Podcast Summary

Kiran Kapur discussed the importance and methods of effective reflection, a topic inspired by a tutorial with an apprentice. She categorised people into three types of reflectors: those who avoided it, those who were blind to criticism, and those who focused solely on the negatives. She argued that reflection provided a crucial space to think and improve, but could be detrimental if done poorly. Using an apprentice's story, who focused excessively on a small failure despite an overwhelmingly positive outcome, she illustrated the common pitfall of dwelling on negatives. The speaker proposed a "Carry on, Stop, Start" framework for balanced evaluation and concluded by emphasising the need for individuals to understand their own reflection style.

Key Points

  • People typically fell into one of three categories regarding reflection: those who avoided it, those who were blind to criticism, and those who only saw the negatives.
  • Reflection was a valuable tool for creating thinking space, enabling improvement, and recognising successful practices that should be continued.
  • A common mistake, which the speaker identified as particularly prevalent in UK culture, was to focus disproportionately on what went wrong while ignoring the positives.
  • The speaker argued that the time spent reflecting on positive and negative aspects should be proportional to the outcome of the event or project.
  • A useful framework for structured reflection was presented as "Carry on" (what worked), "Stop" (what didn't work), and "Start" (what improvements to make).
  • Consciously focusing on positives, even when it felt unnatural, was presented as a method to gain a more balanced and accurate perspective on performance.

 

Podcast Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships at marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur, host (00:13):
Hello and welcome. Today's topic has actually been inspired by a tutorial with one of my apprentices, and we're going to be talking about reflection, reflecting on a project or your performance or your team's performance or your learning, why it matters and how to do it. And over the years, I've found that people tend to fall into sort of three camps when it comes to reflecting. Those that absolutely hate doing it and will do anything to avoid it. They want to move on. We are where we are. They're often quite action-oriented. They want to move on to the next thing. And I'll be honest and say over the years, that's probably where I've been. There are those who have a complete blind spot to any criticism. More than it's a glass half full view, they just feel that there is just no way that there is negative in their team or their organisation's performance, or they'll just dismiss the criticism.

(01:08):
This of course leads to a huge level of complacency, and it's often what happens when you see a company really starting to struggle. It's because they have got so much into a, "Oh, we can't really possibly be doing anything wrong," mindset, that they're just not seeing the negatives. I'm not going to give you examples. There are plenty in the news at the moment where some more reflection, some more opportunity to look at what might be going wrong, as opposed to only concentrating on what was going well, might well have helped the organisation. And finally, and I have to say, to be honest, this is the largest camp that I come across. There are those who can only see the negatives when it comes to reflecting, and they concentrate entirely on what went wrong. They completely ignore the positives. The positives are sort of banked. Oh yeah, we do that.

(02:01):
But we even praise ourselves for doing this. You'll hear people describe themselves, "Well, I have a growth mindset or the power of continual improvement," or, "I use the Kaizen method." Yeah, all of those methods still require you to look at the positives as well as the negatives. So very, very quickly, why do we reflect? Why does it matter? So reflection is a valuable tool, mainly because it gives you space to think. In a time of working where we are all relentlessly task-driven, and it does seem to be particularly task-driven at the moment, it just gives you that space and moment to go, "Ooh, hang on. Let's have a look at how well we've done and what we could do better." It does allow you time to improve. It also allows you time to think about, "We mustn't get rid of these things. We need to hang onto these things because these things are good." But if you do reflection badly, it doesn't help and it does just blinker you to what's going well because you're in that mindset of there's nothing possibly going wrong.

(03:02):
Oh, the negative criticism doesn't matter. Or you can do the opposite. You can actually ignore anything that is going well because you're so relentlessly concentrating on what's gone badly wrong. So why was this inspired by a tutorial with an apprentice? Well, we were discussing an apprentice, a stressful experience, and the outcome had overall been good. There'd actually been a promotion and some lovely feedback on her performance in a panel interview, and panel interviews are very, very stressful and it was clearly very well handled. But I found that the conversation kept coming back to what had gone wrong, a slightly poor presentation that was messed up due to nerves. And I noticed that until I took charge, we ended up spending 10% of the conversation talking about what had clearly gone extremely well, or she wouldn't have got the promotion and lovely feedback, and we kept coming back to the problems about the poor performance.

(03:58):
That's partly due to an emotional feeling of slight shame, "I should have done it better" so you tend not to see beyond that. And it's also partly down to that very natural feeling of, "Oh, well, yes, I know I got the rest right, but I really want to look at where I can improve." This is partly cultural. Concentrating on the negative is something we do a huge amount in the UK. I've noticed that my international students can be much, much better at taking a sort of overview. And it also can of course be due to a gender bias, a background, a personality. For the apprentice, what I needed her to do was to think, "Okay, the presentation had gone wrong. Why?" And when we ask the questions, and there are techniques that suggest you ask five questions so you keep drilling down what the issues are, it was clear that in fact it was unfamiliar technology and too much spent time spent creating beautiful slides rather than practising out loud, and that's what caused the problem.

(04:57):
So in fact, there's a nice, clear solution. Check the technology beforehand, make certain that the presentation is practised many, many times. But my overall point was that in this case, she'd had 80 to 90% positive feedback and positive actions. So we should have spent in evaluating 80% of our time looking at what had gone well and only 20% of the time on what went wrong. So if you were evaluating over 50 minutes, 40 minutes should be spent on what went well and why, and I do suggest using a timer and only 10 minutes on what went wrong. Otherwise, what you actually take away from it is you cement in your minds what went wrong and you don't cement in what you got right and therefore the actions that you need to take next time in order to put them right. And it's noticeable when we're talking about something that went wrong, we need to practise more with the technology, we need to practise the presentation more.

(06:02):
Okay. Those are two easy actions, but we need to do the same with what went right. What are the easy actions that say, "This is what we did. This is how we can stay at this good level." So as a framework for evaluation, and I've adapted these from various things that I've come over the years, you can use a sort of standard feedback method, what went well, even better if, but I do find that's useful for a small project, but it's often not enough if you need to do something more deeply. So there are three headings that I use. Carry on, stop and start. So we start with three questions, carry on. What is working or what worked? Celebrate these and carry on with them and spend time working out those. Stop. What should we stop doing because it doesn't work or it's holding us back?

(06:57):
And start. Now you can look at the improvements. So what improvements can we start to make to make something better and how? Does that apply to everything? No, of course not. If something is a complete and utter disaster, and if you're sitting in an organisation that maybe is imploding, then you need to spend much more time looking at the negatives, but do try and spend a proportion of your time looking at their positives and the negatives. For the apprentice, I set the task of doing a presentation on the experience, but only concentrating on the positives, and I'm told it was the worst task I've ever said. Thinking through what went well and why, rather than focusing on that awful presentation, apparently felt totally unnatural and uncomfortable. But at the end of the experience, I was told that it was a useful double check to see that, oh yeah, it wasn't the complete disaster that perhaps she'd walked away with thinking it.

(07:50):
I hope that's helpful thinking about reflection. It's a topic that can sound very woolly, but there are some very important points to doing reflection and to noticing what type of reflector you are. Are you the type that just doesn't want to do it? Are you the type that only sees the positives or are you the type that completely and utterly get focuses on the negatives and ignores any positives entirely? Thank you for listening. Next week we have Joe Glover, the guy that founded The Marketing Meetup talking about his experiences. I hope to get you then.

Announcer (08:22):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College, training marketing and PR professionals across the globe.