Time for Deep Reflection
In April, the Velvet Chainsaw team practiced what we preach and conducted our own internal strategy session. One of our ongoing quests is to grow our strategic thinking muscles. The stronger and more creative they are, the more value we bring to our client gigs and projects.
Strategic thinking is a complex and opaque topic.To add focus, we brought in an expert on sociology and systems thinking to facilitate our learning experience.
Our team had many aha moments that will help us improve and grow. One of the biggest aha’s for me was that as a team we were doing a lousy job of reflecting on client projects once they ended. Like many, we were too busy jumping from project to project to take a breath and critique our process, learnings and collective performance.
Deep reflection is a big deal. In the first article below, Daniel Patrick Forrester claims that leaders spend less than 5% of their time reflecting and $650 billion is lost each year because we don’t give ourselves time for reflection.
As we design our conference education and networking experiences, it’s important that we realize how critical it is to build time into the agenda for reflection. If attendees don’t make the time to consider how they can apply learnings, no performance improvement will be realized in the workplace.
