Reflecting and Learning
One faces the future with one's past.
~Pearl S. Buck
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
~Soren Kierkegaard
The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.
~Patricia Hampl
There's an old saying that nothing fails like success.
To make our learning, and our lives sustainable, we need to carefully examine both our failures and our successes with an appreciative eye, a fearless heart and a curious mind:
- Be fearless - make it safe for all to openly explore what actually happened.
- Be appreciative - replace the language and stance of blame and accountabilty, with the language and stance of response-ability and adapt-ability.
- Be specific - list all the consequences - positive and negative.
- Be curious - were the consequences the result of design or accident or both?
- Inquire - what can be replicated? - what can be avoided?
- Reflect - In what ways is knowing this information helpful to us?
- Design - a memory system to keep this knowledge inside the body of collective learning.