Donald Schön
Ashgate, 1983, new edition 1991
ISBN 1857423194
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"Well worth reading. Must be one of the most popular books in our library" said a friend.
Readers of my reviews will know that I have been interested for some years in the dialogue between action and reflection, discussed admirably by John Heron and Peter Reason, and put into practice in their Co-operative Inquiry method.
Donald Schön is one of the seemingly few people to have written about reflection and its role in professional life; it is a tricky subject, as it lies between the domains of academia and industry, and must be both theoretically accurate and practically useful to succeed fully.
The preface starts out very promisingly, at once explaining why the book's task is hard:
I have become convinced that universities are not devoted to the production and distribution of fundamental knowledge in general. They are institutions committed, for the most part, to a particular epistemology, a view of knowledge that fosters selective inattention to practical competence and professional artistry.
This is not, of course, an unfamiliar point of view. Many people use the term 'academic' in its pejorative sense...
The mission, then, is to create a new framework of knowledge which values practice above head-knowledge, deals with tacit knowledge and skill in a helpful way, and which shows how reflection enables the practitioner to develop and extend the knowledge available to his profession.
Schön sets out to do this through
a sample of vignettes of practice, concentrating on episodes in which a senior practitioner tries to help a junior one learn to do something... The heart of this study is an analysis of the distinctive structure of reflection-in-action.
The book begins by setting out a case for the existence of a problem, namely the loss of faith in professionals through scandals, through ill-conceived projects, through hastily-introduced technologies with unforeseen side-effects. I'm not sure I'm totally convinced; while the mystique of 'doctor' or 'priest' may have faded, professions like 'programmer' and 'scientist' have possibly become more respected recently. Or perhaps software is the exception that proves the rule.
The second chapter argues convincingly that there are limits to technical rationality; expertise only gets you so far in a world where politics, social effects, and the environment are inextricably mixed up with technical decisions. Even great thinkers like Herbert Simon are seen to be viewing the world in too limited, too Logical Positivist a way. What is called for is reflection-in-action, an 'extraordinary process' that accepts uncertainty and personal ways of knowing, and in so doing subverts the old view of professionalism as technical expertise.
Schön then dives into sociological or ethnological analysis of some specific work situations, which he discusses in detail to bring out how reflection fits into the professionals' use of knowledge. He concludes that
In this reflective conversation, the practitioner's effort to solve the reframed problem yields new discoveries which call for new reflection-in-action. The process spirals through stages of appreciation, action, and reappreciation. The unique and uncertain situation comes to be understood through the attempt to change it...
You might have expected from this that Schön would go on to elaborate the structure, rules, and techniques needed to conduct the process efficiently, but he disappointingly stops short of doing this. In fact he writes:
Reflection-in-action is a kind of experimenting...In what sense, if any, is there rigor in on-the-spot experiment? ...and he goes on to say that he'll look for answers in the documented examples. Is there a note of despair here? Heron, Reason, and other Action Researchers -- yes, it has become a whole field of research -- found a method that works, starting about the same time as Schön.
Questions such as these point to a further elaboration of reflection-in-action as an epistemology of practice. One might try to answer them by appeal to a structure of inquiry, but I do not know what such a structure might be or how it might be discovered...
Peter Checkland (another contemporary working in the early 1980's), in his Soft Systems Methodology, agrees with Schön that being a 'technician' is not enough, but parts from him saying that studying cases, no matter how informative, cannot lead to effective management. Checkland is rather brusque and probably unfair here, as Schön does not simply say that technical expertise is not relevant; nor does he argue for 'artificial vicarious experience' through reading case studies, but rather, invites readers to practice reflection-in-action for themselves.
Where Schön is weak is -- as quoted above -- in his reluctance to analyse the structure of reflective practice. Checkland offers his complex methodology as a solution, which it may be, at least at the level of boardroom consultancy. Co-operative inquiry and other participative methods are perhaps more easily applicable within system and software projects: I have therefore embedded an Inquiry Cycle in my book Discovering Requirements.
Schön's book remains interesting today as a pioneering attempt to explore the boundary of 'hard' and 'soft' thinking, the role of observation and reflection in professional practice, and the limits of academic thinking (based on Aristotle's primacy of the intellect over other forms of knowing). His examples are simply and clearly described, and his arguments based on them are stimulating and informative. That he didn't come up with a theory of everything isn't something we should hold against him. This is a book that professionals in all disciplines should find worthwhile. It has already undoubtedly triggered many useful lines of thought in both research and practice.
(c) Ian Alexander, 2001, 2009
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