in the context of

reflective work and a better understanding of the dynamics at play.

The limitations of the case study discussed herein are twofold. First, there is a low

number of respondents from the stakeholder group of consultants so the findings are

only indicative and not representative. Second, the responses of HR stakeholders

were excluded due to confidentiality and potential personal bias. Future research

should also include the latter stakeholder.

Practical implications

This study shall contribute to heighten the awareness of L&D practitioners with

regard to the potential blockers they could encounter when integrating more reflective

practices in their change initiatives.

Originality/ value

The value of this work lies more in the fact that it is a personal account of an

experience with reflective practices in the corporate world. As mentioned above, for

any evolution on this topic and further insights, the field is in urgent need of such

examples from the business world.

Keywords

Reflective practices; Learning & Development, defensive mechanisms

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INTRODUCTION

The benefits of reflective practices in the context of learning and development

activities have been confirmed by many scholars and practitioners in the field ( Miller,

2005; Moon, 2000; Rigg & Trehan, 2008; van Woerkom & Croon, 2008). The initial

works arguing for a strong connection between experience or action learning and

reflection in order to effect learning can be traced back to 1938 with John Dewey and

the late 40s with Kurt Lewin’s work. Reflecting is basically seen as an integral part of

the whole learning process alongside knowledge teaching and practice. According to

Rigg and Trehan (2008), reflective practices have also increasingly found their way

into the corporate learning world as well (p. 375). I wonder, however, if we have fully

deployed the benefits of some reflective practices in managerial development

programs yet. On the one hand, reflective work seems to still be a proportionally

small part in the whole learning, development or change process, - hence maybe an

underrepresented weight in the whole equation of learning. On the other hand,

certain reflective practices have found their way more into the design, facilitation and

communication of organizational learning initiatives than others.

What I find puzzling is the inherent contradiction between theory and practice around

reflective practices. If we know that reflections are an important element in change

processes, how come that we still do not create more reflective space in

development programs and organizations? Why do the stakeholders involved in

learning and development (L&D) are usually more successful in including a relatively

big part on new knowledge acquisition and practice in development and change

initiatives? What could be the reasons behind that? Hence, it seems to me

worthwhile to look a bit deeper into what could be the underlying reasons for the fact

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that reflective practices and the space for reflection are kept at a comparatively

smaller portion in quite some development initiatives? I am working from the

assumption that the possibilities of reflective practices have been underutilized, and

my intention with this work is to better understand what the potential blockers could

be which keep us from introducing more reflective practices in development

programs? My hypothesis is that there are defense mechanisms at play among and

within the various stakeholders involved in such programs.

One of such development initiatives, which I will call PEAL and which I was in charge

of as program director, offered itself to be examined further. Its form of deployment

and a rather, though not completely, open agenda lent itself to include both more

reflective space and a wider panoply of reflective practices than in many typical

leadership programs promoted by the organization I worked for. By taking PEAL as

an example, I hope to find some answers as to what practitioners need to pay

attention to if they want to increase the effectiveness of their L&D programs by

including more reflective practices.

After a brief synopsis in the next chapter of what we understand by “reflection” and its

value, I will provide the background information to the context of the organization, the

program and its stakeholders. This shall serve as a basis to then explore, by looking

at survey data and considering personal observations, the perceptions of those

involved in the program. In the final chapter I will attempt to synthesize the findings

into conclusions.

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THE VALUE OF REFLECTION AND WHAT IT MEANS

YOU CANNOT TEACH PEOPLE ANYTHING. WE CAN ONLY HELP THEM DISCOVER IT WITHIN

THEMSELVES. - Galileo Galilei -

VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY IS NOT IN SEEKING NEW LANDS BUT IN SEEING WITH NEW EYES.

- Marcel Proust -

Reviewing the literature on reflection and reflective practices clearly reveals two

things. For one, there are numerous understandings of what reflection or reflective

practices are. The discourse on reflectivity is ongoing, particularly in a field called

“critical reflections” (Reynolds & Vince, 2004). Critical reflections have been strongly

grounded in the so called “Frankfurt School” where critical theorists strongly believe

that the purpose of reflections is to uncover social arrangements which inhibit a

further development of a more emancipated world and it is these thoughts that are

also the foundation upon which the fields of Critical Management Studies and its sub-

field of Critical Management Education rest ( Perriton, 2004). Two other areas where

scholars focus their work on reflective practices are in the educational field,

particularly on learning theories, and in psychology where reflection is examined in

the context of psychoanalytical work. Secondly, among all the different strands on the

theory and practice of reflective work there is, however, at least consensus on one

point, namely that reflection is at the core of learning and change processes which

again are closely linked with experience. No matter if the approach focuses on

individual or collective reflection in learning, if the purpose of reflection is placed on

finding solutions to concrete managerial problems or on establishing a more

emancipatory, democratic process in the world and workplace, - no matter what the

various differences in defining the term and the corresponding methodologies -,

reflective practices are always seen as a necessary ingredient for learning to truly

happen.

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As Reynolds (1998), a proponent of critical reflections, points out: “The concept of

reflecting, particularly reflecting on experience, is central to the theories of learning

which have come to inform thinking and practice in management education and

development” (p. 183). Thanks to the work of scholars in the educational field,

reflection has become a central theme in the deployment of development programs.

Schön’s publication of The Reflective Practitioner (1983) can be seen as a pivotal

point at which discussions and research of this topic got momentum. He understood

the value and purpose of reflective practices as the “capacity to reflect on action so

as to engage in a process of continuous learning”.

Educationalists, theorists and practitioners in the field of teaching and learning alike,

had a growing interest in understanding better how learning actually works and

experiential learning was central to this understanding. The interest was on gaining a

better comprehension of how to integrate theory and practice into actual learning,

and scholars underlined the import role of reflective work in order to make sense of

an experienced action (e.g., Argyris & Schön, 1978; Brookfield, 1987; Gibbs, 1988;

Kolb, 1984). Their work had implications on how learning interventions were

designed and facilitated, and we saw a shift in the teaching methods applied in

schools as well as in the corporate training world from the late 70s onwards. Simply

put, it was a shift from an approach favoring a strong focus on knowledge

transmission to an approach putting the concrete experience at the core, which was

strongly linked to steps of reflective observation (i.e. what did one notice, what

happened?) and abstract conceptualization (i.e. what could that mean?) in order to

actively experiment further. The work of David Kolb (1984), known for his Experiential

Learning Cycle, became one of the most popular models which entered the corporate

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learning realm. His learning theory was published almost at the same time as

Schön’s seminal book and like the latter, Kolb was interested in “the process

whereby knowledge is created through transformation of experience” (p.38).

For both, Schön and Kolb, reflection is key to decoding an experience as it

contributes to sense-making and hence increases knowledge for further action. It is

evident that this had an appeal to the managerial world as problem-solving and

finding new solutions to old, current or anticipated future challenges is a manager’s

daily task. And improving these skills is, of course, in the very interest of any

organization because having an edge to a solution in a business challenge leads to

an advantage over one’s competitors.

One of the differences between Schön’s and Kolb’s understanding of reflection can

be found in looking at the timing of reflection, that is to say when does reflection

actually happen in the learning process. Based on his previous work with Argyris,

Schön introduced us to the concepts of ‘reflection-on-action’ and ‘reflection-in-action’

(Argyris & Schön, 1978). Whereas reflection-on- action is about dealing and thinking

of a prior experience, reflection-in-action is:

On-the-spot surfacing, criticizing, restructuring, and testing of intuitive understanding of experienced phenomena, often it takes the form of a reflective conversation with the situation (Schön, 1983, p. 241-242)

It is basically a single process of simultaneous reflection and action because the

person reflects while performing a task. Interestingly enough, Schön mentiones two

other criteria in the reflective process: “intuitive understanding” and “a reflective

conversation with the situation”. Hence, Schön’s ‘reflection-in-action’ includes both

sense-making from a non-rationale perspective and a sort of not necessarily linear

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dialogue. As Dianne Lennard (2010) points out when looking at Schön’s model

through the eyes of a coach:

An adult can reflect while performing an action and as a result discover mental schema that are no longer appropriate, as well as shift to ones that are more appropriate. This insight recognizes the human ability to engage in a situation before having a full understanding of it. Schon explained that the adult learner or practitioner in the process of reflection-in-action makes use of an extensive repertoire of images, metaphors, and theories, allowing for different ways of framing situations […]. Schon emphasized that reflecting while performing an action permits inventiveness and creativity in the moment. (p. 21)

For Schön, reflections are most of the time triggered when somebody deals with a

unique situation as for example when a routine action leads to an unexpected

outcome. Normally a routine action leads to a routine result. Thus, Schön argues that

the unexpected outcome is not in line with our existing mental map and knowledge

which have up to that point given us certainty of how to act. In a way, we can say that

there is a sort of double uncertainty in this type of reflective practice: first we reflect

on something which is uncertain or ambiguous as we want to find a solution to

resolve this situation, and secondly, the reflective work itself contains elements of

uncertainty as there are intuitive and non-rational parts which have to emerge in

order to get us closer to a solution.

There is an additional field of research and practice which should certainly not go

unmentioned in this initial chapter as it is the underpinning of the work of

organizational practitioners who lean towards, or at least include, the clinical

perspective in learning and change work. The clinical paradigm builds on the

concepts of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, developmental psychology, and systems

theories. (Kets de Vries, 2006). It is particularly the concept of using yourself as an

instrument which adds an additional lens during the reflective process. McCormick

and White define the self in this context as “the emotional, perceptual, and cognitive

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processes that make up a person, and using the self as an instrument means

becoming aware of and using these emotional, perceptual, and cognitive processes”

(2000, p. 50). While focusing on organizational diagnosis, they have developed a

model in which they suggest five ways to use one’s self as an instrument. In their

words, the five important things to do are: “paying attention to your emotional

responses to an organization, and use them to create diagnostic hypotheses”,

“paying attention to one’s initial perceptions”, “understand[ing] your common

reactions and prejudices so that you can reduce bias in your diagnosis”, “postponing

judgment to avoid premature conclusions”, and “paying attention to the fantasies and

images that occur while gathering information about the system” (McCormick &

White, 2000). The added value of this approach in reflective work would be

particularly in two areas which are not as deeply developed in the other two

understandings of reflective work above: to access more data for creating

hypotheses in analyzing the issue to be worked on and to generate more possibilities

for future actions. When it comes to finding new ways of doing things in business,

managers still overly rely on their “positive capabilities” when learning from the past

and planning for the future versus using their “negative capabilities” (Simpson,

French & Harvey, 2002). The concept of negative capability is what McCormick and

White basically refer to when they talk about postponing judgment but is has been

further explored by Simpson et al. in the context of leadership skills as

“the capacity to sustain reflective inaction. This is described as ‘negative’ because it involved the ability not to do something, to resist the tendency to disperse into actions that are defensive rather than relevant for the task.” (2002, p. 1210).

Positive capabilities, on the other hand, refer to abilities that focus on decisive

actions. Their application are more at the core of reflective work as promoted by the

classic educational approach which looks at root causes of a specific problem in

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order to find a solution of how to fix it or find an alternative solution. Swan and Bailey

label this type of reflective work “instrumental reflection” (2004, p. 105) and its

approach is similar to what Petriglieri and Wood understand as the “engineering

approach” of self –reflection:

The engineering approach encourages self-reflection for diagnostic purposes – to compare and contrast oneself with desired (or ‘correct’) behaviors and with others. Self-reflection clarifies individual beliefs and values, increases awareness of one’s dominant leadership ‘style’, assesses one’s key strengths and weaknesses, focuses on desired areas for change, and identifies potential internal and external obstacles to that change. After this initial ‘gap-analysis,’ self-reflection becomes just a part of the review and feedback process as executives practice and gain proficiency in applying the necessary leadership ‘tool.’ Executives are encouraged to reflect before and after they act, both to respond to their present context appropriately and to spot potential areas for further improvement. (2005, p. 144)

Although the Petriglierie and Wood write about self-development and reflection, the

parallels to the approach of Kolb is evident and this “instrumental” or “engineering”

approach to reflective work is what we mainly find in development programs. What

the approaches to critical and clinical reflections add is that they build on the rather

technical training approach by more explicitly including elements of tension,

emotions, and subconscious data to the reflective process. These elements are

crucial in achieving a higher level of reflection and, as argued before, can lead to

better and more innovative solutions. By holding knowing in suspense and not

jumping on first, rational answers to the problem to be solved, participants as well as

facilitators in corporate development initiatives can gain access to additional and

newly emerging data which increase the pool of creative possibilities to solve the

problem they are working on (Andriopoulus & Dawson, 2009; Stein, 2007).

Given the previous elaborations on the various facets of reflection, it has hopefully

become clearer now why theorists and practitioners alike believe that reflective

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practices are not only valuable for personal growth in life situations in general but

also in the work setting. The value of reflection is in its opportunity to find solutions to

real business life challenges. In a world with increasing complexity, the traditional

reliance on acquired knowledge and its mere application is not sufficient any more, -

and neither is an exclusive adherence to instrumental reflections only. Managers

need to find new ways of doing things and to create solutions which are innovative

and out of the box. If the goal is to realize better options of operating and thinking,

which is a prerequisite of competitive advantage and performance improvement, then

it requires to make best use of reflective practices.

The three main strands of reflection – instrumental, critical, and clinical – are all

helpful in practicing reflective work. Taken for themselves only, however, reduces the

data for reflection and can therefore limit the quality and sustainability of the solution.

It would also increase the risk each approach entails when used exclusively. For

example, acting on a hypothesis constructed by using one’s self as an instrument

without verifying it with other tools or methods could simply be wrong and that could

lead to disastrous consequences in the follow-up actions (McCormick & White, 2000).

So in sum, the value of reflective work lies in its contribution to insightful learning and

the generation of better options to act on; the quality of reflective work increases (and

through that automatically its value in turn) if is a triangulated approach, including the

practices common to instrumental, critical and clinical reflections.

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CASE BACKGROUND: THE ORGANIZATION, THE PROGRAM, THE

STAKEHOLDERS

The incidents which I refer to in the context of this thesis mainly stem from one L&D

initiative: a corporate development program run with business unit executive

committee members (BU Excom) in a company which I will call Egrafal. In order to

make possible connections later to the context and culture in which this initiative took

place, I will point out some elements of the organization, the actual L&D initiative and

its stakeholders in this chapter first.

The organization

Egrafal is a market leader in its business which at the time of the intervention had

over 100 BU Excom teams spread over 5 continents in approximately 70 countries.

Attributes which characterize the culture of Egrafal in general are ‘conservative’,

‘slow-moving’ and, applying some of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, it would be seen

as ranging rather high on the index of ‘power distance’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘uncertainty

avoidance’ (Hofstede, 2010).

An extensive organizational analysis around 2003 depicted areas in which Egrafal

had its biggest challenges and that would need to be addressed in order to be more

successful in the future. Based on that and additional interviews, the key behavioral

changes which needed to be improved were summarized under the following

headlines: leading by example, ensuring and accepting accountability, stretching

one’s mindset, engaging in positive conflict, leveraging the multi-local business

model, and acting with a sense of urgency.

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The former company president, who had originally commissioned the organizational

analysis and who was known for his anticipatory vision, ensured that a cultural

change program was set up. Even though there was no apparent burning platform, it

was clear to some that things had to change in Egrafal if it wanted to stay market

leader, and maybe he was also quite aware that this blissful state of operating would

have a limited shelf life.

Until 2008, Egrafal was operating in economically still safe enough waters, and the

challenges were not attacked with much urgency. As one of the top executives in the

company said in an interview without a hint of irony: “[Egrafal] is like the Titanic. We

have a long history of success, we are strong and will remain so”. Too little was he

aware of the metaphor he had used; the attractive outer construction and powerful

size of the Titanic was not only what people in Egrafal were also so proud of with

regard to the company they had built but it was also symbolic for the heaviness and

non-responsiveness of the company to its outside world.

Indeed, the environment has changed since and icebergs have increasingly shown

up, particularly in 2008. As for Egrafal’s voyage: it has managed to stay afloat but has

received some dents and scratches from an increasing landscape of “icebergs” such

as competition from new players entering the market, stronger regulatory policies,

and especially the global economic downturn at a time when it had just made big

financial commitments to finance a big strategic acquisition.

At the time PEAL was launched, Egrafal’s share price had dropped sharply and the

company was struggling financially particularly due to the difficulties of refinancing its

debt obligations. So, the burning platform became visible. As with any urgency to

change due to external pressures, we still saw some “ostrich attitude” for a rather

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long time and employees put their head in the sand, kept on working as before, - a

type of denial that the problems were not also house-made but exclusively stemmed

from the outside world and that they would go away the moment the economy would

change. Later the sense of urgency was then addressed more directly but only

became an open topic of conversation and communication towards the end of 2011.

WHAT DID LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT LOOK LIKE IN EGRAFAL? In general, L&D initiatives had been organized in a rather traditional way and

reflected in their conception and deployment the corporate culture in its

understanding that the important things are pushed from the center, i.e.

headquarters. Knowhow and knowledge have always been highly appreciated in

Egrafal as in many other companies with a technical focus and an engineers’

mindset. Developmental initiatives and technical training were separately run and

managed as there was no common L&D Department. Credentials from leading

business schools as well as connections to certain circles, be they social or

educational, were a definite plus for one’s career advancement, particularly when

these attributes were acquired from a few selected schools in the country of Egrafal’s

origin. Hence, leadership training was seen as a nice-to-have and selecting

employees for attendance was oftentimes more a benevolent act of recognition for

their work and an appreciation of the individual than a focused talent and

organizational development process.

A corporate university had been established in 2004 with the mission to support the

organization in its evolution to become the undisputed leader in their business. The

aim was to act on the initial organizational analysis and support the intended change

with interventions that aimed at behavioral and mindset changes, - hence using L&D

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as a tool for organizational change. As the setup of the corporate university was

during the time when the urgency for the needed change was not widely accepted,

the approach was therefore to use acceptable structures and methods while aiming

at building the desire for change slowly from within. The programs succeeded in

raising at least the awareness that leadership and knowledge go hand in hand to

effect successful management and change. The focus shifted from what can be

called knowledge teaching to experiential learning, the introduction of coaching, and

fostering the creation of networks. Corporate programs were centrally organized and

funded. On the outside, they looked like regular training programs but the selection of

the content focus was put on the desired behavioral changes of selected target

groups so that it would contribute to the intended bigger collective change.

So, this was the overall situation in Egrafal when the L&D initiative I will refer to below

got started. The awareness was there that changes were necessary but the felt

urgency was still not openly shared, there was no visible direction from the top of how

to turn the ship around or what the course of direction would be, and employees held

on to their old beliefs that everything would work out in the end if everyone simply put

a bit more effort into what they were already doing…a bit like on the Titanic when the

party went on while anybody looking outside knew how critical it was to change

direction more adamantly.

The Program

After years of running centrally organized development programs, the opportunity

came along to launch a corporate L&D initiative that was more anchored in the

business unit’s reality. It was an opportunity for both real action learning by focusing

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on actual business challenges and for supporting the local business to become better

themselves at looking outside so that they could tackle the market better. One key to

achieving this was in changing the way the top management team in a business unit

would de facto work together. This program (PEAL) offered some opportunities to

include further best practices of learning which had not been deployed before due to

the inherent limitations of centrally-delivered programs with participants from different

BU’s coming together with diverse learning needs and motivations.

PEAL became the corporate university’s first program to be delivered in a business

unit with intact teams consisting of both the BU general manager and his Excom

members. Before, these two hierarchical layers were always separated in all of their

training which was in line with the underlying corporate culture of high power distance

and the compartmentalized way of responsibilities in the corporate university. Instead

of working in a simulated business environment like in open programs, PEAL

participants worked on their unique business questions which automatically had a

higher sense of urgency for the BU. The program consisted of several modules and

was spread over a time span of almost a year per engaging BU so that it would cover

an internal management cycle in Egrafal.

For any L&D or change practitioner the advantages of this approach are evident as it

is based on the understanding that acquiring, practicing and incorporating new

behaviors in a sustainable way cannot be achieved in a one-spot training program of

a few days, that is has to be on real challenges and that it needs to involve the actual

decision-makers. Participants worked together with their peers which did not only

reduce the effects of staggered learning and application but also increased the

chance for holding each other more accountable for following up and implementing

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their decisions. By doing that, it placed the responsibility on the actual actors and

targets of change. So, by making it a long-term, multi-modular workshop approach

with intact teams, the structural design of PEAL was promising. Also, the motivation

to participate was there. After a pull for this type of program from a general manager

who then spoke highly of PEAL, a few other BU GMs followed quickly, and in the end

there was more demand than budget for this initiative. The main portion of the costs

was covered centrally but parts were also paid for by the business unit directly.

PEAL’s objective was vaguely described as : “This program reinforces a BU Excom

Team’s collaboration as a team and strengthens the team member’s ability to jointly

lead performance in their BU”. It is worth noting that the program sheet did not

mention the expression “performance efficiency” anywhere and we had explicitly put

a note into our communication to managers saying:

Note: This workshop series is not intended for participants to learn about the management cycle or how to actually do a Strategic Review, Performance Plan, O&HR Review or Budget. It is rather on strengthening their collective efficiency when working together on the key milestones of the management cycle. (internal program description of PEAL, emphasis added)

Instead terms around “collaboration” and “improving team dynamics” were used quite

often in the communication. The focus was supposed to be on the functioning of the

team as a group of senior executives who apart from their functional roles are the

main contributors to the overall running and success of a BU. As flexible as the

content arrangement in the modules of PEAL were, there were two elements which

were non-negotiable, namely to work on the topic of customer value proposition

(CVP) in relation to the strategic plan of the respective BU and to work alongside the

company’s annual management cycle which revisits elements of the strategy through

the lenses of marketing, organization and HR, and the budget. Knowledge input was

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intended to stay at a minimum for CVP and this topic was mainly chosen for two

reasons. By infusing the program with a method based on the famous Blue Ocean

Strategy (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005), participants were not only meant to get

acquainted with this approach but also to be “forced” to deal with the outside world in

their strategic thinking. Secondly, by working on a strategic topic with a method

unknown to the vast majority of participants and basically not mastered well by

anybody in the teams, the team would have to learn together to achieve the results,

thus focusing on the team collaboration while the debriefs would not focus on the

economic aspects of their work but on overcoming the potential dysfunctionalities

among the Excom members.

Lastly, any other BU-relevant topic area would be added based on the initial and

ongoing analyses of the consultants with the team members. For example, the

consultants spent two days with the participants in 1-2-1 conversations and witness

some meetings of the BU Excom prior to kicking off the first PEAL module.

Depending on these observations, they would draw up an initial roadmap of how to

make the best use of the three modules. As anticipated, the content came to include

further business topics specific to the respective BU, intercultural and cross-

functional conflict handling, and a few tools such as the MBTI1 for instance.

Besides looking at PEAL’s design approach, advantages and content, it is worthwhile

saying a few things about the context to affect change in the BU Excom. Given the

generally low perception of a sense of urgency, learning anxiety was rather low

among both the BU general managers as well the Excom members. There was

enough trust on the internal client’s side into corporate L&D programs as being more

1 Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a psychometric tool to explain personal preferences in how people

perceive the world and make decisions.

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supportively fostering learning than exposing a lack of skills or competencies in

participants for example. It is also fair to surmise that the BU general managers

signed up for a PEAL journey with the perception of keeping a “good enough

leadership control”. I sometimes explicitly discussed this with them in the contracting

stage while underlining that there would probably be conflicts and tensions emerging

during PEAL, - actually that I would be surprised if they did not happen. Quite often I

used the metaphor “you cannot put other people in the shower without getting wet

yourself” but also assured them that they would get support. This support was

supposed to be done by the second facilitator who usually would have not been

present during modules 2 and 3 and not kept his facilitating role but could have acted

as a coach to him and others for personal reflections which would not find a place in

the collective work.

As Edgar Schein points out:

There are two kinds of anxiety associated with learning: “learning anxiety” and “survival anxiety”. Learning anxiety comes from being afraid to try something new for fear that it will be too difficult, that we will look stupid in the attempt, or that we will have to part from old habits that have worked for us in the past. …none of us would ever try something new unless we experience the second form of anxiety, survival anxiety – the horrible realization that in order to make it, you’re going to have to change. … The basic principle is that learning only happens when survival anxiety is greater than learning anxiety….there are two ways to accomplish that. Either you increase the survival anxiety by threatening people with loss of jobs or valued rewards, or you can decrease learning anxiety by creating a safer environment for unlearning and new learning (Diane Coutu, 2002, p.104)

What was certainly low at the start of PEAL was the level of felt “survival anxiety”

which would have been more conducive to effect change. However, I was not

concerned about this situation as I knew that the design allowed for creating the

necessary psychologically safe space once participants would encounter higher

pressures of learning anxiety when realizing that some goals will not be met and

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some of their basic beliefs of how to achieve these goals would not be confirmed.

Also, the external business context was working in favor of increasing the urgency of

survival. Basically, I was expecting the first stage of change, - what Schein calls

“unfreezing”- (Schein, 2002), to happen during the course of the program.

In sum and with reference to the elaborations on how learning is best effected, PEAL

provided the opportunity to increase and decrease existing anxieties for change to be

effected, and it provided the space for all three elements in the learning process

whereby knowledge input was intended to stay at a minimum while practice and

reflections were supposed to take the main portion of the program.

The stakeholders

Getting participants to accept a leadership program with a greater level of reflection

than in more traditional programs can be a challenge. Getting other stakeholders to

do so as well poses yet another set of challenges. Altogether, there were mainly

three stakeholder groups involved in this change initiative, as in the people or groups

that can affect and/or be affected by this new approach in Egrafal.

For one, there is a stakeholder cluster which can generally be called “corporate HR”.

It would comprise three constituents in this context: hierarchy, peers, and one of my

reports who was in charge of development initiatives for Excom members. I will

exclude this group in the overall observations due to professional confidentiality and

the high probability of personal bias. Let’s just say that introducing something which

deviates from commonly established practice usually triggers certain anxieties on

different levels, and HR is no exception to that. Actually, HR is quite often even more

23

uncomfortable than others with uncertainties as their main focus has historically been

on ensuring consistent processes (payroll, employment negotiations, training,

workforce planning, etc). It seems to me that the role of HR and their beneficial or

harmful impact on true learning warrants further exploration in general as it is seems

at least quite questionable to me whether change and transformational topics should

actually be best placed under the responsibility of this corporate function. Leaving

this topic for future research and putting this stakeholder group aside for the present

work, let’s look at the other two stakeholders instead, namely the consultants and the

participants.

THE CONSULTANTS

Another stakeholder were the external consultants who accompanied the learning

initiative and served the double-role of being the facilitators of the program as well as

the consultant to me. In the first year and a half PEAL was run with two consultants

only (A,B) to which two consultants were successively added (C, D). This was not

only done due to a bottleneck in delivery commitments and an increasing

overdependence on one consultant, who had the lead on the vast majority of

engagements, but it was also done with the intention to increase the polarities in the

team. It was also done at a time when the program was established enough since it

had received sufficiently good press but I perceived PEAL as “too” quiet.

All of them were western males and were chosen for their complementary skills and

personalities so that they could become a team in which one finds knowledge of

leadership development, strategy, intercultural communication and psychology. Like

any group of consultants, they had varying preferences and skills along the

continuum of content to process facilitation (Schein, 1978). As PEAL was addressing

24

both the hard and soft elements in Excom work, all of them were able to deliver each

part of the program but each in turn was stronger in one area than the other which

can be visualized in a rather simplistic chart as follows:

Expertise/Experience Expertise/Experience in “hard” topics in “soft” topics (e.g. strategy, org. structuring etc.) (e.g.team dynamics, human behavior)

D A12 (A2) B C

Lastly, it should be mentioned that they all worked on their own account and were

hence partners and competitors at the same time.

THE PARTICIPANTS

A main stakeholder are certainly the participants which we can also be called internal

client as there was no sponsor of the program until about a year later when a top

executive volunteered for this role. The internal client was hence the Excom team

whereby both the BU General manager and his direct reports, the Excom members,

made up the client.

The Excom teams were made up of anything between 6 to 15 participants in total

including the general manager. The Excom functions always included Finance, HR,

Operations, Marketing/Sales, and then depending on the BU other functions such as

Purchasing, Legal, Supply Chain, etc. With one exception all of the BU’s were

culturally diverse as it is common in Egrafal to have at least on expat on the BU

Excom and especially in emerging countries it is not uncommon to have around half

of the team made up of different nationalities. In total there were 149 PEAL

2 Facilitator A holds a double position here as in relation to D the business expertise is lower (A2) but due to

extensive previous work in Egrafal his knowledge of in-company business topics was rather high (A1).

25

participants over the course of two years. 22 business units from 17 countries started

to engage in PEAL whereby not all of them concluded all 3 modules due to

organizational restructuring and initially non-anticipated moves of BU general

managers.

26

THE STAKEHOLDERS’ VIEW ON REFLECTIONS

In view of the initial goal of the PEAL program, I was interested in finding out how far

we had been able: to establish a good equilibrium between content input, experiential

activities and reflective practices, how this was perceived by the stakeholders and - in

case reflective practices had not been sufficiently established -, what the underlying

reasons could be. I had also hypothesized that stakeholders’ defense mechanisms

towards possible negative impacts on them by a further use of reflective practices, -

particularly the ones taking their techniques from the repertoire of critical and/or

clinical reflections -, could be a reason why reflective work might be underutilized in

the workplace.

I was surprised that my research yielded very limited literature as I had imagined that

some research would have been done on defense mechanisms in participants,

consultants and program directors in the context of the uncertainties created from the

use of reflective practices. The research results were truly disappointing and my own

data collection from PEAL experiences was insufficient because it was at the time not

collected with this thesis in mind and was hence inconsistent as notes were taken

randomly according to the specific situation. Hence, I chose to send a questionnaire

to the consultants and another to the participants which I hoped would give me more

data to work with. I particularly wanted to look at the following areas in the analysis:

How did consultants and participants perceive the time distribution of “Reflection/Debriefs” in relation to “Contents/Input” and “Action/Activities”? Are their perceptions similar or not, and had the space for reflections been created?

Which category of activities did they value most?

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What did they understand by reflection?

Are there any hints in the open text comments that indicate whether reflection had been conducive to or hampering learning? Maybe even direct reference to not having done enough or deeply enough reflections? Are there any indications of possible blockers or defenses against reflective work?

I will share the survey findings for a stakeholder group first and then add personal

perceptions, the latter stemming from my own observations throughout the overall

timespan of PEAL.

THE CONSULTANTS

All four consultants were invited to share their views via nine questions around the

effected learning in PEAL. An adapted version of the questionnaire can be found in

Appendix A. It is worth noting that this questionnaire was administered after PEAL

had stopped running for a while and after I had left the organization. Hence there was

factually no contractual “dependency” between myself and the consultants. All four

knew that I was looking for input for this thesis and they were aware that I wanted to

write about reflective space. Their answers were not anonymous to me. Even though

I had offered to set the questions up via an internet survey tool which would have

guaranteed my not having visibility on who wrote what, each one of them individually

said that they were fine sending their answers directly to me. They did not copy each

other on the answers.

QUESTION 1

The first question was about the consultants’ personal perception of how much time

was spent on the three contributing elements in facilitating learning. On average the

consultants saw the time dedicated to these categories distributed as follows:

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Category Percentage

Content / Input 13.75 %

Action / Activities 55 %

Reflection / Debriefs 31.25 %

There was no remarkable deviation among the four of them with one possible

exception: the consultant who had been running the biggest portion of PEAL

programs allocated 20% to “Content/Input” compared to one respondent’s 5% and

the other two allocating 15%. He is also the one who entered the lowest percentage

on the category of “Reflection/Debriefs”.

QUESTION 2

When asked about the possibly underlying reasons why PEAL had come to run

according to their individual allocation of the percentages, the comments all referred

to so-called rational reasons and mainly focused on the relation between the lowest

and the highest percentage categories (“Content/Input” versus “Action/Activities”). It

is interesting to note that none made any reference to a possible influence of this

time distribution due to their personal preferences, skills or the objectives of the

program. Instead they referred to reasons such as making the program attractive to

the internal client by having a high focus on activities around the BU’s business

topics “since the BU GMs [general managers] understood that if there was little

content, they would get to spend more time on the business topics they wanted to

address” or that there was “a sense from both the group and the facilitators that we

wanted to make good, productive, practical use of the time together, hence wanting

to devote quality time to real, live business topics”.

In all the answers, a comment from one of the consultants stands out:

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“The preponderance of doing [“Action/Activities”] can also be explained by a desire for the Excoms to produce useful business outputs in addition to the learning and this had a price in time. So on many instances instead of cutting a topic at the end of its allotted time irrespective of whether it was complete or not (which is what I would have done in a classical training scenario) I allowed the team to continue until the desired outcome had been achieved – little additional learning was accrued but tangible business outcomes were achieved.”

His comment is in line with those from his peers above who had rationalized the

allocation of time by the Excoms’ wish to make best use of their time. It is in this

comment, however, that we can see more of a conscious acceptance of reducing the

learning impact, and we can surmise that it is the remaining time left for after-action

reflections that he decreased in favor of achieving another goal rooted in action. The

same consultant also wrote that “Although the initial debriefs/reflections could take

upwards of an hour, the Excom members became faster at identifying key points and

as we progressed through the workshops most debriefs became correspondingly

shorter”. At other points in his answers he referred several times to the “action

learning philosophy ie [sic] do, review, backfill with content” as the basic approach in

PEAL. We can infer from these comments that the reflections were basically of an

instrumental nature in order to achieve concrete action improvements. And we can

also conclude that the fact that this technique was acquired by the participants over

time more effectively did not lead this consultant to use the space for other reflective

practices and go deeper but rather made him, together with the Excom, revert to

more experiences (in the example above, an extension of the ongoing activity).

Hypotheses for the reason why he acted that way could be around his own

preference for action, collusion with the internal client and/or a defensive behavior

similar to what Kayes (2004) termed “goalodicy” with a focus on idealizing the goal as

30

an optimal outcome and to justify a continued course of action by experience and

future achievements of a goal.3

QUESTIONS 3, 4 AND … THE REST

Questions 3 and 4 tried to elicit not only a ranking of the consultants’ perception of

where they felt that they had made the biggest impact on the participants’ learning

(question 3) but the setup also provided an open text field for further comments after

the third question and asked in question 4 which of the three categories they like

most when facilitating and why. Hence, it gave the respondents space, - should they

wish to use it- , to reflect, clarify or comment on any assumption or relation that could

exist between the effected learning and their own role as facilitators given their

strengths and preferences. This possibility was either not seen by the respondents or

they chose not to make these links for whatever reasons. Instead their answers for

question 4 were quite difficult to make sense of. Sometimes there was a “split”

perspective taken when answering; for example, one respondent wrote

“In theory, …I like to deploy whatever mix of the three will help me achieve my learning objectives…what I think is appropriate and [what] my client is willing to accept. In practice, I noted that my thoughts regarding what the client was willing to accept leaned more heavily on the “action/activity side…” (emphasis added)

and another consultant answered “As a learner I would rather do [have a preference]

but as a consultant I try and create opportunities for all 3” (emphasis added). And the

latter then elaborated on how difficult it can be to provide content in an innovative

way and ended by writing about “a consultant” when he shared his opinion about the

skillset used in process work. Let’s recall: The question was about which of the three

3 Christopher Kayes differentiates between 3 types of goalodicy (action, experience, and identity goalodicy)

when exploring the consequences of experience absent reflection. We cannot however explore this defensive reaction further as the data points in the consultant’s answer are too limited.

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earlier established sub-categories of learning they personally like the most when

facilitating. So the fact that they answered the questions from these conceptual and

depersonalized angles was quite a surprise to me. One respondent even started his

answer with “If pushed to choose,…”.

As the following count of the consultants’ answers to question 3 shows, their self-

perception about which part of their work was most beneficial to the participants’

learning leans towards “Reflection/Debriefs”.

Answers for level of personal contribution to participants’ learning

Contribution level Learning category

Highest Medium Lowest

Content 1 0 3

Action/Activities 1 2 1

Reflection/Debriefs 2 2 0

The ability of contributing to other’s learning and insights seems to be a given

according to the consultants’ self-perception. Why did they not make use of that skill

in the survey or make a connection between them, the program and this skill? Was it

a matter of preference, - was it maybe something else?

Their answers to the remaining five questions did not give much further insight into

any relation between the initially established three categories of learning and their

own stance towards reflection in the context of their role understanding, performance

as facilitators, connection to other stakeholders, or external factors such as

methodological design of the program. The answers to the last question (What is

your understanding of the term “reflective work” in the context of organizational

development programs?) did not translate into any personal positioning either with

one exception where one respondent replied:

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None. I imagine you are referring to the team’s collective ability to reflect on their own dynamics and performance? Why do you ask?

PERSONAL PERCEPTIONS

One of the areas I wanted to explore through the survey is whether there are any

indications of possible defenses against reflective work. The questionnaire developed

for the consultants involved in PEAL was supposed to provide some answers while

the other inputs would come from other experiences during the program and by using

myself as an instrument in the sense-making.

As demonstrated earlier, there is not much explicit data in the answers provided by

the consultants that could empirically back up any hypotheses which, anyhow, would

have been difficult as one of the limitations of this survey is the low number of

respondents. For a long time I wondered if the rather elusive responses were due to

the questionnaire’s timing, communication and design or if there were maybe other

underlying reasons. No doubt, the questionnaire could be improved though I doubt it

would lead to much more explicit insight. On another level, however, there is certainly

information here, namely that there seemed to be some hesitation by the consultants

to position themselves on these questions. This was indicated by answering some

questions about themselves in the 3rd person, by diverting to participants’ views, or

by giving commonplace answers to what learning or the program is generally about.

The question is what could be the reasons behind that. Normally, resistance includes

some notions of anxiety and even though I could make some fair guesses what the

underlying reasons could be as I know each of them quite well, they would have a

high propensity of bias. Fortunately, I had a side conversation with one of the

consultants that shed some light on the situation.

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A brief review of that exchange: By chance I met Tom (name changed) a few weeks

after I had received the consultants’ answers. He asked how I was getting along with

my thesis. I told him that I was struggling to make sense of the questionnaires and

that I was stuck as the answers did not make much sense to me. I mentioned that I

had tried to read them in any possible way and elaborated on the techniques. I said “I

simply cannot understand that there is so little about reflection in it; the answers are

all over the place” and I shared that I was baffled by the lack of depth and coherence.

Tom leaned back, smiled and said “Honestly, I tried to do my very best on helping

you personally.” I nodded and in an emotional outburst added “But I simply do not

understand why none of you shared anything personal. There is no personal view on

reflective work really; you had plenty of space in the questionnaire. I mean there were

text boxes in it. Nobody, I mean nobody, made a connection between questions 3

and 4 for example. It’s all commonplaces and general blabla …nothing about

reflection.” My disappointment and frustration was quite obvious. He nodded again

and then said: “As I said, I tried my best to help you. But maybe you should not forget

that you are still a client to us“. I rolled my eyes in disbelief saying “Come on you

know quite well that this is not true. I left Egrafal months ago. You and I have no

contractual agreements at all anymore.” He said: “I know but that doesn’t mean that

you are not a possible future client for us.”

So what can be inferred from that conversation? In a way he had said that I, as the

perceived client, did not get anything which would have cast a “bad” light on them.

True, they had not given me the substantial input that I had hoped for and I was

hence not swept off my feet by any impressive input from their side, but they also had

not got themselves “in trouble” as future program facilitators. Quite the opposite, they

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had expanded on their views of the effectiveness of such a program, the energy they

had got out of working with the teams and gave input on how PEAL could be made

even more effective. So, while leaving out any further reference to reflective work,

they had still made themselves look “good enough” in their role as providers. At first, I

was then thinking again that I had chosen the wrong method to elicit meaningful

answers from the respondents. There is always a concern with self-reporting surveys

such as a questionnaire in that it has a high propensity to generate socially desired

responses and that the reason behind that is that people want to look good in front of

themselves and others (Paulhus, 2002). Fair enough. But given that there was

obviously not a basis to engage in some deeper exchange with me, is there not a hint

of what would have also kept them from exploring more in-depth reflections with the

other clients involved?

Considering that all of them saw the BU general manager as the main onsite client4,

therefore also as a possible future client for follow-up work, we can surmise what

would block consultants from engaging in any deeper reflective work with them and

their teams. It is much safer to engage in instrumentally driven reflections than in

reflections borrowing from critical and clinical reflection techniques5. The two latter

approaches would focus more on identifying values and assumptions underlying an

action, deconstructing the taken-for-granteds in it, and would try to get a deeper

insight into the experience and possible solutions by exploring associations, fantasies

and images for instance. This type of work can trigger anxieties related to “not

looking good enough” to a client, a peer or even oneself. If the clients’ expectation is

4 All respondents listed the general manager in Question 8 of the survey.

5 I am referring for instance to various techniques here ranging from written reflective work, co-

development/Intervision (“kollegiale Fallberatung” approx. translation “cooperative case counseling”) to even those borrowing from approaches such as Bohmian dialogue (cf Hartkemeyer & Dhority, 1999) or Balint-based group work (Balint, 1968) .

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to receive content and help in finding quick, tangible solutions, which is what the

consultants’ rationalizations were for sticking to the instrumental debrief approach,

then it might not be wrong to surmise that the client’s expectation is to get an expert

for this. The role of the consultant in the non-instrumental reflective practices is

however far from being that of an expert. He would rather level with the client in a

way that both parties do not know the answer to the problem and are in it together to

explore different perspectives. Not meeting the expectation of the client would

certainly not make one look good as he could view the consultant as lacking

competencies or as being non-cooperative. From a commercial point of view, this is

certainly not a comfortable situation to be in. Hence, parting from the safer practice of

reflection bears a commercial risk. Additionally, if one of the consultants fully caters

to the client’s expectations, chances are high that the other consultant would look

even more unattractive to the client.

Furthermore, it has been stated before that such type of reflective work can cause

anxieties in the consultants themselves as there is a high level of ambiguity during

the reflective work. They would also need to have a high level of competencies of

such type of process work, a high level of self-awareness and the capacity to provide

a holding environment for the tensions arising in the process as well as from the

stress of the participants (Kets de Vries, 2009; Obholzer, 2007; Van de Loo, 2007).

When Sallyanne Miller, a consultant herself, refers in her self-narrative of “holding the

space” to being an experience which can be enriching but also “filled with anxiety,

fear, embarrassment” (2005, p.368), one wonders who would be up to making

themselves so vulnerable, - also in front of another peer who, let’s not forget, is also

a competitor.

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And lastly, not engaging in solution-providing according to the expectations of the

client bears the risk of becoming an outsider, of being considered “the odd one out”

or the one who does “not get what business is about”. In the corporate world there is

a clear preference for doing over thinking. As Stein (2007) writes “We think far less

approvingly of “thinkers” as we do of “doers” (p. 116). Hence, one’s self and worth is

constantly questioned in such an environment.

An additional “commercial” reason to hamper the consultants’ introduction of further

non-instrumental reflective practices in PEAL can be found in the possible

implications of evaluating their work. Again, it goes back to the interaction between

consultants and the program director, a symbolic representative of the organization

as well as the one paying the final bill. The results of evaluations can not only have

an impact on one’s self-esteem but they often valued by providers due to their own

need for positive reinforcement.

When asked about the criteria upon which the consultants evaluated their

performance, one of them stated that “it would be futile to hide that the evaluation

forms were important to me”. I truly thank him for this honest comment as it highlights

a structural blocker in L&D work in general and particularly for the use of reflective

work practices that can generate tensions in participants who are often not able or at

the point of integrating their learning when training evaluation methods are being

applied. There was no explicitly voiced expectation from me or my hierarchy on

achieving a particular satisfaction percentage from participants in PEAL. Personally, I

do not believe much in most ROI measurements of training unless it is for evaluating

purely technical skills trainings and I join the club of L&D peers calling level 1

evaluations (Kirkpatrick, 1984) “ happy sheets” as they do not indicate anything else

but the perception of participants’ personal satisfaction at a limited point in time.

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However, I had indeed made the mistake of running post-modular evaluations. For

one, I had initially wanted to see in how far the most and least beneficially perceived

elements of the program might change over the course of the 9-12 months duration

of one PEAL program, and secondly I had asked participants to share their key

learnings and insights. Apart from these three text fields, I had unfortunately also

included a rating of whether the program objectives were achieved and how they

rated the consultants’ work. Naively, I had not thought about the impact of this on the

consultants at that point. I surmise that I was myself dealing with the tension of

making this program a success and needed to have some confirmation that the

program was off to a good start. Also, I perceived a high risk of this new program

approach (it basically started to change the business model of the corporate

university) to be capsized by my superiors if I did not have some evaluation data to

provide them. Ideally, I should have waited a year before evaluating the program. It

was in my role as manager that I handled corporate politics and I only realized very

late in the process that this was to the detriment of learning. I remember when I had

seen a 5 out of 5 evaluation for a consultant after a module, I went back to him

sharing that such a result does “not make me happy at all” as it is too good and made

me wonder in how far he had just provided what participants felt happy with. It was

already too late to realign the consultants on this, something that I had said at the

beginning of our working together but had not repeated and reinforced regularly. So,

to state the obvious: consultants, - like any other human being-, thrive on positive

feedback. It reinforces self-esteem, confidence and also the hope for future

engagements.

Rigg and Trehan describe a similar experience from the consultants’ perspective in

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an article which interestingly is titled “Critical reflections in the workplace: is it just too

difficult?”:

There is an inherent contradiction between the pull to keep the customer satisfied and the conception that the organization change needs disruption to the existing order (i.e. dis-order, dis-organisation and disturbances), which inevitably cause some disturbances amongst individual members. How this is constructed and managed by the client, sponsor, participants, facilitators and academic manager will affect which direction will prevail. (2008, p.380)

A clear lesson for myself, and I would think any fellow L&D practitioner, is that any

type of ROI expectations must be challenged and discussed with all stakeholders

involved in the process in order to engage in more meaningful work and in order to

work with critical reflections in a performance and measurement-driven environment

such as a corporate organization.

The previous elaborations have highlighted underlying reasons of why it is difficult to

increase learning via reflective practices. Sometimes it is more due to system-

inherent factors such as the nature of stakeholder dynamics (client, provider,

hierarchy) and commonly established procedures (e.g. L&D evaluations on ROI), and

sometimes it is more due to subconscious defenses which are harder to elicit. It is in

the small encounters that the latter usually shine through and when using one’ self as

an instrument is helpful in formulating hypotheses. I just briefly referred earlier to the

moment when I felt at unease with the program as I considered it “too quiet”. It was

an accumulation of many small things: evaluation sheets were excellent, BU general

managers told me that the program is great and nothing needs to be changed,

consultants telling me the same, me not getting a feeling for what is going on during

a session, having discussions with consultants about secrecy versus confidentiality,

futile attempts to set up post-PEAL reflections together, two futile attempts of getting

the consultants together for our own reflective work and learning, etc. I had a hunch

39

that there was something and was not sure whether it was a cover-up or collusion or

whatever but I was wondering where the tension was that would usually emerge and

become visible or felt inside and outside of the stakeholders involved. As Kayes

points out:

Countless reasons exist for why organizations fail to learn, but all explanations may share a common element: a system that lacks reflection lacks the tension essential for learning to occur. One understudied mechanism that limits learning in organizations lies in the mechanisms that organizational members use to justify a continued course of action” (2004, p. 71-72).

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THE PARTICIPANTS

THE SURVEY SETUP

For this survey a sample was selected from the total number of 149 employees who

had participated in PEAL. Only business units that had gone through the full cycle of

3 modules were selected, and among those, only participants who had participated in

all 3 modules. The reason for this is the assumption that feedback from someone

who has not been through the whole process would rely on a limited experience and

not base his or her evaluation on the overall process and perception of the program.

This led to a possible total of 93 respondents of whom 9 participants had left Egrafal

and thus were not sent a questionnaire so that there was a pool of 846 managers as

potential respondents coming from 14 different BUs. The questionnaire was set up

anonymously, i.e. participants did not identify themselves by name or were tracked.

The invitation to participate was set up in a way that it underlined their voluntary

contribution to my personal studies and that any findings would not be brought back

into the organization. I also pointed out that I was not an active employee of the

company any more. The survey was run in a time span of 3 weeks with 2 reminders.

The final dataset consisted of 40 responses from 35 men (87.5%) and 5 women

(12.5%), 8 BU general managers (20%) and 32 BU Excom members (80%), age

groups between 31 to over 50 in the whole sample, 19 different nationalities.

6 Note: As the questionnaires were sent without receipt confirmation function, it is not clear how many of the

possible 84 respondents actually received it. In the statistical data we asked among some other demographic data for the respondents’ nationality and as there is a low number of certain Middle Eastern respondents, there is high probability that one BU did not receive the initial mail.

41

PARTICIPANTS’ RESPONSES

When asked how PEAL participants saw the time allocation during the program

between the three initially established categories, the result was as follows:

Content/Input: 27.4% Action/Activities: 43.5% Reflection/Debriefs: 29.1%

In comparison with the consultants’ answers, the category in which the answers

above vary is on “Content/Input” as participants perceived more time being spent on

that category (27.4 vs 13.75% from consultants). They were also asked to confirm

the categories in which they learned and rate them in the order in which they had an

impact on learning:7

Question

Category

In which category did you learn sth for yourself. Tick all that apply.

Rate the categories in the order in which you had most learning for yourself (not what you liked most)

...in the order in which you think they were most meaningful for your Excom team’s learning ticks no ticks

Content/ Input

47.5 % 52.5 % Highest : Medium: Lowest:

15 % 25 % 60 %

Highest : Medium: Lowest:

10 % 35 % 55 %

Action/ Activities

80 % 20 % Highest : Medium: Lowest:

32.5 % 42.5 % 25 %

Highest : Medium: Lowest:

37.5 % 35 % 27.5 %

Reflection/ Debriefs

95 % 5 % Highest : Medium: Lowest:

52.5 % 32.5 % 15 %

Highest : Medium: Lowest:

52.5 % 30 % 17.5 %

From these answers we can conclude that participants believe that

“Reflections/Debriefs” contributed the most to their learning during PEAL. While 95%

of the respondents learned something from reflective work, slightly more than 50%

did not check “Content/Input” at all for their learning. In line with this, they also found

“Reflection/Debriefs” most meaningful for both their own as well their peers’ learning

7 Note that for the two rating questions, the questionnaire tool was set up in a way that respondents had to

rank all three categories and could not leave out one.

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as indicated by the 52.5% versus “Action/Activities” with 32.5% and 37.5 and

“Content Input” with 15% and 10%.

Moreover, in an additional multiple choice question 75% of the respondents wrote

that corporate development programs like PEAL should include more space for

collective and/or individual reflections whereas 10 participants answered in the

negative out of which 3 however added the comment that there was already sufficient

room for reflections during the overall program.

The above indications about the value and impact of reflections seemed promising to

gain a good understanding from the respondents’ qualitative comments on what they

understand by reflection and in how far it was conducive to their learning. The

following questions and requests in the survey aimed at shedding some light on that:

What do you understand by the word “reflection”?

Please share an incident when you had an “insightful” moment or experience during the duration of the program (e.g. you had an insight about the reasons why something works or nor, or how it could work, you realized something about yourself, about somebody else, etc.)

In relation to question 12: if you had no such moment of insight, do you think this did not happen due to external factors (e.g. program design, group composition, facilitators, etc), or internal, personal reasons?

In relation to Questions 12, if you had no such moment of insight, what is your best guess/assumption/hypothesis of why this did not happen?

In relation to Question 12, if you had such an insightful moment, do you think it was triggered by something externally (…) and/or do you think it was triggered by something inside of you?

In relation to Question 12, if you had such an insightful moment, what is your best guess/ assumption/hypothesis of why this happened?

In relation to Question 12, if you had such an insightful moment, was there room or space during your program to share this insight or experience of it?

From the participants’ view, the mental and cognitive aspects in reflective work

mainly characterize their understanding of what reflection is. For example, 15

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respondents referred to “thinking” as an important element of reflections, a few of

them saw it even as more or less the only part. 16 respondents specified that

reflection to them is something like a post event analysis. Overall, the answers

indicate an understanding which is in line with our previous definition of

instrumentally-driven reflections as a few quotes will show:

“reflection: consider what happened in the past, review the present, set targets for the future.” “Thinking about something, reviewing all the data around, and defining an action plan.” “Looking back at how I/we did things, analyzing what was good and what could have been done better.” “A self analysis of the steps taken in solving an issue, what went well, what didn’t, what to do now, what to do next time….”

All in all, the rational - oftentimes sequential - element of reflections for finding

solutions was at the core in the majority of the respondents’ answers. It cannot be

excluded that some of the respondents understood their thinking to include also a

non-rational more messy part but it is not for certain. For example, 2 participants

listed “introspection” in their answers, one defined reflection as “thinking inside

myself”, another mentioned among other things “’talk’ to myself” and there was one

more respondent who wrote “First thing that comes to mind is looking into and at

one’s self and self-experiences”.

When asked to share an “insightful moment”, 4 respondents said that they could

either not remember such a moment or that it did not happen. The remaining 36

answers mainly highlighted moments in which the participants gained a better

understanding about themselves. This was mainly achieved through organized 1-2-1

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feedback sessions or the MBTI discussions. A few referred to a better understanding

of their colleagues or running effective meetings with the team.

The main reasons for having had an insightful experience during PEAL was triggered

for the vast majority of participants externally though none of them elaborated on the

differentiation between external and internal reasons as set up in the question itself.

“Facilitators’ contributions” was mentioned 18 times and “program design” was given

15 times as the cause. These were examples given for external reasons in the

question and it seemed that oftentimes respondents just picked these concrete terms

for their answers. Three respondents indicated that their insight was brought about by

themselves as they were working on their personal awareness during that time.

The participants’ assumption of why they came to have an insightful moment still

highlighted external factors such as facilitators, program design, time and space, and

7 respondents did not formulate any guesses at all. Nevertheless, there is a small

increase in looking at the personal engagement and prerequisites for reflections.

Participants mainly hypothesized about their personal readiness (4), increasing

confidence and being allowed to reflect (2), and their interest to learn (2).

Lastly, out of the 36 participants who had elaborated on their insightful moments,

approximately 90% confirmed that PEAL had provided the space and time to share

their insight or experience of it.

The answers of the four respondents who did not have an insightful moment during

PEAL do not provide much information on the topic of reflections. Three of them

wrote that they do not remember such an insight taking place while two of them said

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that the program was simply too long ago and the other referred to the Excom team

as a blocker. The fourth respondent clearly said that he had no insight and this was

due to the fact that there was no time to “unwind in order to get into a state of

creativity” and that PEAL’s location was not far enough away from the office.

Interestingly enough, the latter was a BU general manager, ergo the decision-maker

for the location of the program.

PERSONAL PERCEPTIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS

What can we learn from participants’ answers to the questionnaire? Generally,

participants see the role that reflections played in the program as conducive to their

learning. They seem to value an instrumental approach to reflective work, and

consider this approach as the main contributor to learning effected during the

program.

The text comments from participants suggest that reflections have been helpful for

their learning as well. They do not, however, provide much further information on

whether there were possible blockers or defenses against reflective work. There was

an additional “comment” box at the end of the survey which was put right after the

last question on whether corporate development programs should include more

space for collective and / or individual reflections so it was intentionally left vague

what their comments could focus on: the previous question or anything else, which

they had not mentioned yet or wanted to explain further in addition to some of their

earlier entries. Roughly 50% of the respondents made an entry here of whom almost

half just made a praising comment on the program and 10 participants mentioned

something about reflections, mainly verbalizing their decision on reflective space in

the question prior to the comment box. It is among these comments that one answer

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caught my eye. It was by far the longest entry in any of the text fields in the

questionnaire. It also expressed thoughts – in a critically reflective manner-, on the

organization, its problem to create a learning culture and made a link to the use of

reflection. I think it is fair to say that this participant reflected more from a meta-level

than any of his peers. Before the respondent actually went on to elaborate on the

challenges of creating a corporate learning culture, his comments are as follows:

I am not sure that Managers in Egrafal [name changed] actually like the reflection piece. Hence, I dont [sic] think they saw that as the main learning piece. Why? Well, firstly, simplistically, the people we recruit like to do. Secondly, reflection is emotive, it is unconfortable [sic], it requires feedback, we are not good at difficult conversations. The team did not like or see any value in the feedback sessions – says more about them than the process. My read is that they find reflection a sign of weakness not strength. White, middle aged males have been taught to bottle it up – ‘Be a man’. Consequently, exposing weakness is seen as a weakness not a strength. It is not seen as a learning process. (respondent # 30)

In this respondent’s comment we can see an allusion to several blockers that could

have hampered a further increase of non-instrumentally focusing reflections in PEAL,

just like in any other corporate learning program. A main point, he highlights is the

perceived vulnerability in doing reflective work. Participants would try to avoid

experiencing such vulnerability because it basically generates tensions. For instance,

there would not only be the rational but also the emotive side of sense-making, two

different and oftentimes conflicting sources in one’s reflections. Indeed unless one

approaches reflections more through approaches of critical and clinical practices,

participants can control this unsettling experience quite well. He is the only

respondent who realized and voiced it.

When the respondent referred to Egrafal’s managers as having issues “with difficult

conversations”, there is certainly an allusion to the personal challenge for an

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employee in engaging in such discussions but I was also reminded of the term

“positive conflict” which was identified in the organizational analysis mentioned earlier

in this work as an area to work on in Egrafal . According to his comment, and in line

with the cultural analysis of the company, the overall culture in the organization does

not seem to be conducive to engaging in work practices which could surface anything

close to conflicting views. However, the inherent tension that arises when having

opposing views, or even those that seem to have no common ground at first sight, is

a crucial element in deeper reflections and their integration is exactly what will lead to

new insights.

Finally, this respondent alludes to another cultural element which can hamper some

reflective work, namely an exaggerated masculinity. According to Hofstede (2010)

this dimension includes a high level of assertiveness under the general concept of

competitiveness. Such an understanding of one’s own functioning neither embraces

the co-existence of seemingly contradicting information nor the playfulness to explore

different associations or options which, again, are crucial to in-depth reflective work.

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CONCLUSIONS

My hypothesis at the outset of this work was around the assumption that certain

stakeholders involved in corporate learning initiatives hold and display defense

mechanisms towards reflective work in general and probably more so when those

reflections are of a more critical or clinical nature. A corollary speculation was that

this would result in a stronger focus on both educational content input and activities.

By looking at a corporate learning initiative and the reactions of consultants as well

as participants with regard to the contributing elements of learning, some of the initial

assumptions could not be empirically substantiated. Quite the opposite, there is a

high congruence between both stakeholder parties on the value of reflections and

they both saw reflections as an integral part of their work accounting for

approximately one third of the program’s time. What has emerged from studying the

answers of the respondents, however, is that their understanding of reflective work is

mainly instrumentally-oriented. It is in the sense of action learning reviews and rather

technical debriefings according to Kolb’s reflective stages of the experiential learning

cycle: review of the concrete experience with questions like “What happened, when,

where, with whom, why?”, a review of reactions to the experience (with a focus on

the rational, observable and tangible), a discussion of concepts that can be

supported by “factual” reviews, and lastly some planning for future action which

incorporates the learning obtained (1984). It is an example of a strong action

orientation which seems to be preferred by participants and consultants alike when

working together. Given all the advantages and the good results that this approach

brings forward, an over-reliance on instrumental reflections still limits the potential of

achieving deeper and more sustainable insights. It seems to me fair to conclude that

there was an overutilization of the instrumental approach in the PEAL program.

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Some responses in the surveys and observations during PEAL indicate a high

probability that various defenses in the stakeholders, in the dynamics among them,

and in the system contributed to reverting to instrumentally driven reflective practices

and that this was at the cost of possible gains from more critical or clinical reflections.

A longer field study examining the purpose and function such an adherence to

instrumental reflections would serve in Egrafal, might probably bring forth more

deeply-rooted defenses inherent in the organization itself.

The common thread through all observations on PEAL and the bigger system, i.e. the

organization, manifests itself in an avoidance of uncertainty and tension. Protecting

oneself from ambiguity, suspense and stress is, of course, a very natural and human

tendency. Nevertheless, its consequences for further development, - for individuals,

teams or the organization alike-, are far from promising to effect a step-change.

Evidently, survival anxiety was not high enough in PEAL and the company until

shortly before the end of the program. So the ships stayed on course. They did not

run into an iceberg but one wonders in how far there was an openness to use the

time to develop the agility needed to react better towards external changes coming

up in the business environment or how it will be able to achieve innovative solutions.

Post PEAL, there were restructurings, new plans to shift the business model, and

many other initiatives in the organization. These are all the right efforts to unfreeze

the system. An element that seems still to be missing, - and that is a very personal

view-, is the lack of engagement in practicing deeper reflections due to a perceived

identity threat. When I invited the consultants to learn and practice techniques of

deeper reflections, there was avoidance. When the participants had the time and

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space to go beyond technical reflections, there was no active pursuance of it though

one can argue that they cannot do what they might not be aware of. But the point

remains that – with a few rare exceptions - critical and clinical reflective practices

have not been embraced by the stakeholders of PEAL. On the consequences for the

organization, Kayes underlines what I pondered upon earlier:

When a system lacks reflection it tends to stay the course it has already begun. [Sic: With] Absent reflection, learning is not likely to happen, no matter how much new experience the system generates. A system that lacks reflection becomes an identity-centric system driven by generating new experiences. An identity-centric system moves towards order at the expense of tension. (p. 71)

The lesson to take away for any L&D practitioner from this is in the old saying that

you can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink….unless it is thirsty or

understands the water’s contribution to staying strong, becoming stronger or staying

alive.

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APPENDIX A

The following questionnaire that was sent as a word document to the consultants.

The name of the L&D program has been changed.

Please think back at your whole experience of PEAL, its 3 modules as well as the time between modules, and respond to the following points: 1. According to your own perception, how much time was spent in the following categories of

learning during PEAL? Please distribute 100% accordingly.

Contents/Input ___% Action/Activities ___% Reflection/Debriefs ___% 2. What do you think are the underlying reasons for why the programs were run according to the

distribution indicated by you above? 3. Please rate the categories in the order in which you think you contributed the most to the

learning of the participants (Note: if you think that your personal strength is in making people understand new concepts such as PPO, Customer Value Proposition, MBTI, etc, you would rate “content” the highest and give it a 1, if you think that your personal strength is the facilitation of a reflective discourse but you still think that you were more effective in contributing to participants’ learning through teaching or explaining a model, you would also put “content” first, So the question is about your personally perceived contribution on the learning and not on where you consider your skills the highest)

__ Content __ Action/Activities __ Reflection/Debriefs Any further comment?

4. Which category of the above 3 do you personally like the most in the deployment of learning

initiatives? And why? 5. What are the criteria upon which you evaluate your performance as a facilitator of PEAL?

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6. Would you please describe who the stakeholders were for you in this program and why you

saw them as stakeholders? 7. What are your personal evaluation criteria of whether the programs were successful or not? 8. What could have made PEAL more successful from a methodological design and delivery point

of view? 9. What is your understanding of the term “reflective work” in the context of organizational

development programs?

Thank you very much for having shared your personal views on the questions above with me.