Reflective Intelligence

and Why You Think You Don't Have Time for It

A few weeks ago I was talking with a group of leaders about how their company does engagement. What caught my attention was the gap between two things. There was how people in the room talked about the place. And there were the actual engagement results.

The results were high. Really high. Very good, on paper. The trouble was they did not match a word of what I was hearing. There was higher than expected turnover and a lot of frustrated people. There was a real sense that people were holding back their best and confusion about where things were heading.

Communication that was not landing. And underneath all of it, the sense that nobody really felt safe to say what they thought.

So which one was true? The number on the slide, or the experience I was hearing in the room?

I am not telling you this because I am against measuring engagement. I am not. Asking your people how they are doing is one of the better things an organisation can do. The problem was never the question. It was that the way the company had built the asking had taught people, over time, not to answer it straight.

That gap, between what something is for and what it has actually turned into, is hard to see when you are in the middle of it. Seeing it is a skill I call reflective intelligence.

Reflection begins the moment you stop defending the version of events you would rather be true.

The reflection worth your time

Tell most busy leaders to make time for reflection and watch their face. Not hostility. Something closer to exasperation (I have worn that look myself, on the receiving end of someone’s intended good advice.) There is always a meeting, or a call to make, or a number of other unending tasks. I have found that under the no-time objection sits a second one, more honest and harder to say out loud. Even if I had the hour, what would it change?

Here is the bit almost nobody separates out. They are right about one kind of reflection and wrong about another. The kind they are picturing is the mind going round and round at 11pm, or the offsite that changes nothing by Tuesday. That deserves the eye-roll. In Press Pause I call it rumination. It is what reflection turns into when it has no frame. It feels like thinking but it changes very little. It tends to lead to downward spirals of despair and circular thinking leading nowhere.

Reflective intelligence is the other kind. It is the discipline of looking at what is actually happening, including the parts you would rather not, through a frame instead of a mood. It can be learned. It is not a personality type. And it is worth investing the time. This is what Di Stefano and colleagues found when they ran a series of experiments and found that once people had some experience at a task, stopping to reflect on it improved how they did it more than simply doing more of it did. (Di Stefano et al., 2016).

This is important to understand because it seems to be counter intuitive. An hour you spend thinking about the work can be worth more than the hour you spend doing more of it. Reflection is not the reward for getting through. Skipping it is not speed. It is just speed with the headlights off.

Why the number didn’t match the room

So what would reflective intelligence have seen in that company I was working with? Start with how a good number goes bad. Back in 1975 the economist Charles Goodhart noticed that the moment you turn a measure into a target people are judged on, it starts to drive different behaviour (Goodhart, 1975). The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later put it in the line you may have heard.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Strathern, 1997). The engagement score was meant to surface how people felt. Once it became the thing leaders were judged on, it stopped doing that. People learned to give the answer that kept the number healthy rather than changing the behaviours that actually created health.

The problem was never that we measured engagement. It was that we made the truth expensive to tell.

There is an older idea underneath this, from Chris Argyris. He talked about the gap between what he called our espoused theory and our theory in use. What we say we do, against what we actually do when it counts (Argyris and Schon, 1974). The espoused theory in that company was fine; we listen to our people. The theory in use, the system that actually got built, was closer to keep your manager happy so that they can report a good engagement number. This gap shows up because of how the system is designed. The frustration in the room was the impact; people had stopped speaking up.

Argyris also described a defensive way of thinking, where the truth is welcome right up until it threatens us, and then we reshape it, almost without noticing, into something we can live with (Argyris, 1991). A good number tends to be the easiest reshape there is. And it gets worse the more senior you are. A recent review of decades of research on senior managers found overconfidence to be the most heavily documented decision flaw at the top (Hodgkinson et al., 2023). Add Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety and you have the rest of it. The higher you sit, the fewer people will walk in and tell you the good number is covering a bad truth (Edmondson, 1999). That company did not have a measurement problem. It had a truth problem, and the score was hiding it.

Design, Purpose, Impact

The reason the score held its story for so long is that nobody put the system through a frame. Reflective intelligence needs a structure that allows us to see the gap between the design and what the intended purpose is. One such frame I have found to be useful is the Design, Purpose, Impact framework. Three questions, in order.

1. What is this system actually built to do, including the incentives no one wrote down?

2. What is it really meant to achieve?

3. And what is it actually producing, including the things nobody intended?

Purpose is what you meant to build and Impact is what you actually built.

The discipline is in that order. You look at what the system is producing, and you stay with it, before you reach for the reason it isn’t your fault. The labour market. The restructure. The two hires that did not work out. Some of that might even be true. But reach for it before you have let the impact land and you are not reflecting. You are defending. And defending feels, from the inside, exactly like clear thinking.

So keep measuring engagement. Keep asking your people how they are. Then do the harder thing. Look honestly at whether the way you ask has made it safe to answer. The good numbers are not the ones to celebrate. They are the ones to question first.

Asking these three questions allows us to reflect and understand why the intended purpose may not actually be having the impact we are seeking.

References

Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99-109.

Argyris, C., and Schon, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Di Stefano, G., Gino, F., Pisano, G. P., and Staats, B. R. (2016). Making experience count: The role of reflection in individual learning. Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 14-093.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Goodhart, C. A. E. (1975). Problems of monetary management: The U.K. experience. In Papers in Monetary Economics (Vol. I). Reserve Bank of Australia.

Hodgkinson, G. P., Burkhard, B., Foss, N. J., Grichnik, D., Sarala, R. M., Tang, Y., and Van Essen, M. (2023). The heuristics and biases of top managers: Past, present, and future. Journal of Management Studies, 60(5), 1033-1063.

Strathern, M. (1997). ‘Improving ratings’: Audit in the British University system. European Review, 5(3), 305-321.