Adopting a reflective practice
How I catalogue my learning to grow as a practitioner
Update [Oct 25, 2024]: My approach and tools have changed since writing this in 2021, so I wrote another post about my new reflection process ✨
I’m one of those people who can’t sleep until the thoughts floating around in my head are either written down or sketched out. I used to see this as a negative thing, like an obsession to think through all possible scenarios of a given challenge or idea. Over the last year and a half I decided to try something different. I developed a system to structure my thoughts to allow space for reflection, rather than attempting to solve things immediately.
It all started with a daily moment of reflection. Every morning, for nearly 500 days now, I write or sketch at least two pages of absolutely anything that pops into my head––this process allows me to get all my thoughts on paper. Through this process, I started to notice recurring themes in my writing that were worth revisiting in my practice.
As a way to capture these recurring thoughts and ideas, I began adding them to a Miro board (a digital whiteboard), curating and indexing my reflections in a way that made them easy to retrieve. Since then it has expanded, I now have an ever-growing catalogue of reflections, ideas, and resources that have helped me grow personally and as a practitioner working in design and technology.
In this blog post, I will share my reflective practice, how I structure my thoughts in a systematic way, and how you can leverage these techniques too. I will cover the following:
- Why adopt a reflective practice
- What to document
- How to start mapping your practice
Why adopt a reflective practice
Reflection has become a common practice across multiple professions. In the field of design and technology, which I work in, reflective practices are often manifested through regular check-points, such as people writing weeknotes or teams conducting weekly retrospectives, all of which act as a feedback loop, helping us grow individually and as part of a collective.
Donald A. Schön, author of The Reflective Practitioner, says “reflective practice is a dialogue of thinking and doing” through which we can become more skillful. He explains how we must regularly look back at our work, the process, our experiments, and consider how to improve in all aspects. Schön makes the distinction between ‘reflection in action’ (thinking in the moment) and ‘reflection-on-action’ (thinking after the experience).
My reflective practice includes cataloguing or mapping my learnings, as I’m better at remembering information spatially, which allows me to maintain this loop of thinking, learning, and doing. To give you an example, I typically reference my catalogue of learnings either before an event (when I’m looking for inspiration or reminders of successes/failures), or afterward (when I’m thinking about how something went and how to improve).
Most importantly, through this reflective process, I’m able to create space for personal accountability and challenge my mental models, which pushes my practice to grow. There are a lot of parallels here with adopting a growth mindset, rather than a fixed one — recognising that one can always learn and improve.
The analogy I like to use to describe my reflective process is similar to an exquisite corpse (example on the left). It’s a very old technique where artists would collaboratively draw a character of composite parts. Although my practice isn’t directly collaborative with other people, the process is similar in the way that the reflection and corresponding mapping process builds up or grows in unexpected ways, often taking on new meaning.
Two of the most beneficial aspects of this process are: discovering new associations and connections through the emergent process, and revisiting scenarios I’ve encountered in the past to review what has or hasn’t worked in order grow as a practitioner.
Adopting a reflective practice is like learning a new skill, it takes time and dedication before you will start to see the results –– the transformation won’t happen overnight. To be honest, I was skeptical at first. Daily writing and reflection started as a non-work-related exercise that both my therapist and coach were encouraging me to try. I am glad that I did, as it has had an incredible impact on me personally and professionally.
What to document
There isn’t a right or wrong answer here, it’s whatever will help your practice grow. If you are outcomes-oriented (thinking of all my Product friends out there), you may want to think about what your goals are for documenting and what you hope to achieve. If you are more of a ‘choose your own adventure’ and see where the process takes you type of person (my preference for documenting), you could capture anything from learnings from a book to activists that inspire you.
The first step is determining what is important to you and what you want to spend time documenting.
Guiding questions for what to document
- What areas do you want to grow in personally?
- What might help you become a better practitioner?
- What new tools and methods are you curious about?
- What organisations or people are doing compelling work that you want to learn more about?
In my practice, I tend to document methods around topics such as systems thinking, responsible tech, and how to create positive social and environmental impact. In addition to daily journalling, I also catalogue learnings from books, articles, talks, tips from colleagues, and tools I’ve used in my practice — documenting what worked and what failed. Over time, patterns and themes begin to emerge, inspiring new ideas that I eventually test in my work.
Example from my practice
Let me give you an example of how mapping one resource led to new ideas. Last year, I read Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth — I know, I’m late to the party. I was so inspired by her 7 principles for the 21st century that I decided to sketch my learnings. The process of sketching my takeaways from her book, in combination with other resources I had documented, inspired a personal project.
For my side project, I leveraged resources that I had already catalogued around systems thinking and climate action, specifically, the Iceberg model by Donella Meadows and Project Drawdown’s analysis of the top climate solutions. Inspired by these resources and Doughnut Economics, I mapped organisations addressing the climate crisis based on where they were intervening at a systems level. The outcome of this process helped expand my thinking as practitioner working in tech and how I apply a systems lens to my work.
Through my process, I was able to explore new topics and ideas relevant to my previous work with Pivotal Act. For example, the learnings led to new ideas of applying systems thinking to our work with nonprofits, specifically, to better understand the root cause of their problems and determine how technology can (if at all) enable the desired change.
My catalogue of learnings and resources has developed since the first sketch, and continues to grow, allowing for multi-directional connections. This is just one example from my practice of how you can document your learnings to allow for reflection and ideas to flow. For me, the act of regular reflection and documentation encourages continuous (re)calibration ––always learning and unlearning ––to create thoughtful and intentional work.
How to start mapping your practice
There are so many exciting ways to document your practice. If you are living in a small London flat, like me, you could buy a foam board or a sketchbook that can easily be stored away. Select a tool depending on how you like to structure information to make it discoverable and easy to retrieve.
I use Miro because I like the option to see all the information at once and the search by keywords functionality (which is quite helpful if you have indexed the information well). I realise Miro is not an accessible tool for everyone. You may want to test out a few options until you figure out the right tool for you.
Once you have figured out what you want to document and what tool you are going to use, you can follow these steps –– remember to start small.
Steps to start mapping your practice
- Start by synthesizing your notes into key insights. Add your reflections into a single repository, whether that’s a notebook or a digital space. Write down what you learnt from this information and what your takeaways are.
- Sort insights into themed groups. For example, you could have a theme dedicated to models for measuring impact or a group of resources around equity.
- Reflect on what you have documented. As your collection of different resources and thoughts grow, so too will your perspective. Think about what you have learnt and how your perspective may have shifted. How might this inform future work? As a bonus, having all your learnings in one place also makes it easier to exchange resources with others.
My process for capturing and mapping my learnings and reflections has evolved over the years, and will continue to do so. I used to document everything in sketchbooks, however, it was difficult to quickly recall information when I needed it. This need, forced me to transition from an analogue to a digital format.
One of the challenges that I find the most difficult is prioritising and staying on top of the resources I need to read. The way I address this now is to sift information based on my criteria and prioritise based on relevance to my current work and my reading goal that I set each year. Here is how I sort information:
Criteria for sorting information
- Needs time to digest and reflect on. If it’s an article, book, or talk that I need to dedicate time reflecting on, I add it to my backlog. Once I’ve read it, synthesized the learnings, I then add it to the Miro board and tag it accordingly.
- Specific insight. If it’s an idea or learning I don’t want to forget, it goes straight into its respective section in Miro. I also colour code my insights, so I’m able to quickly distinguish ideas from learnings.
If you are like me and have way too many tabs open in your browser, you also might want to think about a temporary holding space, like Trello, for the list of things you want to read.
I’ve designed my cataloging system to suit my needs, as I am the primary user. My reflective process likely won’t work for anyone else because it’s designed for my workflow and on how I remember information. One day I would like to figure out a way to make it useful for others too. I believe if we make dedicated time for reflection in the workplace, there is a lot of potential for teams to create their own collection of insights, resources, learnings and ideas ––becoming more intentional as a team.
In summary, reflection is a time investment (and a privilege), which means you will likely have to drop something else in order to make space for it. It’s difficult to see the value of slowing down and taking a step back to reflect ––especially if you are working in a fast paced environment or if there are stressful things going on in your life or in the world. However, I assure you that the effort is a worthwhile investment in yourself and subsequently the relationships around you.
If you are still looking to dig in a bit more, I’ve listed a few additional resources below:
Approaches & tools for documenting
- Sketchnoting is a perfect for rich visual notes. If you are looking for inspiration, I would check out Denise Yu (@deniseyu21) and Makayla Miranda Lewis (@maccymacx).
- I mentioned Miro above, but you could also use Trello or Notion if you are interested in listing your reflections.
- Kumu is a tool designed for mapping complex data into relationships –– I haven’t personally used it but looks like it has a lot of potential.
Further reading
- The Reflective Practitioner. I read this book nearly 10 years ago and it was quite dated then, however, it still offers relevant framing on the concept of reflection.
- Organisational learning. This article explains single, double and triple learning loop (developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön).
- Making the case (and space) for reflection. Adding this gem to this list, as I was recently pointed to it by the States of Change newsletter ––a constant source of inspiration.
Let me know if you have tried adopting a reflective practice or if you have resources I can add to the list above! Also, if you have any feedback, please send me a message here or on Twitter — @alyblenkin. I prefer actionable, kind, and specific feedback.
Lastly, thank you to Mamta Gera for being the most incredible coach and to Nadia Odunayo for nudging me to share my process.
