Reflective practitioner

We need to take some time to step back and learn from our experiences.

But how do we do that? In creating your own elevator speech, you must have reflected and thought about all the attributes that you bring to your respective organisation.

We use self-reflection as a guiding process to achieve this. Reflective practice is thinking about or reflecting on what you do. It is closely linked to the concept of learning from experience in that you think about what you did and what happened. Based on this process you explore what you would do differently next time.

People who reflect on how they operate in different jobs and under different challenges are better prepared for their work in today’s world of uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

We have already noted that the 21st century professional needs to be agile and responsive to change. They need to be able to respond to what management theorists have dubbed the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) challenge. This model has been variously used in the military and more recently in strategic leadership in all kinds of organisations. It is a guide for describing or reflecting on the many diverse situations we can find ourself in.

The VUCA framework can be used to assist with:

• anticipating and reacting to the nature and speed of change
• acting decisively without always having clear direction and certainty
• navigating through complexity, chaos and confusion
• maintaining effectiveness despite constant surprises and a lack of predictability.

Your task

Take a look at the VUCA guide. Using this framework, pick one element (eg complexity) and use it to describe a challenge that you have faced. Paying attention to the approaches mentioned in the guide, come up with your own approach to solving that particular challenge.

Share your approaches in the comments and respond to other learners’ ideas.