I spent last week on holiday in Italy. There’s solid science to explain why it was one of the best weeks of learning I’ve had since the summer.
I didn’t plan to think about work on holiday last week, but it did more for my thinking than any week since the summer.
The outline of a new book proposal took shape. The answer to an issue that has been nagging me since the summer showed up in plain sight. And the solution to a longstanding issue became clear.
All of this stuff was resolved because I’d stopped working. It turns out that there’s a solid body of evidence to explain why taking a break is important not just for physical rest but also for learning.
Why reflection beats practice
Cognitive science explains why this works. When you’re doing stuff, the brain focuses on the task in hand. There is no capacity for the work of linking a new experience to existing knowledge or spotting patterns.
I’ve been writing all year about the shift in public relations from production-level work to management-level judgement. AI is absorbing the monitoring, drafting and reporting. Management increasingly pays for the ability to read a situation, assess risk and provide advice.
This capacity and expertise are built through reflection.
Reflection as a safety mechanism
There is a category of work in public relations where reflection acts as a safety mechanism.
Practitioners spend a lot of their time on emotionally charged issues: a redundancy programme, a product failure, or an attack on the organisation that feels personal.
The pressure for a rapid response leads to a gut reaction. Daniel Kahneman’s work on fast and slow thinking describes this mechanism. Fast thinking works when the situation matches a pattern you’ve seen before. A crisis rarely matches the pattern.
My own research adds an additional perspective. Senior communicators absorb the emotional weight of the organisation and have no way of managing it. Clinicians have supervision and emergency services debrief as a matter of routine. Public relations practioners have neither.
Redesigning workflow to build better judgement and decision making
The challenge is finding and putting a value on the time required for reflective learning. Activity and outputs are our baseline metric and overservice is the norm.
But we must deliberately design our workflow to allow for reflection. It is critical to building judgement and good decision making.
Unfortunately, a week in Italy isn’t a scalable solution, but research suggests that benefit comes from regular breaks and positive behaviours. Here are some suggestions:
Write it down - use 15 minutes at the end of the day to write down what you have learned. Journaling is a powerful means of learning.
Protect unscheduled time during the week - walk, read or reflect on a problem.
Ask reflective questions in one-to-ones - “what have you learned since we last spoke” changes what people notice.
Debrief on challenging issues - use the emergency services format of reflective learning, without blame.
Take the holiday - research on emotional and physical recovery is clear that partial disconnection delivers limited benefit.
If you have a practice that works for building reflection into your week, reply and tell me. I’ll share the best of them.
Have a good week ahead.
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Further reading
This article was originally posted on my Substack. The Wadds Inc. newsletter is read by almost 6,000 communications and public relations practitioners. We take a slower, critical perspective on the research, evidence and developments shaping the field. We put evidence before opinion, and we say how confident we are in what we publish.
