Reflexive Practice for transformative change
What is Reflexive Practice?
To understand what Reflexive Practice is, I want to first share the theoretical underpinnings, with links to external resources embedded.
I first knowingly encountered the idea of ‘reflexivity’ in Ta7taliya Michelle Nahanee’s Decolonize… workbook. She writes about ‘reflexivity in practice’ as part of defining who you are, and offers particular framings to consider in the process. I strongly encourage you to engage with the source material to learn more, but it’s her definition of reflexivity that we’ll focus on here.
“‘Reflexivity’ - a process of continual, active reflections that moves beyond comfort, to activate new ways of knowing & doing based on new information.”
Reflective Practice, on the other hand, is something that I had encountered years prior as a tool for continuous learning. This Participatory Methods article provides a great overview of the technique and its applications in the development sector. The process, when explored within peer groups, can be particularly helpful for deepening our inquiry and building a sense of trust and community with others in our community, creating a process of shared learning and meaning even when focusing on our individual experiences.
What then, is the difference between both? Learning for Sustainability articulates the difference well, as captured below. To further simplify, reflective practice has us pause, reflect, and analyze our learnings and actions, whereas reflexivity encourages us to apply a more critical lens of our learning and actions to get to a deeper understanding and engage with the complexity within which we work.
“Reflective practice is a process by which you: pause and think about your practice; consciously analyse your decision making; and draw on theory to relate it to what you did (or didn’t do) in practice.
Reflexivity is finding strategies to question our own attitudes, thought processes, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions, to strive to understand our complex roles in relation to others. ”
In 2021 I had the opportunity to participate in Working in Complexity Inside & Out which is an exceptional learning opportunity with Chris Corrigan and Caitlin Frost, especially for people working in systems change. Here, I learned about Adaptive Action as a planning (and evaluation!) process grounded in three simple questions: what? so what? now what?
The underlying theory is that, as indicated by the Cynefin framework, when we’re working on complex challenges/opportunities, we can never have full knowledge of a situation, or fully understand cause and effect because conditions are always influx and shifting as other factors shift. So, to make decisions, we are best by using a process of probe—>sense—>respond to inform our decision making. Adaptive Action is a process that helps facilitate this process: probe (what?), sense (so what?) respond (now what?).
By bringing in this framing and applying it in a reflexivity context, we can undertake a process of deep and regular examination of our actions and beliefs, to challenge ourselves to see areas of growth and where more growth is needed to create the transformational change we seek in ourselves and in our communities.
How do we do Reflexive Practice?
At Cultivating Belonging, we incorporate Reflexive Practice into regular individual, peer, and group practices. In order to honour ‘reflexivity’ as defined by Ta7taliya, it is important for this process to be regular and to open ourselves to the discomfort this process will inevitably surface as we seek to transform. As such, we encourage participants to engage in whatever care practices they may need to be present and vulnerable in the space, and to support them afterwards.
Before you start, identify what you will be examining in that session. It could be a particular action you have taken recently, a project you have worked on, a learning you engaged in, a check in on a particular trait you’ve been attempting to learn or unlearn…
Then, ask yourself ‘what?’ and explore in writing or verbally what you are examining, or what has happened in relation to the topic being explored. This is our data-collecting portion of the process. Human Systems Dynamic Institute offers great prompting questions as you collect this data, including ‘In general I notice…’, ‘I was surprised by…’, and ‘This reminds me of…’.
When you feel like you have sufficiently named the ‘what’, ask yourself ‘so what?’. What patterns are you starting to identify from the ‘whats’ you surfaced? What is this telling you about the system(s) at play? What are the conditions contributing to the current state, and which might need to be shifted to create change? Here we seek to not just analyze decisions and actions at a surface level, but to also explore underpinning patterns in values, assumptions, etc. that are showing up in the patterns.
Finally, move to the ‘now what?’ portion for moving into actions or next steps you can take given what you’ve learned to advance the transformations you seek. These can range from micro-actions to significant shifts. Reground yourself in where you are now and what you will try next in your efforts to ensure your ‘now what’ is achievable. As you move on to taking those actions, re-engage in this process and pay attention to the impact of those actions.
Want to participate in Reflexive Practice with Cultivating Belonging? See what offerings we have here:
