The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action

The author links academic and practical knowledge and sets them onto equal footing. He explains how practitioners know what they know, and he emphasizes the creative processes involved in planning and problem-solving. Schon's work addresses a variety of professions -- engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning -- and distills what they have in common.

Dr. Schon addresses how professionals can better join in a process of learning and decision-making. By seeing life as a process involving both the service provider and the client/customer, the interaction itself provides additional tools and information. Coming out of an industrial engineering perspective, processes of decision-making can be structured to require step-by-step participation in problem definition and solution clarification. Best quote: "A skillful teacher draws out critical facts, and by a sequence of astutely chosen questions leads students through a process of inquiry which serves both to structure the "solution space" of the situation at hand and to demonstrate a mode of thinking about business problems."

This is a critical book that provides a foundation for most of the other work on organizational learning (such as Senge) and complexity in organizations (Wheatley). As most classics are, this is not the most up-to-date book on reflection and action, and if you are looking for something that will give you a fast pay-off, I suggest looking elsewhere. If, however, you are interested in reading one of the foundational pieces of writing on these issues, this is one of the classics, and an important book.

A word of warning. This book is hard to read. Some things are reapeated over and over, while other detailes are never given proper treatment. But - if you don't mind spending some time reading and analyzing the book, there are heaps of golden nuggets to find. Schön illustrates why rational design processes doesn't work in reality (for computer enthusiasts this means an explanation of why the waterfall model will never work on real life problems). Instead he tries to explain how designer (architects, musicians, engineers etc.) really work, when they solve real problems. And how to teach expert knowledge to others. I highly recommend this book for non-whimps...;-)

In this book, Schon gives us a language for understanding professional practice. Because the sum of what a professional knows is greater than the sum of what he is aware he knows -- let alone the totality of what he can articulate -- there is a hidden world of practitioner competence. I found Schon to be a little repetitive and his examples difficult to fully conceptualize. However, his discussion of the Technical Rationality model and his vignettes of five professions provide a framework which may be applied to the practice of any profession. I believe that readers of this book can enhance their self-awareness as professionals and artists.