Most of us carry a particular assumption about reflection, even if we haven’t ever stopped to examine it. Lets start with a contrast.
For example, action is what happens in the noise and pressure of organisational life, whilst thinking (or reflection) is what happens when you step away from it. You clear the calendar, find some quiet, and return to the work with a clearer head.
It’s a reassuring idea, and a wholly inadequate one. The problem with this picture is it assumes thinking occurs somewhere above or outside any situation, in a kind of cognitive ‘clean room’.
If only.
What research in phenomenology has understood since at least the mid-twentieth century is that cognition is not a detached process hovering above experience; it is an engagement with it, shaped at every point by the body in that lived experience.1
The executive who steps out of a difficult team meeting to think ‘objectively’ about the situation cannot really extricate themselves from its grasp. Whether they acknowledge or not, they are thinking from within their history with those people, those relationships, those accumulated tensions. The angle or perspective you’ve assumed doesn’t disappear simply because you don’t notice it.
This matters for leadership development because the ‘retreat’ model shapes program design in ways that are rarely made explicit. If reflection is something that happens away from the action, development becomes something that happens away from work: off-sites, structured withdrawal, protected space. When participants return to the workplace, very little transfers. And the reasons for this gap are rarely examined with any genuine rigour.
We aren’t suggesting distance is never useful. What we are highlighting here is that we’ve mistaken a useful occasional tactic for a general account of how thinking works.
There’s a more accurate account of how leaders think under pressure, and it has nothing to do with stepping back. The distinction that changes things here is the difference between reflecting after the fact and maintaining the capacity to notice, reframe, and adjust in real time, while something is actually happening.2 David Schön’s ‘skilled practitioners’ don’t primarily learn by stepping back. They learn by staying present to what’s unfolding and adapting as it shifts. This is less idealistic than the contemplative ideal, but it describes something any capable practitioner knows about their own best work. When you’ve been at something long enough, the thinking and the doing stop feeling like separate activities.
There is another body of research on how people perform complex tasks that management theory often sidesteps.3 Take the planning model many of us take as self-evident: develop a clear picture, form a strategy, execute. The problem this model surfaces is that it describes almost no skilled human activity accurately.
Effective performance is better characterised as ongoing responsiveness to what the situation keeps producing.
Plans are real and useful, but they function as resources for navigation, not scripts for execution. Leaders who insist on complete analysis before moving tend to be the ones who move too late, or in ways that no longer fit the problem they thought they were solving.
There is also a relational dimension here worth pointing out. Thinking is not a solitary activity, even when it looks like one. The assumptions we bring to any situation, the things we notice and the things we screen out, the frames we reach for before we’ve consciously chosen them: all of this is shaped by the communities we belong to, the conversations that have formed us, the histories we carry into every room and every interaction. Teams that have learned to think together, not simply share information but genuinely interrogate assumptions in real time, develop something no individual member possesses on their own. That capacity can’t be acquired in a singular workshop. It must be practised in the work itself, through the repeated experience of thinking carefully in front of, and with, each other.
And then there’s the ethical dimension to consider. If thinking is participation rather than retreat, then thought carries consequences before it even becomes a declared decision. The executive working through options in their head is already making moves. The team that reflects on a problem without noticing who isn’t in the room has already tilted the conversation, with real impacts on what gets decided and whose interests shape it.
The opposition between the life of the mind and the life of action goes back a long way, but it misrepresents both.4
Genuine reflection requires encounter with the world. Meaningful action requires ongoing thought.
Teams (and their leaders) who grasp this aren’t more withdrawn or more reckless; they are more attentive to what is already happening.
The practical implication is less about adding reflection time to the calendar and more about developing a different relationship with action itself. Not slower, not more removed from the situation, but more awake to it. Teams who maintain this kind of attention while remaining fully engaged are, in a meaningful sense, reflecting constantly. They are not always waiting for quiet time away from their colleagues to think about the work. They are thinking in it, as it unfolds, and treating the quality of that attention as the work itself.
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References
- Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge.↩
- Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books. ↩
- Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication. Cambridge University Press. ↩
- Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.
PG