Reflection at work from a scientific perspective:
Reflection can be seen as a return to experience through which the experience is re-evaluated in order to promote continuous learning.

Reflecting includes addressing emotional aspects, e.g. when a situation at work has made an employee angry, confused or pleased, specific behaviors during the work, or ideas generated during the experience. The outcome of the reflection may be new knowledge as well as readiness to behave differently in a similar situation next time.

Reflection might be triggered by a perceived mismatch between what was expected and what actually happened in a particular situation, or might be triggered explicitly through debriefings and reflection sessions integrated into work practices. Reflection might be individual or collaborative. Employees, for example, might share with others their experiences and try to collaboratively make sense of challenges they have encountered. A learner can observe others (e.g. peers or experts) acting in similar situations and vicariously relate to their experience. A learner’s recall and reflection can benefit from the use of data gathered from the events in question; for example video recordings of the learner’s actions.

Reflection at work from a business perspective:
Competitive businesses always try to find out how to learn from experience as a whole. Ideally the experience of one worker should be shared with all co-workers in order to avoid making the same mistakes again and to improve performance when dealing with, for example,  customer care or resolving conflict situations.

The ability to do so immediately results in being able to create a virtuous circle such that both effectiveness and customer satisfaction on the one hand and cooperation and motivation of employees on the other can be continuously improved.

In reality employees are often unaware of what is going on in a specific situation and most of the time they do not stop to analyse and reflect about the dynamics of given situations and the range of possible outcomes arising from making alternative choices or behaving differently. If this could be done in one way or another it would mean experience could be capitalised as a single resource, and potentially, should reflection enable the resource to be shared with colleagues, to spread this richness to the team and eventually to the whole organisation.

From a business perspective, this is what MIRROR is about.

In order to try to apply these concepts to a simple example, and be able to appreciate the consequences of different behaviours, play the MIRROR serious game!

Click here to play the serious game.