The reflection capability

The reflection capability

Individuals continuously learning

Reflection is a team’s ability to learn from its work and improve its understanding of the task. The reflection capability can be described as the process where the team extracts its members’ individual knowledge and integrates it. This process aims to serve two purposes. First, to get a high utilization of everyone’s unique knowledge and skills (think: what percentage of the individual’s knowledge becomes available to the team), and second, to achieve a dynamic team process that enables shared knowledge to grow beyond its sum, rather than diminish it (think: is the sum of the team’s knowledge more than the participants’ accumulated knowledge?). Thus, reflection is critical to improve a team’s ways of working and the behaviors related to it.

When a team has a reflective capability, it means that they can coordinate individual learnings into collective problem-solving processes. It is the ability to reflect about and learn from specific situations and turn this into coordinated collective behavior, achieving better results than any single team member could have. Individuals in a team will always be at different reflective levels, some work with the problem definition while others focus on problem solving.

Team reflection improves the problem setting and problem solution

The dynamics of these situations can either result in a valuable discussion that takes the team forward and gradually helps improve both the problem setting and the problem solution, or they could limit the team by suggesting a concrete solution too fast. A positive example of this could be someone in the team suddenly breaking the thought pattern in a discussion and taking it into a new problem setting, which in turn can support problem solving. More concrete examples are when someone asks questions such as “are we discussing the right problem right now?”, “do we have the right perspective?” or “do we need to take a step back to solve this problem?”. Thus, reflection is about continuously calibrating a team’s perspective. The person taking the initiative to reflect can vary and it does not have to be someone’s role.

In the same way, a discussion of the problem setting that gets stuck in complexity can be broken by someone suggesting a concrete solution or action. In both cases, it is the interruption of the current patterns that have a positive effect. This works when the team can handle to be coordinated, to move together and take the process forward.

However, interruptions are not always positive. In other situations, they can break a discussion pattern that would have had to continue for the team to come together. In these cases, the interruptions are disturbing and break the communicative dynamics of the team.

There is no specific sign for when a situation will or will not benefit from an interruption. It is a matter of balancing between advocating for change and containing the team’s ability to listen to each other. The sensitivity to evaluate this is up to the team members and attention must be directed to the tensions and atmosphere in the team.

Author

Influence Labs

CI Model Research

Developing Collective Intelligence is an approach to share and integrate knowledge using self-navigation and reflection to achieve commonly defined goals.