Edmondson’s article is a good one. It’s a nice application of Donald Schön’s concept of a learning organization to real examples. She clearly has built on his work and perhaps made it more palatable to the practitioner. She even uses many of Schön’s original examples, such as the tennis player who “learns” while executing. I’m interested to know if she changed Schön’s original term “Reflection-in-Action” to “Execution-as-Learning” because she disagreed with his thinking in some way, or for some other reason.

Interestingly, Schön differentiates between reflection-in-action (like the tennis player planning his next shot while running to the net) and reflection-on-action (like the tennis player watching game film after the game), where Edmonson is not as explicit about this differentiation. Schön seemed to think (and i agree) that this was an important distinction, because expert practitioners often have trouble making their processes of reflection-in-action explicit – and therefore cannot pass those skills on to others. Edmonson seems to me to address the need for reflection-on-action in her step 4 where she recommends institutionalized disciplined self-reflection, but might be leaving out an organization’s ability to develop “learning executors” who develop the individual skills necessary to simultaneously learn and execute on the spot in the moment.

I’m going to read a little more by Edmonson to see if this was an intentional shift, or perhaps just the result of having to write a short-format article.