Donald Schon, in his book The Reflective Practitioner, points out that
the drive for instant action appears to come from public school
classroom learning, where teachers are bound by a bureaucratic organization
that discourages time to reflect. "If the teacher must
somehow manage the work of thirty students in a classroom, how
can she really listen to any one of them?" Thus, in the schoolroom,
learning becomes synonymous with absorbing information dished
out by an "expert," and everyone, both student and teacher, moves
as quickly as possible so as to absorb as much as possible.1
In an organization, the manager is the "expert." If there is no
authority figure to turn to, then successful professionals (according
to Schon) must develop the capacity to work in continuous cycles of
pausing to develop hypotheses, acting, and pausing to reflect on the
results. Schon calls this "reflection-in-action" and talks about it as a
characteristic of professionals who are successful learners. "Phrases
like 'thinking on your feet,' 'keeping your wits about you,' and
'learning by doing,' " he wrote, "suggest not only that we can think
about doing but that we can think about doing something while doing
it."
But many American managers are too busy running to "think on
their feet." For most of us our internal pictures about the nature of
our work say that activity is good, that a manager's job is to keep
things moving. Hanover's Bill O'Brien calls this the "chain gang"
model of management: "Most managers seem to think of themselves
like the boss of the chain gang: 'the speed of the boss sets the speed of
the gang.' "
It is easy to blame this incessant activity and lack of time for
reflection on organizational pressures but research is beginning to
suggest otherwise. We have conducted numerous experiments, as
part of research in developing managerial microworlds (Chapter 17), to
study managers' learning habits. Surprisingly, these experiments show
that even when there is ample time for reflection and the facility for
retrieving all manner of relevant information (in the form of a
computer-based simulation, in which the managers play out their reallife
roles), most managers do not reflect carefully on their actions.
Typically, managers in the experiments adopt a strategy, then as soon
as the strategy starts to run into problems, they switch to another
strategy, then to another and another. In a simulated four-year
exercise, managers may run through three to six different strategies,
without once examining why a strategy seems to be failing or
articulating specifically what they hope to accomplish through a