You made me smile in agreement that my friend would quickly lose interest in riding horses if he had to do the formal risk assessment each time he hops on.

Your comment made me ponder on what it is that I then think we should do with our reflection. Certainly not codify it and try and apply it directly in the next situation.

I wonder if somehow the reflection becomes part of your experience of the situation. So that your experience is then enriched by the subsequent reflection. In which case, what is an unreflected experience? Well, we are always reflecting in some way, each situation becomes part of our experience and habitual ways of responding. I wonder if it’s about having sufficient reflection so that next time we do not respond in our habitual way, or perhaps whether it’s about the reflection enabling us to notice more effectively the subtleties and nuances of the situation so that we can respond in the moment in a a skilled spontaneous manner.

It is not a rational thing though, and so resists attempts to document, codify and analyse risk.

Thanks for a very stimulating comment.

I have been reflecting on your reflection of your friend’s reflection!

You make the argument well for leaders to adopt a stance of detached involvement in their day-to-day interactions with others. Paying attention to the subtle shifts in conversational patterns and power relationships, whilst at the same time actively participating in this dynamic web of interactions, is one of the central challenges of effective leadership.

As you (and Jason) suggest, the lessons learnt make for more rounded leadership practice. Yet, as you have said on many other occasions, if this leadership is to be truly effective it must, paradoxically, remain spontaneous and ‘in the moment’.

Many of the problems that stifle people in organizations stem from the well-intentioned imposition of rules, processes and procedures that aim to capture and apply the lessons learnt from the formal ‘reflection’ on past incidents. If your horse-riding friend were in future compelled to carry out a formal risk assessment each time before mounting his horse, to avoid the risk of future injury based on the lessons learnt from his accident, I guess that his appetite for horse riding would diminish significantly. Yet this is what happens day-in-day-out in organizations.

So this is where the challenge lies for those of us who see organizations as complex social (or responsive) processes of people in interaction. Leadership ‘lessons learnt’ through reflection cannot be distilled into an n-step process, set of rules or magic formula that will guarantee future success – or avoid future incidents. It is much more about personal awareness-raising and responsibility-taking. Sadly, much of conventional management practice (and, increasingly in the UK, socio-economic policy) is based on the assumption that lessons can be codified into rules, regulations and codes of practice – and that therefore these must!

I look forward to sifting through some of your articles.