Reflective Practice

January 17, 2011 By rob 6 Comments

Reflective Practice is defined by Donald Schon as “the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning”.

All the kids are doing it

And by kids I mean masters. Aside from the fact that prominent thinkers such as Schon, John Dewey and Jean Piaget have been talking about it for decades. I think I first noticed it when reading Dale Carnegie several years ago. He has a section in his book where he talks about learning a key element of productivity from a Wall Street Banker who religiously conducted a weekly review every Saturday. His family knew and gave him the time. It was a key to his success.

“Sharpen the Saw”, is one of the ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ that Stephen Covey talks about. Think about that. Covey boiled years of reading and research down to 7 Habits (yes, I know there are 8 now) and one of them is about taking the time to reflect, redraw and rejuvenate. Seems important to me.

These guys are too old for you? OK. How about David Allen, who also recommends a weekly review to maintain a ‘mind like water’? Oh, and my personal hero, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton’s Touchpoints Approach (who is the youngest older person I know), maintains that Reflective Practice is key to growing as a professional and growing in your interactions.

I reflect all the time

I have always, quite naturally reflected on situations, circumstances, interactions, accomplishments, and of course, failures. I’m a bit of an associative thinker and I’m sure there’s a touch of “SQUIRREL” tucked in there somewhere. So, I might begin the process of reflecting on an interaction and end up thinking about what it would be like to ride a segway on an ice hockey rink.

Natural is fine, but is it doing anything for you? Natural abilities are wonderful, but what could they be in the hands of a master, someone who is willing to hone and develop those abilities. The question is, how do you hone your abilities to reflect?

Ask the right questions – Framing

These may not be the right questions for you, but I’m going to offer 5 questions here to share with you one possible frame for Reflecting. I have come to understand that for me, reflection has to be intentional, deliberate and framed to keep me focused in order to extract meaning. This means that I have to ask myself the right questions.

What successes occurred this week and how can you build on them?
What struggles did you encounter this week and what can you learn from them?
What remains unfinished from this?
What resources do you need?
How will you approach next week differently?

Don’t allow yourself to give quick and simple answers. Think about your interactions small and large. Think about your relationships with your employees, your clients, your customers. Dig deep and look for the unexpected and overlooked interactions that may just help you get better.

What questions would help you frame your reflections?

Filed Under: Business, Productivity, Reflective Practice, Work

Three Words – 2011

January 8, 2011 By rob 2 Comments

I’ve been a bit busy over at Human Business Works since I joined in August of 2010 and we are working hard to grow peoples capabilities. The real thrust behind everything we do over there is about looking for opportunities to lift people up, provide opportunities for them to learn, connect, share and be successful.

The work that I am doing there is somewhat new to me in that it’s a different industry but it is also very familiar to me. My prior work was working with children and families where I was supporting the growth of professionals who serve them and creating environments for them to be successful. Interestingly enough I still find myself doing that in this role, not the children and families part, but supporting the growth of professionals. We’re also creating environments for people to grow and be successful. The big difference, is that the folks I work with and I, don’t necessarily share a common language, we have to discover it. I have a lot of listening to do. I have a lot of learning to do.

This is the thrust of my Three Words for 2011.

Frames – In my work with the team at HBW I am going to be focusing on frames. Frames are necessary to build. They help us to build a common understanding of our business goals, our relationship. Frames support the structure of what we’re building. Frames provide the parameters in which we are working and serve to outline our mutual expectations of not only what we’re trying to accomplish, but how.

Fire – Passion and execution are the elements of this word for me in 2011. Passion drives our organization. Just spend 5 minutes with Estrella Rosenberg at 501MissionPlace, Joe Sorge at Kitchen Table Companies, or Josh Fisher our new Creative Director and you will get a sense of the passion and fire I’m talking about.
My role is to recognize it, find ways to tend to it and support its purpose. That’s where execution comes in. A useful purpose for fire is used to forge. Fire is built on passion is a great first step, but we can’t loose site of how to use it.

Masters – I want to spend 2011 learning from Masters. I have the good fortune of working with one of them. Actually, I have the good fortune of working with many of them. In 2011 I want to spend time getting to know more people, sitting with folks, listening and learning from Masters.

I learn a ton in a five minute conversation with Jon Swanson or by reading one of his posts. Part of this will be reading, listening and watching to find masters. You can bet that this applies to appreciating the mastery that emerges from my children and my wife.
I also have an ongoing list of folks I’d like to meet in 2011. I bet you’re on it.

So, there you have it. My Three Words for 2011. Stay tuned and thanks for stopping by

A note and preview: One of the Masters who I’ll be talking a lot about here is world renown pediatrician, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, who is a master at relationships and a master of observation (I quite think the two are connected).

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Be Helpful

May 28, 2010 By rob 3 Comments

I saw this Tweet from Tom Peters the other day and the first line struck me immediately. Being helpful is something I think about often and in fact train people to consider often in their work in supporting families through something called the Touchpoints approach.

Touchpoints

Dr. T. Berry Brazelton is a pediatrician and the Founder of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center in Boston. Dr. B’s approach to working with children and families (Touchpoints) is based on relationship and focusing on the strengths of the parent. As a practitioner working with families; a pediatrician, a nurse, home visitor, teacher or other family service professional, Touchpoints asks us to be mindful of the family system we are entering. It asks us to join collaboratively, rather than prescriptively.

Assumptions

In order to accomplish this, Touchpoints asks us to operate from certain Assumptions which for many in the field of early childhood education or family service might be challenging. The Touchpoints Assumptions are:

The parent is the expert on his/her child
All parents have strengths
All parents want to do well by their child
All parents have something critical to share at each developmental stage
All parents have ambivalent feelings
Parenting is a process built on trial and error

These Assumptions ask us to reflect on our own practice and imagine what a relationship with a family would look like if we truly operate from these Assumptions.

Strengths, Collaboration and Offering Advice

If we simply look at and think about operating from the Assumption “All Parents Have Strengths”, it begs us to discover what those are. The only way we can discover those strengths, is by engaging in a relationship with them. If we assume that this person ‘has strengths’ and, to go one step further, that they “have something critical to share” with us, all of a sudden, the relationship is less about what advice I have for you as a parent, but about discovering together what will be helpful to you based on your strengths, your own knowledge, your expertise.

So, when a parent says that their child is not sleeping through the night, I can either choose to launch into a prescriptive diatribe about what I think she should do, or I can begin by earnestly wondering with her about what those nights are like for her, or if it is even a concern for her. Based on what she initially told me I really don’t have any idea what would be helpful in this situation.

Being Helpful

If you haven’t guessed by now, I believe we can recast these Assumptions for our everyday relationships, in our organizations, in our business practices. What would happen if we look first for the strengths in others, if we seek to understand what they know and what is important to them? Maybe then we can begin to understand how we can be most helpful.

I’m off to read Ed Schein’s book.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Up Too Late: Bad Parenting

February 28, 2010 By rob Leave a Comment

We let our ten year old stay up too late last night. I think it was 12:30 when he and his mom and I finally went to bed. I am sure there will be consequences. In fact, this morning he woke up and one of the first things he said was, “that movie was intense”.

Yesterday on a whim, I rented “The Great Debaters”, with Denzel Washington. It is a story about a debate team from an all black college in the 1930′s who, after beating so many other small black colleges and one white college, are invited to debate at Harvard. What I loved an appreciated were the many examples of bright minds, passionate about learning, knowledgeable about poetry, the Bible, mythology and literature and a lovely quote that summed the culture of one hard working family, “We do what we have to, so we can do what we want to”.

There were grim reminders of our country’s racist legacy, and oscillation between worlds that challenge the watcher to understand that the path these students were on was not just difficult because of racism. It also flew in the face of leaving the comfort of a culture that they were part of, to exist in a culture where members of each believed they did not.

Aidan watched this. At every reasonable interval we checked in with him to see if he was awake and whether he was “ok”. His responses were groggy though not from being tired, but from the rapt attention he gave this movie. At some of the more intense moments when we thought it might be confusing or overwhelming, he simply replied, “That’s so sad.” What we knew from both his attention and response is what we have come to know and appreciate about Aidan. That he understands humanity and is able to comprehend the context in which something is presented.

What happened last night was one of those moments when you are reminded that you are raising a person who, while needing the support and guidance of his parents, has gifts to give and a strong role in our family.

We talked for a short while afterward. His mother and I discussed with him some of the language we heard. He and I talked about the characters love for reading and his own passion for greek mythology, novels and more recently, poetry.

The epilogue of the movie demonstrates not how these events and characters changed the course of history, but how this experience changed lives of the characters. This too is important. For while it was wonderful, the experience of watching something like this with Aidan revealed far more for me than the story itself.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Listening Differently

September 1, 2009 By rob Leave a Comment

I have been reading Trust Agents by Julien Smith and Chris Brogan and as often happens for me when reading a new work, I take something away that feels slightly askew of what the book is about. One example of this in Trust Agents, is where the authors talk about the tools that the interwebs have for listening to what people are saying about you or your organization. They point us to all the nifty gadgets that are available for us to pull this information together with.

My mind immediately went to my own organization, but not in the same way. I need to pull information together internally. I need a better collection of the moments in time data of many moving parts of our organization.

It used to be easier

A few years ago within our previously small non-profit there were a few programs and listening and sharing were easier. Getting information about the performance of our programs was often as simple as having a conversation with a teacher, therapist or director and asking for it. It was softer, it was simpler, it was more personal and a couple of objectives could be achieved simultaneously: connecting with staff and understanding how we were doing in each program.

What happened?

Having experienced some rather rapid growth (doubling the number of employees in 18 months through growth, not acquisition), I have noticed that the information I am needing and the speed at which I need it about our organization internally has changed. We have over 20 financial departments that require reporting internally and externally. We have dozens of revenue streams that must be managed, many of which are grants, all of which need reports. Our customers/clients have grown and changed each one requires services that are as unique as each of them.

What I will be changing

Listening Internally

With Chris and Julien’s suggestion to create a dashboard of external listening, I came to the realization that my internal methods of listening were too scattered, inefficient and not as clearly rooted in the data to drive decision making as they should be.

Delegating

Again, the advice in Trust Agents is to delegate because your community needs you. While I have enjoyed the collection of information process through connecting individually with staff, I have redirected the reporting responsibilities of programs (and adding/fine tuning a few), to my Executive Assistant to aggregate the important data. She already receives and reports much of it externally to state agencies, foundations and the like, it just needed to be pulled together internally in order to listen to what it might be telling us.

Dashboard

All of this aggregation of data is being reported on an internal Dashboard. The use of a dashboard is not a new concept, but I have used it as a reporting tool for our board and not necessarily as a listening tool for me. It is my internal RSS feed albeit not as easily or neatly pulled together. It will be one way in which I listen to some key indicators of our performance within the organization.

What’s Next

All of this would be useless if I didn’t have a plan for it or a reason why I am doing it. None of this is entirely novel, and I have been doing it in some form and fashion for the last five years. The difference is the size and scope and amount of information. The difference is the time it takes to gather the information via my old means. The difference is that I have to listen differently in order to understand my community and be present for them. Now that I am gathering this information in one place. Now that I have changed the way I listen to that aspect of our organization, I have time for all of the other things. I have time to hear the stories and visit with programs and listen for the meaning behind the data. It gives me time and purpose with which to participate in my internal and external communities. So thanks Chris and Julien for sparking an actionable idea. Now, back to the book.

Filed Under: Agency, Business, musings, Networking, Work

I Lied To You Last Night

August 26, 2009 By rob 2 Comments

As we sat together, you not feeling well, you asked me if I knew where there were any headphones. You were looking to engage in something that might serve as a necessary distraction from *blech* and simultaneously not “bother” me.
I said, “No.”

It wasn’t entirely untrue. I didn’t “know” for sure. But was in fact unkind and lazy and did not show the care I promised to you.
I could have, I should have, gotten up and looked. It wouldn’t have taken long because I just found them and thought of you and thought less of me for not having done so last night.

I am sure that things like this happen everyday in relationships.

The “lie” we tell seems quite harmless until we weigh it against the value we have stripped from the care and kindness we could have showed.
I’m sorry.

Filed Under: family, friends, musings

100 Word Reflections – Stress and Self Awareness

May 13, 2009 By rob 2 Comments

In the face of stress and disorganization I go silent to find strength, to give me some space. I get quiet. I get calm. I am thinking about implications, about next steps, about actions, about relationships, about who I need in this moment, about what will support me, about what I can do and what I cannot, about what I should do and what I should not. I am thinking and appear calm. Please don’t mistake my calm for a lack of concern or passion or commitment. It is how I gather my strength and I have an abundance it.

Filed Under: 100 Words

100 Word Reflections – Passion and Preparation

May 6, 2009 By rob Leave a Comment