Reflection is a Discipline
In mission-driven organizations, the pace of the work can make reflection feel optional. There is always another deadline, meeting, program cycle, or emerging need demanding attention.
But without a disciplined way to reflect, teams risk repeating avoidable problems, losing valuable learning, and treating activity as progress.
When I oversaw the New York City Teaching Fellows program, our work followed a clear annual cycle: applications opened in the fall, teacher selection continued through the spring, and summer training prepared fellows to enter classrooms. Each year, before beginning the next cycle, we held program step-backs.
Every team examined its work and produced a short memo organized around three questions:
What worked?
What did we learn?
What are the key next steps?
These memos did more than document the work. They gave teams dedicated space to make sense of their experience, helped colleagues understand how one team’s work affected another’s, enabled us to share learning with other teaching fellows programs, and allowed us to identify which improvements were both important and feasible.
They also strengthened alignment with our client. Rather than arriving with a list of internal recommendations, we could use the step-back documents to discuss which next steps mattered most to them—and what we could realistically take on in the coming year.
Not all work has a clear annual cycle or a natural endpoint. But the practice of reflecting on work in a structured and disciplined way is still important. Reflection helps organizations learn from experience, make better decisions, and avoid repeating the same challenges simply because there was no time to stop and consider them.
A formal step-back memo may not be right for every organization. There are many other ways to build reflection into your work:
A Start–Stop–Continue process
A SWOT analysis
“What? So What? Now What?” (What happened? Why does it matter? What will we do next?)
An After-Action Review
At Leadwell, we conduct a quarterly review using the Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) from Gino Wickman’s Traction. Each year, we revisit and update our V/TO as part of our annual planning process.
The right approach will depend on your organization, the nature of the work, and the decisions you need to make. The important thing is to decide how often your organization needs to pause, reflect, and learn—and then create a process that makes that reflection possible.
Consider this question: What cadence of reflection would help your organization learn before the next urgent priority takes over?
In partnership,
Jodi (and Christina)
