The Quiet Rebellion of Reflection

Why is Reflective Thinking Uncommon?

Thinking

My old professor used to tell me “we think less than we think we think,” and of course he was right. If we think less than we think we think, then what is real thinking? One area of thinking which is greatly underappreciated, and practiced, is reflective thinking.

Reflective thinking is the disciplined process of pausing to examine our beliefs, actions, and assumptions in light of evidence, experience, and consequence. It is deliberate and metacognitive, thinking about thinking, with the aim of gaining deeper understanding or correcting implicit assumptions. It involves both narrative construction and analytical detachment: replaying events in memory while interrogating the motivations, values, and contextual forces at play. In this way, it exists somewhere between journaling and strategic planning.

Unlike rumination, which fixates on distress without resolution, reflection reframes and extracts meaning, often leading to insight, action, or release. It is not the same as idle musing or intellectual abstraction; rather, it is an active effort to make sense of complexity, to identify inconsistencies, and to refine our judgments. In the professional world, where decisions carry weight and reputations hinge on insight, reflective thinking is both a cognitive tool and a moral imperative.

Reflection is a complex, rigorous, intellectual, and emotional enterprise that takes time to do well.

Grasping the World

In a world so thoroughly besieged by noise, notifications, deadlines, the algorithmic shriek of relevance, quiet thinking may seem quaint. But if our age suffers from a cognitive affliction, it is not a lack of information. It is a deficit of deliberate self-inquiry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote in ‘Self-Reliance’:

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

This is reflective thinking as intellectual rebellion. Emerson urges us to scrutinize inherited beliefs, resist crowd logic, and cultivate an inner compass. His writing is aphoristic, each sentence a distillation of deep thought. In this, Emerson stands as an early voice for metacognitive courage: the willingness to pause, examine, and dissent.

We see another form of reflective reckoning in Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Near the novel’s end, the protagonist, an aging English butler named Stevens, concedes:

“Indeed — why should I not admit it? — at that moment, my heart was breaking.”

This is reflection not as revelation, but as belated reconciliation. Stevens, who has spent a lifetime repressing emotion and subordinating personal judgment to professional dignity, slowly confronts the cost of his loyalty, missed love, and moral blindness. His reflections, filtered through decorous, understated language, reveal the quiet tragedy of a life examined too late. Here, reflection is not grand epiphany, but a final act of moral inventory.

John Dewey, the grandfather of modern reflection, wasn’t interested in the idle churnings of the mind. “Thinking,” for Dewey, was not a verb for casual pondering but the foundation of democratic life and responsible agency. It was a discipline of consequence: an active, deliberate inquiry that began in doubt and ended, tentatively, in judgment. Reflective thinking, as Dewey insisted in How We Think, was the slow burn that turned experience into insight.

“It involves,” Carol Rodgers later wrote, “not just a sequence of ideas, but a consequence—a belief or action.”

The reflective mind moves not in circles but in spirals: revisiting, re-evaluating, re-forming.

Yet the modern workplace, like much of professional life, has declared war on slowness. Reflection demands time, and time, as we are told, is productivity's enemy. The tragic irony, of course, is that without time to digest, we lose the very nutrients of our intellectual diet. Even when organizations pay lip service to 'lessons learned,' the relentless pace often means these become box-ticking exercises rather than genuine inquiries. The manager who pivots from Zoom call to quarterly report and back again may cover ground quickly, but rarely sees what's beneath their feet. And in bypassing reflection, they risk not only inefficiency, but a dereliction of the deeper responsibilities embedded in their role.

Reflection is a learned process

Researchers like Uğur Akpur have empirically demonstrated what common sense already suggests: reflective thinking correlates strongly with effective performance. But that should not be the end of the story. Reflection is not merely a means to better metrics; it is the posture of a person who intends to act with discernment. Dewey argued that the hallmark of reflective thought was the

“… active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it.”

That is not a skill confined to academia. That is a leadership stance, of oneself and others.

And yet, as Norman Bauer observed, “reflection” is often treated as a rhetorical garnish, spoken but not done. The term has been so diluted by organizational enthusiasm that it risks becoming meaningless. A retrospective memo does not reflection make. Nor does a compliance survey or a keynote debrief conducted out of obligation.

Dewey warned us that reflection had to involve consequences, whether for belief, for action, or for the direction of an organization. Absent those, we drift into what Donald Schön called “technical rationality”: efficient, clean, and entirely unmoored from the murky uncertainties of real decisions.

So what would it mean to practice reflective thinking seriously? First, it would mean abandoning the fantasy of seamless control. As Hans Gelter, in Why is Reflective Thinking Uncommon, put it, reflection is evolutionarily recent and effortful, a conscious act by a fragile “I” beset by distractions, cognitive biases, emotional reactivity, social pressure to appear decisive, and the sheer glut of incoming stimuli.

Intellectual honesty

If you want reflection, you must train for it. It is not spontaneous. It is a skill acquired in defiance of one’s own brain, which is evolutionarily optimized for speed and survival, not self-interrogation.

Second, it means recognizing that reflection is not cognition alone, but a moral stance. The reflective person is not simply asking, “Is this true?” but also, “Why did I believe it? Who is affected by this? What follows from it?” This is not unlike what Dewey called the “habit of examining the basis for beliefs,” which in its deepest sense is a form of intellectual honesty. We reflect not because it is efficient, but because it is ethical.

Third, to institutionalize reflection is to slow the tempo of professional and personal life. While this might seem insurmountable, even small changes, like reserving 30 minutes of no-meeting time for focused thought each day, or instituting a 24-hour cooling-off period before major non-urgent decisions, can carve out space for deeper thinking. Reflection flourishes not in the all-hands meeting, but in the well-posed question. Not in the deck, but in the silence after it’s presented. Not in the rushed reply, but in the decision that follows deliberation. Dewey once said that education was not preparation for life, but life itself. In the context of leadership and enterprise, reflection is what keeps that life from becoming mechanical.

So here is my modest proposition: reflective thinking is a quiet form of rebellion. In an economy built on reaction, it is a refusal to be swept along. In a business culture built on performance, it is the courage to dwell in uncertainty. In a professional world allergic to doubt, it is the assertion that complexity, not simplicity, is the truer mark of understanding.

And in a world that tells us to think fast, perhaps the most radical act is to think again.

Stay curious

Colin

Image by Guido Coppa on Unsplash