The Power of Reflection: How Thinking Improves Learning & Performance - ft. Giada Di Stefano — Transcript

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1. 0:00(bright music) - Imagine you're taking part
2. 0:01in an experiment.
3. 0:02They give you five math puzzles.
4. 0:04When you finish up, they say,
5. 0:05"Okay, you're gonna do another round
6. 0:07of puzzles in a few minutes,
7. 0:09but before then you have a choice.
8. 0:11You can spend the next three minutes
9. 0:13practicing more puzzles,
10. 0:15or you can spend the next three minutes
11. 0:18reflecting on the practice that you just did.
12. 0:21Which one would you choose?
13. 0:22Well, if you're like me, it's practice.
14. 0:24Of course it is.
15. 0:25This is an actual experiment that they ran in real life.
16. 0:28And two really interesting things happened.
17. 0:31First, 82% of the participants,
18. 0:33just like you and I, they chose practice.
19. 0:36And after those three minutes
20. 0:37of either reflection or practice,
21. 0:39the participants take on round two of the puzzles.
22. 0:42The reflection group outperforms the practice group.
23. 0:46(record scratches) Huh.
24. 0:47- That's suspicious. That's weird.
25. 0:50- These surprising and unexpected results,
26. 0:53they're just the tip of the iceberg.
27. 0:54'cause we tracked down the person
28. 0:56who did that pilot experiment,
29. 0:58and it ends up, she published a whale of a paper,
30. 1:0168 pages long that I've spent months digging through,
31. 1:05and I can't stop thinking about it.
32. 1:07(bright music continues)
33. 1:12- I'm Giada Di Stefano.
34. 1:14I'm an associate professor of strategy
35. 1:16at Bocconi University in Milan
36. 1:18in the Department of Management and Technology.
37. 1:20- [Trevor] So they find this organization
38. 1:22that puts their new hires
39. 1:23through a really intensive training program.
40. 1:26- And during that, we decided basically
41. 1:28to have a control group that was going
42. 1:29through the regular program,
43. 1:31and another one that through the training,
44. 1:33that was going to switch up to this reflection manipulation.
45. 1:39- [Trevor] So they have over 100 participants.
46. 1:41They divide 'em into two groups.
47. 1:43One group, they just keep going
48. 1:45with the normal training program.
49. 1:46The other group, they spend the last 15 minutes
50. 1:50of each day reflecting about the things
51. 1:52that they learned throughout the day.
52. 1:54- What we basically did was giving them a diary
53. 1:56in which at the end of the day,
54. 1:57the last 15 minutes of the workday,
55. 2:00they could have written down the main lessons
56. 2:03that they learned.
57. 2:04- During the time that they're reflecting
58. 2:06on the lessons they learned throughout the day.
59. 2:08The control group, they're still going through the training,
60. 2:11so they are acquiring more experience and practicing more
61. 2:15during the time that the reflection group is thinking
62. 2:19about what they learned throughout the day.
63. 2:21- And then what we looked at afterwards
64. 2:23was we tried and understand whether the people were
65. 2:26in these treatment condition would be better
66. 2:30compared to those who are in the control condition.
67. 2:32- So at the end of this two-week on-the-job training,
68. 2:35the company always delivers a big assessment
69. 2:38to the new hires.
70. 2:39The control group that went through kind
71. 2:41of the normal training process,
72. 2:43they score a 54.4 on the final exam.
73. 2:47The reflection group, 71.5,
74. 2:51nearly a 20% boost in performance,
75. 2:54and again, the only difference between the two groups
76. 2:57was 15 minutes at the end of the day.
77. 3:00everything else was the same.
78. 3:01- Which was huge.
79. 3:03Then the other thing we looked at was whether these people
80. 3:05were going to be rated better afterwards,
81. 3:09once they started working for the firm.
82. 3:11- Giada and her team, they actually track the participants
83. 3:15for their first month on the job.
84. 3:16The reflection group, their customer satisfaction scores
85. 3:20are higher than the control group.
86. 3:22So not only did 15 minutes of reflection
87. 3:24at the end of the day
88. 3:25improve their scores on the assessment,
89. 3:28it seems to spill over into their actual job,
90. 3:31like they're performing better
91. 3:33than the traditional practice group.
92. 3:35Okay, so those are some of the benefits of reflection.
93. 3:38Now, let's get into the weeds and talk
94. 3:40about when and how to do it.
95. 3:43- There is a difference in the sense
96. 3:44that if you are working with an easy task,
97. 3:48thinking about it is enough,
98. 3:50but the more the task gets complicated,
99. 3:53the better it is to actually write something down,
100. 3:56because this is when you really get the additional boost
101. 3:59by trying to codify somehow what you're learning.
102. 4:03If you are more of an expert,
103. 4:05thinking about in terms of strategy helps more.
104. 4:09If you are more of an novice,
105. 4:10just the idea of talking about it is enough.
106. 4:14So even when you write, just elaborating more
107. 4:17on what is it that I'm asking you to do
108. 4:19and what's going on is enough if you're at the beginning.
109. 4:23The more you become an expert with the task,
110. 4:25the more it's really about like trying
111. 4:27to make sense of what's going on
112. 4:29and bringing it to the next level.
113. 4:30- I found some great research that shows the value
114. 4:33of reflection when we experience
115. 4:35both good and bad outcomes.
116. 4:37And I love this so much
117. 4:38because when you think about reflection,
118. 4:40I'd say most of the time people in groups don't do it.
119. 4:44And if we do do it's when things go bad.
120. 4:47It's like, "Oh, that didn't work.
121. 4:48We gotta sit here and think."
122. 4:50What Ellis shows is that there's value in both.
123. 4:54When things go well, when things don't go well,
124. 4:57spending time in reflection is valuable.
125. 4:59- So it's not really about rejecting when you're doing
126. 5:03poorly or when you're doing awesome.
127. 5:05It is just about the act of stopping and thinking,
128. 5:09which I think is important also
129. 5:11as a takeaway for managers, because as you were saying,
130. 5:14and I totally agree on that, people tend to resort
131. 5:17to these tools only where things are not going well.
132. 5:20And, but the reality is that if you're learning,
133. 5:23independent of whether or not you're being
134. 5:25a good or bad performer, this is going to help you.
135. 5:27So why use it only when things are not going well,
136. 5:31when you can also use it when, you know,
137. 5:33you are actually doing pretty good?
138. 5:34- So the famous quote that we all hear all the time,
139. 5:37I either win or I learn, you can upgrade it.
140. 5:41It's I either win and I learn or I lose and I learn.
141. 5:45Either way, spending some time in reflection is a good idea.
142. 5:48My best advice here is don't overcomplicate it.
143. 5:50Doing it is almost always better than not doing it.
144. 5:54All these studies are basically just showing
145. 5:56that reflection is more important
146. 5:58to the learning process than we realize.
147. 6:00Learning isn't just about doing, doing, doing.
148. 6:03No. It's do, reflect, do.
149. 6:07Taking some time and thinking about what we're doing,
150. 6:10what we're learning, what's working, what's not
151. 6:13is a simple and free strategy that can help us extract
152. 6:17more value from our experiences.
153. 6:19This is also something we can use as leaders,
154. 6:22creating time and space for the people we lead
155. 6:25to reflect on the lessons we're teaching them,
156. 6:28the things that we're doing is really, really important.
157. 6:31(upbeat music)
158. 6:40(upbeat music continues)