The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Donald A. Schön)

the assumption that competent practitioners usually know more than they can say. They exhibit a kind of knowing-in-practice, most of which is tacit. Nevertheless, starting with protocols of actual

In my analysis of these cases, I begin with

But although we are wholly dependent on them, there are increasing signs of a crisis of confidence in the professions. Not only have we witnessed well-publicized scandals in which highly esteemed professionals have misused their autonomy— where doctors and lawyers, for example, have used their positions illegitimately for private gain—but we are also encountering visible

failures of professional action. Professionally designed solutions to public problems have had unanticipated consequences, sometimes worse than the problems they were designed to solve. Newly invented technologies, professionally conceived and evaluated, have turned out to produce unintended side effects unacceptable to large segments of our society. A professionally conceived and managed war has been widely perceived as a national disaster. Professionals themselves have delivered widely disparate and conflicting recommendations concerning problems of national importance, including those to which professional activities have contributed.

In 1982, there is no profession which would celebrate itself in the triumphant tones of the 1963 Daedalus volume. In spite of the continuing eagerness of the young to embark on apparently secure and remunerative professional careers, the professions are in the midst of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy. In public outcry, in social criticism, and in the complaints of the professionals themselves, the long-standing professional claim to a monopoly of knowledge and social control is challenged—first, because professionals do not live up to the values and norms which they espouse, and second, because they are ineffective.

Clearly, this skepticism is bound up with the questions of professional self-interest, bureaucratization, and subordination to the interests of business or government. But it also hinges centrally on the question of professional knowledge. Is professional knowledge adequate to fulfill the espoused purposes of the professions? Is it sufficient to meet the societal demands which the professions have helped to create?

Let us consider, then, how the crisis of confidence in the professions has been interpreted by professionals who have given serious thought in their own fields to the adequacy of professional knowledge. On the whole, their assessment is that professional knowledge is mismatched to the changing character of the situations of practice—the complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflicts which are increasingly perceived as central to the world of professional practice.

Even if professional knowledge were to catch up with the new demands of professional practice, the improvement in professional performance would be transitory. The situations of practice are inherently unstable. Harvey Brooks, an eminent engineer and educator, argues that professions are now confronted with an "unprecedent requirement for adaptability":

The situations of practice are not problems to be solved but problematic situations characterized by uncertainty, disorder, and indeterminacy.

"designing a desirable future and inventing ways of bringing it about."

In sum, when leading professionals write or speak about their own crisis of confidence, they tend to focus on the mismatch of traditional patterns of practice and knowledge to features of the practice situation—complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict—of whose importance they are becoming increasingly aware.

Why, then, should leading professionals and educators find these phenomena so disturbing? Surely they are not unaware of the artful ways in which some practitioners deal competently with the indeterminacies and value conflicts of practice. It seems, rather, that they are disturbed because they have no satisfactory way of describing or accounting for the artful competence which practitioners sometimes reveal in what they do. They find it unsettling to be unable to make sense of these processes in terms of the model of professional knowledge which they have largely taken for granted.

An avocation is "the antithesis to a profession" because it is "based upon customary activities and modified by the trial and error of individual prac-tice."2 In contrast, Moore said, a profession involves the application of general principles to specific problems, and it is a feature of modern societies that such general principles are abundant and growing.3

specialized, firmly bounded, scientific, and standardized.

Schein's use of the term "skill" is of more than passing interest. From the point of view of the model of Technical Rationality institutionalized in the professional curriculum, real knowledge lies in the theories and techniques of basic and applied science. Hence, these disciplines should come first. "Skills" in the use of theory and technique to solve concrete problems should come later on, when the student has learned the relevant sci-ence—first, because he cannot learn skills of application until he has learned applicable knowledge; and secondly, because skills are an ambiguous, secondary kind of knowledge. There is something disturbing about calling them "knowledge" at all.

Technical Rationality is the Positivist epistemology of practice. It became institutionalized in the modern university, founded in the late nineteenth century when Positivism was at its height, and in the professional schools which secured their place in the university in the early decades of the twentieth century.

But for this, the professionalizing occupations paid a price. They had to accept the Positivist epistemology of practice which was now built into the very tissue of the universities. And they had also to accept the fundamental division of labor on which Veblen had placed so great an emphasis. It was to be the business of university-based scientists and scholars to create the fundamental theory which professionals and technicians would apply to practice. The function of the professional school would be the transmission to its students of the generalized and systematic knowledge that is the basis of professional performance.

But this division of labor reflected a hierarchy of kinds of knowledge which was also a ladder of status. Those who create new theory were thought to be higher in status than those who apply it, and the schools of "higher learning" were thought to be superior to the "lower." Thus were planted the seeds of the Positivist curriculum, typical of professional schools in American universities, and the roots of the now-familiar split between research and practice.

From the perspective of Technical Rationality, professional practice is a process of problem solving. Problems of choice or decision are solved through the selection, from available means, of the one best suited to established ends. But with this emphasis on problem solving, we ignore problem setting, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen. In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. In order to convert a problematic situation to a problem, a practitioner must do a certain kind of work. He must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense. When professionals consider what road to build, for example, they deal usually with a complex and ill-defined situation in which geographic, topological, financial, economic, and political issues are all mixed up together. Once they have somehow decided what road to build and go on to consider how best to build it, they may have a problem they can solve by the application of available techniques; but when the road they have built leads unexpectedly to the destruction of a neighborhood, they may find themselves again in a situation of uncertainty. It is this sort of situation that professionals are coming increasingly to see as central to their practice. They are coming to recognize that although problem setting is a necessary condition for technical problem solving, it is not itself a technical problem. When we set the problem, we select what we will treat as the "things" of the situation, we set the boundaries of our attention to it, and we impose upon it a coherence which allows us to say what is wrong and in what directions the situation needs to be changed. Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.

Technical Rationality depends on agreement about ends. When ends are fixed and clear, then the decision to act can present itself as an instrumental problem. But when ends are confused and conflicting, there is as yet no "problem" to solve. A conflict of ends cannot be resolved by the use of techniques derived from applied research. It is rather through the nontechnical process of framing the problematic situation that we may organize and clarify both the ends to be achieved and the possible means of achieving them.

One of the hallmarks of the professional, therefore, is his ability to "take a convergent knowledge base and convert it into professional services that are tailored to the unique requirements of the client system," a process which demands "divergent thinking skills."43 About these, however, Schein has very little to say, and for good reason. If divergent skills could be described in terms of theory or technique, they would belong to one or another of the components of the hierarchy of professional knowledge. But if they are neither theory nor technique, and are still a kind of knowledge, how are they to be described? They must remain a mysterious, residual category.

Thus the gap which Schein locates between "convergent" science and "divergent" practice, Glazer locates between major and minor professions.

It is Simon, however, who most clearly links the predicament of professional knowledge to the historical origins of the Positivist epistemology of practice. Simon believes that all professional practice is centrally concerned with what he calls "design," that is, with the process of "changing existing situations into preferred ones."44 But design in this sense is precisely what the professional schools do not teach.

Simon proposes to build a science of design by emulating and extending the optimization methods which have been developed in statistical decision theory and management science.

Here, ends have been converted to "constraints" and "utility functions"; means, to "command variables"; and laws, to "environmental parameters." Once problems are well formed in this way, they can be solved by a calculus of decision. As we have seen, however, well-formed instrumental problems are not given but must be constructed from messy problematic situations. Although Simon proposes to fill the gap between natural science and design practice with a science of design, his science can be applied only to well-formed problems already extracted from situations of practice.

Schein, Glazer, and Simon propose three different approaches to the limitations of Technical Rationality and the related dilemma of rigor or relevance. All three employ a common strategy, however. They try to fill the gap between the scientific basis of professional knowledge and the demands of real-world practice in such a way as to preserve the model of Technical Rationality. Schein does it by segregating convergent science from divergent practice, relegating divergence to a residual category called "divergent skill." Glazer does it by attributing convergence to the major professions, which he applauds, and divergence to the minor professions, which he dismisses. Simon does it by proposing a science of design which depends on having well-formed instrumental problems to begin with.

Our knowing is ordinarily tacit, implicit in our patterns of action and in our feel for the stuff with which we are dealing. It seems right to say that our knowing is in our action.

It is this entire process of reflection-in-action which is central to the "art" by which practitioners sometimes deal well with situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict.

In examples like these, knowing has the following properties: There are actions, recognitions, and judgments which we know how to carry out spontaneously; we do not have to think about them prior to or during their performance. We are often unaware of having learned to do these things; we simply find ourselves doing them. In some cases, we were once aware of the understandings which were subsequently internalized in our feeling for the stuff of action. In other cases, we may never have been aware of them. In both cases, however, we are usually unable to describe the knowing which our action reveals. It is in this sense that I speak of knowing-in-action, the characteristic mode of ordinary practical knowledge.

The word "practice" is ambiguous. When we speak of a lawyer's practice, we mean the kinds of things he does, the kinds of clients he has, the range of cases he is called upon to handle. When we speak of someone practicing the piano, however, we mean the repetitive or experimental activity by which he tries to increase his proficiency on the instrument. In the first sense, "practice" refers to performance in a range of professional situations. In the second, it refers to preparation for performance. But professional practice also includes an element of repetition. A professional practitioner is a specialist who encounters certain types of situations again and again. This is suggested by the way in which professionals use the word "case"—or project, account, commission, or deal, depending on the profession. All such terms denote the units which make up a practice, and they denote types of family-resembling examples. Thus a physician may encounter many different "cases of measles"; a lawyer, many different "cases of libel." As a practitioner experiences many variations of a small number of types of cases, he is able to "practice" his practice.

A practitioner's reflection can serve as a corrective to overlearning. Through reflection, he can surface and criticize the tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive experiences of a specialized practice, and can make new sense of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness which he may allow himself to experience.

A practitioner's reflcction-in-action may not be very rapid. It is bounded by the "action-present," the zone of time in which action can still make a difference to the situation. The action-present may stretch over minutes, hours, days, or even weeks or months, depending on the pace of activity and the situational boundaries that are characteristic of the practice. Within the give-and-take of courtroom behavior, for example, a lawyer's reflection-in-action may take place in seconds; but when the context is that of an antitrust case that drags on over years, reflection-in-action may proceed in leisurely fashion over the course of several months. An orchestra conductor may think of a single performance as a unit of practice, but in another sense a whole season is his unit. The pace and duration of episodes of reflection-in-action vary with the pace and duration of the situations of practice.

Reflection-in-action, in these several modes, is central to the art through which practitioners sometimes cope with the troublesome "divergent" situations of practice. When the phenomenon at hand eludes the ordinary categories of knowledge-in-practice, presenting itself as unique or unstable, the practitioner may surface and criticize his initial understanding of the phenomenon, construct a new description of it, and test the new description by an on-the-spot experiment. Sometimes he arrives at a new theory of the phenomenon by articulating a feeling he has about it. When he finds himself stuck in a problematic situation which he cannot readily convert to a manageable problem, he may construct a new way of setting the problem—a new frame which, in what I shall call a "frame experiment," he tries to impose on the situation. When he is confronted with demands that seem incompatible or inconsistent, he may respond by reflecting on the appreciations which he and others have brought to the situation. Conscious of a dilemma, he may attribute it to the way in which he has set his problem, or even to the way in which he has framed his role. He may then find a way of integrating, or choosing among, the values at stake in the situation.

In examples such as these, something falls outside the range of ordinary expectations. The banker has a feeling that something is wrong, though he cannot at first say what it is. The physician sees an odd combination of diseases never before described in a medical text. Tolstoy thinks of each of his pupils as an individual with ways of learning and imperfections peculiar to himself. The teachers are astonished by the sense behind a student's mistake. In each instance, the practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation.

Each move is a local experiment which contributes to the global experiment of reframing the problem.

The testing of local moves is partly linked to, and partly independent of, this system of implications. Quist discovers that the three classroom levels carved into the slope yield a "total differentiation potential of fifteen feet maximum" which would permit "as much as five-foot intervals" and he subsequently notices that these spaces, seen in section, could be made into "nooks." Here he affirms a local move because he finds that it has produced a situation out of which he can make something that he likes. In this he makes use of his knowledge of the relations between slopes of various grades and their uses. But he finds further support for the dimensions of the geometry he has carved into the slope when he discovers that the resulting configuration "works slightly with the contours." His method of carving the geometry of the classrooms into the slope is affirmed in one way when he sees it as a local experiment and in another way when he sees it as part of a global experiment.

Petra's problem solving has led her to a dead end, Quist reflects critically on the main problem she has set, reframes it, and proceeds to work out the consequences of the new geometry he has imposed on the screwy site. The ensuing inquiry is a global experiment, a reflection-in-action on the restructured problem.

It is not difficult to see how a design process of this form might underlie differences of language and style associated with the various schools of architecture. Designers might differ, for example, with respect to the priorities they assign to design domains at various stages of the process. They might focus less on the global geometry of buildings, as Quist does, than on the site or on the properties and potentials of materials. They might let the design depend more heavily on the formal implications of construction modules. Their governing images might be framed in terms of building character, and they might allow particular precedents to influence more frankly the order they impose on the site. But whatever their differences of language, priorities, images, styles, and precedents, they are likely to find themselves, like Quist, in a situation of complexity and uncertainty which demands the imposition of an order. From whatever sources they draw such an initial discipline, they will treat its imposition on the site as a global experiment whose results will be only dimly apparent in the early stages of the process. They will need to discover its consequences and implications. And though they may differ from Quist in their way of appreciating these, they will, like him, engage in a conversation with the situation they are shaping. Although their repertoire of meanings may be different from Quist's, they are likely to find new and unexpected meanings in the changes they produce and to redirect their moves in response to such discoveries. And if they are good designers, they will reflect-inaction on the situation's back-talk, shifting stance as they do so from "what if?" to recognition of implications, from involvement in the unit to consideration of the total, and from exploration to commitment.

The main lines of this process can be readily drawn. Indeed, they are not very far below the surface of the examples as I have described them. In each case, the student has set and tried to solve a problem and has been unable to solve the problem as set. Petra cannot butt the shapes of the building into the contours of the slope; neither can the Resident unravel the puzzle of the patient by analyzing her relationships with others. In each case the teacher responds by surfacing and criticizing the student's framing of the problem.

As the practitioner reframes the student's problem, he suggests a direction for reshaping the situation. Petra is urged to impose a geometry onto the slope, a geometry seen as generated by the L-shaped classrooms. The Resident is invited to join the two streams of experience drawn from the patient's life in and out of therapy.

The practitioner then takes the reframed problem and conducts an experiment to discover what consequences and…

In order to see what can be made to follow from his refraining of the situation, each practitioner tries to adapt the situation to the frame. This he does through a web of moves, discovered consequences, implications, appreciations, and further moves. Within the larger web, individual moves yield…

But the practitioner's moves also produce unintended changes which give the situations new meanings. The situation talks back, the practitioner listens, and as he appreciates what…

In this reflective conversation, the practitioner's effort to solve the reframed problem yields new discoveries which call for new reflection-in-action. The process spirals through stages of appreciation, action, and reappreciation. The unique and uncertain situation comes to be understood through…

Such is the skeleton of the process. It suggests several further questions. The practitioner conducts an experiment in reframing the problematic situation. But how is such an experiment to be evaluated? The practitioner judges his problem-solving effectiveness in terms of an objective function, but how ought he to judge the problem setting which establishes the objective function? When the practitioner takes seriously the uniqueness of the present situation, how does he make use of the experience he has accumulated in his earlier practice? When he cannot apply familiar categories of theory or technique, how does he bring prior knowledge to bear on the invention of new frames, theories, and strategies of action? Reflection-in-action is a kind of experimenting. But practice situations are notoriously resistant to controlled experiment. How does the practitioner escape or compensate for the practical limits to controlled experiment? In what sense, if any, is there rigor in on-the-spot experiment? Technical problem solving involves a characteristic stance toward inquiry, as suggested…

Quist and the Supervisor act as though they were judging their reframing of the students' problems in terms of these questions: Can I solve the problem 1 have set? Do I like what I get when I solve this problem? Have I made the situation coherent? Have I made it congruent with my fundamental values and theories? Have I kept inquiry moving?

When the practitioner tries to solve the problem he has set, he seeks both to understand the situation and to change it, Quist's moves test the new geometry's suitability to the slope and at the same time they carve the L-shaped classrooms into the slope, producing a new configuration of buildings on the site.

Through the unintended effects of action, the situation talks back. The practitioner, reflecting on this back-talk, may find new meanings in the situation which lead him to a new refraining. Thus he judges a problem-setting by the quality and direction of the reflective conversation to which it leads. This judgment rests, at least in part, on his perception of potentials for coherence and congruence which he can realize through his further inquiry.

But the achievement of coherence does not put an end to inquiry. On the contrary, the practitioner also evaluates his reframing by its ability, in Erikson's phrase, to keep inquiry moving. Quist concludes his review by describing new questions which flow from the design—the size of the middle area, the dimensions of the grid, the treatment of the trees.

The Supervisor's initial description of the patient's problem opens up a line of inquiry into the unique experience of this woman. He may have seen other patients who were continually self-frustrating or guilty, but he does not diagnose this patient as a case of guilt as a physician might diagnose someone as a case of mumps or chicken pox. Rather, he attends to her particular way of being guilty and to the role guilt plays in her inability to satisfy herself. The notions of guilt and self-frustration guide his attempts to discover what is different about this patient's experience.

What I want to propose is this: The practitioner has built up a repertoire of examples, images, understandings, and actions. Quist's repertoire ranges across the design domains. It includes sites he has seen, buildings he has known, design problems he has encountered, and solutions he has devised for them. The Supervisor's repertoire includes patients he has seen or read about, types of stories he has heard and psychodynamic patterns associated with them, interventions he has tried, and patients' responses to them. A practitioner's repertoire includes the whole of his experience insofar as it is accessible to him for understanding and action.

To see this site as that one is not to subsume the first under a familiar category or rule. It is, rather, to see the unfamiliar, unique situation as both similar to and different from the familiar one, without at first being able to say similar or different with respect to what. The

On the other hand, the inquirer may reflect on the similarities and differences he has perceived or enacted. He may do this by consciously comparing the two situations, or by describing this situation in the light of a tacit reference to the other.

It is our capacity to see unfamiliar situations as familiar ones, and to do in the former as we have done in the latter, that enables us to bring our past experience to bear on the unique case. It is our capacity to see-as and do-as that allows us to have a feel for problems that do not fit existing rules.

Moreover, each new experience of reflection-in-action enriches his repertoire. Petra's case may function as an exemplar for new situations. Reflection-in-action in a unique case may be generalized to other cases, not by giving rise to general principles, but by contributing to the practitioner's repertoire of exemplary themes from which, in the subsequent cases of his practice, he may compose new variations.

In the most generic sense, to experiment is to act in order to see what the action leads to.

When action is undertaken only to see what follows, without accompanying predictions or expectations, I shall call it exploratory experiment.

Exploratory experiment is the probing, playful activity by which we get a feel for things. It succeeds when it leads to the discovery of something there.

There is another way in which we sometimes do things in order to see what happens: we take action in order to produce an intended change. A carpenter who wants to make a structure stable tries fastening a board across the angle of a corner. A chess player advances his pawn in order to protect his queen. A parent gives his child a quarter to keep the child from crying. I shall call these move-testing experiments. Any deliberate action undertaken with an end in mind is, in this sense, an experiment. In the simplest case, where there are no unintended outcomes and one either gets the intended consequences or does not, I shall say that the move is affirmed when it produces what is intended for it and is negated when it does not. In more complicated cases, however, moves produce effects beyond those intended. One can get very good things without intending them, and very bad things may accompany the achievement of intended results. Here the test of the affirmation of a move is not only Do you get what you intend? but Do you like what you get?

A third kind of experimenting, hypothesis testing, I have already described. Hypothesis-testing experiment succeeds when it effects an intended discrimination among competing hypotheses. If, for a given hypothesis, its predicted consequences fit what is observed, and the predictions derived from alternative hypotheses conflict with observation, then we can say that the first hypothesis has been confirmed and the others, disconfirmed—or, in Popper's more accurate formulation, the first hypothesis has demonstrated a greater competitive resistance to refutation.

What is it, then, that is distinctive about the experimenting that goes on in practice? The practice context is different from the research context in several important ways, all of which have to do with the relationship between changing things and understanding them. The practitioner has an interest in transforming the situation from what it is to something he likes better. He also has an interest in understanding the situation, but it is in the service of his interest in change.

When the practitioner reflects-in-action in a case he perceives as unique, paying attention to phenomena and surfacing his intuitive understanding of them, his experimenting is at once exploratory, move testing, and hypothesis testing. The three functions are fulfilled by the very same actions. And from this fact follows the distinctive character of experimenting in practice.

When we compare the practitioner's hypothesis-testing experiment to the method of controlled experiment, however, there are several notable differences. The practitioner makes his hypothesis come true. He acts as though his hypothesis were in the imperative mood.7 He says, in effect, "Let it be the case that X . . and shapes the situation so that X becomes true.

Thus their hypothesis-testing activity is neither self-fulfilling prophecy, which insures against the apprehension of disconfirming data, nor is it the neutral hypothesis testing of the method of controlled experiment, which calls for the experimenter to avoid influencing the object of study and to embrace disconfirming data. The practice situation is neither clay to be molded at will nor an independent, self-sufficient object of study from which the inquirer keeps his distance. The inquirer's relation to this situation is transactional.9 He shapes the situation, but in conversation with it, so that his own models and appreciations are also shaped by the situation. The phenomena that he seeks to understand are partly of his own making; he is in the situation that he seeks to understand.

He understands the situation by trying to change it, and considers the resulting changes not as a defect of experimental method but as the essence of its success. This fact has an important bearing on the practitioner's answer to the question, When should I stop experimenting?

But in practice situations like Quist's and the Supervisor's—where experimental action is also a move and a probe, where the inquirer's interest in changing the situation takes precedence over his interest in understanding it— hypothesis testing is bounded by appreciations. It is initiated by the perception of something troubling or promising, and it is terminated by the production of changes one finds on the whole satisfactory, or by the discovery of new features which give the situation new meaning and change the nature of the questions to be explored. Such events bring hypothesis testing to a close even when the inquirer has not exhausted his store of plausible alternative hypotheses.

The full range of changes, those that match or fail to match his expectations together with those that fall outside the scope of his intentions, are encompassed in this schema: Consequences in relation to intention Desirability of all perceived consequences, intended or unintended 1. Surprise Undesirable 2. Surprise Desirable or neutral 3. No surprise Desirable or neutral 4. No surprise Undesirable

When a move fails to do what is intended and produces consequences considered on the whole to be undesirable, the inquirer surfaces the theory implicit in the move, criticizes it, restructures it, and tests the new theory by inventing a move consistent with it. The learning sequence, initiated by the negation of a move, terminates when new theory leads to a new move which is affirmed. From the point of view of the logic of confirmation, the results of experiment remain ambiguous. Other theories of action or models might also account for the failure of the earlier move and the success of the later one. But in the practice context, priority is placed on the interest in change and therefore on the logic of affirmation. It is the logic of affirmation which sets the boundaries of experimental rigor.

The situations of Quist and the Supervisor are, in important ways, not the real thing. Quist is not moving dirt on the site. The Supervisor is not talking to the patient. Each is operating in a virtual world, a constructed representation of the real world of practice. This fact is significant for the question of rigor in experimenting. In his virtual world, the practitioner can manage some of the constraints to hypothesis-testing experiment which are inherent in the world of his practice. Hence his ability to construct and manipulate virtual worlds is a crucial component of his ability not only to perform artistically but to experiment rigorously.

Hence, he must adopt a kind of double vision.11 He must act in accordance with the view he has adopted, but he must recognize that he can always break it open later, indeed, must break it open later in order to make new sense of his transaction with the situation.

Something similar had been happening in Wilson's work on malnourishment. He had begun with the image of a nutrient flow model that would organize all of the variables recognized by the conflicting research perspectives on malnourishment, and he had intended that outside experts would use that model to diagnose and cure the malnourishment problems of particular communities. Nevertheless, as he became more fully aware of the methodological difficulties in constructing the model and of the dilemmas of implementing it, he was led to restructure his image of intervention. It would not be outside experts but community members themselves who would use the nutrient flow model idea to diagnose their own malnourishment problems and design their own interventions. With this change, community learning became an objective equal in importance to the reduction of malnourishment. And as a consequence, community members—who might have figured as parts of the social context of technical practice—became problem-solving agents. As Wilson sought to create at the Hogar the conditions for a Cogwheel Experiment on malnourishment, he had to frame and reflect on a new problem, that of involving and guiding the community members he wished to adopt as co-inquirers. His practice as a systems engineer merged with his practice as a teacher.

Whatever the triggering condition, a manager's renection-in-action is fundamentally similar to reflection-in-action in other professional fields. It consists in on-the-spot surfacing, criticizing, restructuring, and testing of intuitive understandings of experienced phenomena; often it takes the form of a reflective conversation with the situation. But a manager s reflection-in-action also has special features of its own. A manager's professional life is wholly concerned with an organization which is both the stage for his activity and the object of his inquiry. Hence, the phenomena on which he reflects-in-action are the phenomena of organizational life.

Finally, managers live in an organizational system which may promote or inhibit reflection-in-action. Organizational structures are more or less adaptable to new findings, more or less resistant to new tasks. The behavioral world of the organization, the characteristic pattern of interpersonal relations, is more or less open to reciprocal reflection-in-action—to the surfacing of negative information, the working out of conflicting views, and the public airing of organizational dilemmas. Insofar as organizational structure and behavioral world condition organizational inquiry, they make up what I will call the "learning system" of the organization. The scope and direction of a manager's reflection-in-action are strongly influenced, and may be severely limited, by the learning system of the organization in which he practices.

Thus managers must commit to a process which they distrust. They respond by making the commitment of resources hard to win; and once resources are committed, they hold the product development director wholly accountable for performance, loading him with the full burden of uncertainty. And the maintenance of corporate commitment becomes touchier as investment in the product increases and the company becomes more exposed. Under these circumstances, product development people try to win the game by gaining and retaining management commitment, while maintaining their own credibility within the company.

So product-development is a high-wire act in which you eventually fall. Moreover, you don't whine or complain, because you would be seen to lack confidence. The effect is to put product development directors, those who occupy the pivotal position between general managers and the laboratory, under a great deal of strain. They strive to protect their own credibility, keeping problems "under a tent," with the result that in midstream, problems tend to be ignored. In order to retain corporate commitment, the product is changed as little as possible. Once a problem has been exposed, however, they "climb all over it." And they strive to retain ownership of the task, which makes them treat offers of help as though they were threats to security.

The Art of Managing and Its Limits

Patterns and Limits of Reflection-in-Action Across the Professions

"reflective conversation with the situation."

Thus, in all of these examples, inquiry, however it may initially have been conceived, turns into a frame experiment. What allows this to happen is that the inquirer is willing to step into the problematic situation, to impose a frame on it, to follow the implications of the discipline thus established, and yet to remain open to the situation's back-talk.

I have so far stressed similarities of pattern in the various arts of reflective professional practice, but there are also important differences. These go beyond the familiar distinctions between "hard" and "soft" professions, "helping professions" and "mechanical arts," "learned professions" and "professionalizing occupations." I have in mind differences in the constants that various practitioners bring to their reflection-inaction: the media, languages, and repertoires that practitioners use to describe reality and conduct experiments the appreciative systems they bring to problem setting, to the evaluation of inquiry, and to reflective conversation the overarching theories by which they make sense of phenomena the role frames within which they set their tasks and through which they bound their institutional settings.

If, in the midst of such inquiries as these, there were a sudden shift of appreciative system, inquiry would no longer have the character of a reflective conversation. It would become a series of disconnected episodes. It is also because of the constancy of his appreciative system that an inquirer engaged in on-the-spot experiment can tell when he is finished. He bounds his experimenting by his appreciation of the changes he has wrought.

overarching theories. An overarching theory does not give a rule that can be applied to predict or control a particular event, but it supplies language from which to construct particular descriptions and themes from which to develop particular interpretations. Psychoanalytic theory functions in this way for the Supervisor,

These arguments admit the possibility of reflecting on action (even the pitcher who never "thinks" during the game is happy to review films of the game in the privacy and safety of the locker-room), but they point to the dangers of reflection in action.

The fear that reflection-in-action will trigger an infinite regress of reflection derives from an unexamined dichotomy of thought and action. If we separate thinking from doing, seeing thought only as a preparation for action and action only as an implementation of thought, then it is easy to believe that when we step into the separate domain of thought we will become lost in an infinite regress of thinking about thinking. But in actual reflection-in-action, as we have seen, doing and thinking are complementary. Doing extends thinking in the tests, moves, and probes of experimental action, and reflection feeds on doing and its results. Each feeds the other, and each sets boundaries for the other. It is the surprising result of action that triggers reflection, and it is the production of a satisfactory move that brings reflection temporarily to a close.

Quite different from the mythical limits to reflection, celebrated in the conventional wisdom, are the self-reinforcing systems of knowing-in-practice that we have encountered in some of our case studies of professional practice. The town planner in our example reflects on his strategies of problem solving but not on his problem settings or on the role frame and theory of action from which they derive. The consumer product managers reflect on their organizational crises but not on the organizational learning system that fosters crises. Their reflections operate within their systems of understanding.

It seems to me that the processes which maintain the constancy of individual and organizational systems of knowing-in practice are also the ones that keep the art of practice mysterious. When a practitioner does not reflect on his own inquiry, he keeps his intuitive understandings tacit and is inattentive to the limits of his scope of reflective attention. The remedy to the mystification of practice and to the constriction of reflection-in-action is the same: a redirection of attention to the system of knowing-in-practice and to reflection-in-action itself.

The status of professional experts, their claims to social mandate, autonomy, and license, are based on the powerful ideas of Technical Rationality and the technological program. There is no more vivid sign of the persistence of these ideas than the hunger for technique which is so characteristic of students of the professions in this decade.

These arguments are used to justify the thoroughgoing demystification of the professions and to buttress either of two remedial strategies: development of a new breed of professional advocates who will work in the interests of the powerless client-victims of the professions, educating them to their rights and organizing them to defend their rights; or creȧtion of a new breed of citizen-practitioners—citizen-planners, citizen-builders, citizen-physicians—who will be equipped to take over the territories of the professional experts.

And in this sense, demystification is not a showing up of the falsity of the practitioner's claims to knowledge but a bid to undertake the often arduous task of opening it up to inquiry.

But I shall argue that radical critique cannot substitute for (though it may provoke) the qualified professional's critical self-reflection. Unreflective practitioners are equally limited and destructive whether they label themselves as professionals or counterprofessionals.

The traditional professional-client relationship, linked to the traditional epistemology of practice, can be described as a contract, a set of shared norms governing the behavior of each party to the interaction.

The radical criticism of the professions carries significant implications for the professional-client contract. Because the radical critic denies the legitimacy of the professional's authority and of the client's submission to it, he rejects a fundamental element of the traditional contract.

The movement to create "citizen professionals," on the other hand, is an effort to replace the professional-client contract by a new contract in which exchanges of service and remuneration would occur between laymen. But these remedies carry defects of their own. When advocates organize clients to defend their rights against excessive professional control, the organized advocacy and the adversarial process may become as controlling and as unreflective as traditional professional practice at its worst.

The defects of such measures seem to hinge on one or another of two issues. First, there is the difficulty of combining an adversarial stance toward the professional with a wish to benefit from his special knowledge. And second, there is the sense in which a professional advocate or citizen-professional still takes a professional stance, claiming special knowledge and autonomy which he may abuse in his relations with his clients.

It is important to note, first of all, that reflective practice does not free us from the need to worry about client rights and mechanisms of professional accountability. My concern is to show how the professional-client contract may be transformed, within a framework of accountability, when the professional is able to function as a reflective practitioner.

In this sort of example, and in the examples of reflective teaching, managing, and therapy which I have given earlier, there is the recognition that one's expertise is a way of looking at something which was once constructed and may be reconstructed; and there is both readiness and competence to explore its meaning in the experience of the client. The reflective practitioner tries to discover the limits of his expertise through reflective conversation with the client.

Thus, in a reflective contract between practitioner and client, the client does not agree to accept the practitioner's authority but to suspend disbelief in it. He agrees to join the practitioner in inquiring into the situation for which the client seeks help; to try to understand what he is experiencing and to make that understanding accessible to the practitioner; to confront the practitioner when he does not understand or agree; to test the practitioner's competence by observing his effectiveness and to make public his questions over what should be counted as effectiveness; to pay for services rendered and to appreciate competence demonstrated. The practitioner agrees to deliver competent performance to the limits of his capacity; to help the client understand the meaning of the professional's advice and the rationale for his actions, while at the same time he tries to learn the meanings his actions have for his client; to make himself readily confrontable by his client; and to reflect on his own tacit understandings when he needs to do so in o*der to play his part in fulfilling the contract

Expert Reflective Practitioner

In short, the competent client should really function in many ways as a reflective practitioner. He need not pretend to take matters into his own hands (like the "lay physician" or "citizen planner"), but he should cultivate competence in reflective conversation with the professional, stimulating him to reflect on his own knowledge-in-practice.

Traditional Contract Reflective Contract

Nevertheless, there are kinds of research which can be undertaken outside the immediate context of practice in order to enhance the practitioner's capacity for reflection-in-action. "Reflective research," as I shall call it, may be of four types, each of which already exists at least in embryo. Frame analysis, the study of the ways in which practitioners frame problems and roles, can help practitioners to become aware of and criticize their tacit frames. Description and analysis of images, category schemes, cases, precedents, and exemplars can help to build the repertoires which practitioners bring to unique situations. A most important kind of research has to do with the methods of inquiry and the overarching theories of phenomena, from which practitioners may develop on-the-spot variations. And practitioners can benefit from research on the process of reflection-in-action itself.

When practitioners are unaware of their frames for roles or problems, they do not experience the need to choose among them. They do not attend to the ways in which they construct the reality in which they function; for them, it is simply the given reality.

When a practitioner becomes aware of his frames, he also becomes aware of the possibility of alternative ways of framing the reality of his practice. He takes note of the values and norms to which he has given priority, and those he has given less importance, or left out of account altogether. Frame awareness tends to entrain awareness of dilemmas.

In the field of psychotherapy, as I have noted earlier, practitioners have to deal with a bewildering variety of "schools." Leston Havens has proposed that these can be grouped into the broad categories of objective-descriptive, interpersonal, psychoanalytic, and existential psychiatry.9 Architects face a similar predicament. They may choose, for example, to be "historicists," focussing on the development of variations on historical precedents. They may identify with the "modern movement," which has sought to free itself from historical precedent but has now become something of a tradition in its own right. They may concentrate on building as a craft which utilizes and gives prominence to the unique properties of materials. They may see building as an industrial process which calls for new technologies and for building-systems. Or they may give primary importance to the idea of architecture as a social process in which the users of buildings should participate in design. Social workers may approach their tasks as clinical caseworkers, monitors and controllers of social behavior, deliverers of social services, advocates of the rights of their clients, or as community organizers.