Two ways to start
Two openings for the same reflection.
A. In March I was assigned responsibility for a project which had previously been unsuccessful on two occasions.
B. I took on a project last March that two other people had already handed back. Nobody told me that.
Four questions.
1. What does B tell you that A does not?
2. Had previously been unsuccessful against had already handed back. What changes?
3. What does B’s four-word second sentence do?
4. Is A wrong?
The model · 341 words
What I took on, and what I took from it
I took on a project last March that two other people had already handed back. Nobody told me that. I found it out six weeks in, from somebody in another team who assumed I knew.
The work itself was straightforward. What had held it up both times was that the three departments involved each thought one of the others was going to sign it off, and none of them had ever been in the same conversation. That is not a technical problem, and it does not get fixed by a plan.
So I stopped trying to move the work forward and spent two weeks setting up one meeting. Getting six people into a room turned out to be the entire project. I chased it, I got turned down twice, I went round to people’s desks, and in the end it happened because somebody senior mentioned it in passing to somebody else, which is not a method anybody can put in a plan.
The meeting lasted forty minutes. The thing that had been stuck for eleven months got sorted out in forty minutes, and everybody in the room was slightly embarrassed about that — which is, I think, why nobody has brought it up since.
What I took from it is that I had been treating "it is not moving" as a fact about the work. It was a fact about who had not spoken to whom, which is a different thing to fix and a much easier one, provided you are willing to spend two weeks on something that does not look like progress. Two weeks is a long time to look idle in an open-plan office.
I would do one thing differently. I did not tell my manager what I was doing, because for two of those weeks it looked exactly like doing nothing and I did not want to have to defend it. That was cowardice with a good explanation attached. If it had gone wrong, the fact that nobody knew would have been the worst part of it.
Four questions about the model.
1. Count the phrasal verbs in the first paragraph.
2. What is the analytical move in paragraph two?
3. Why does paragraph four mention the embarrassment?
4. The last paragraph names a failure. What kind?
Repair a weaker one
The five moves: what you took on, and what you were not told · what was actually holding it up, reclassified · what you did instead, including the part that looked like nothing · what happened, with a number · what you would do differently, named honestly.
Below, a second reflection with four sentences removed.
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
I ran the same weekly meeting for two years and only worked out in the second year what it was for. [1]
On paper it was a status update. In practice nobody needed the status — everything in it was already in the tracker, and everybody had read the tracker. [2] It was the only time in the week when the four of us were in the same place and something could be brought up without anybody having to make an appointment to do it.
[3] Once I saw that, I cut the status section down to four minutes and left the rest open, and the meeting got shorter and more useful at the same time.
What I would do differently is ask sooner. [4] Nobody would have minded being asked, and I did not ask because I had set the meeting up and did not want to hear that it was not working.
That is a small piece of cowardice, and it cost eleven months of forty-minute meetings.
Register, and the escape route
Rewrite each line for a written professional reflection — plain, precise, and in the language people use.
Over-formal → plain
I was assigned responsibility for a project which had previously been unsuccessful on two occasions.
Over-formal → plain
I subsequently ascertained that the authorisation had not been obtained.
Over-formal → plain
It was necessary to postpone the meeting until the relevant figures had been approved.
Too casual → written reflection
Basically it was a total mess and nobody had a clue what was going on, tbh.
Vague → specific
The situation improved considerably after I addressed the underlying issues.
Six sentences from drafts. Four are register or word order; two are what 340 words cannot afford.
1. In this reflection I am going to describe a project I worked on. — 340 words
2. I ascertained the cause and rectified it.
3. I turned down it twice before it happened.
4. Nobody had followed up it.
5. In conclusion, communication is very important in the workplace.
6. I cannot put with it up any longer.
Write it
Task card · Writing · Alone · 17 minutes
Write a 340-word professional reflection on something you took on that turned out to be a different problem from the one you were given.
Five moves, in order. Seventeen minutes writing, six checking.
- Open with what you took on and what nobody told you. No announcement paragraph.
- Reclassify the problem: what was actually holding it up, as opposed to what it looked like.
- Describe what you did, including the part that looked like nothing.
- Give the outcome with a number in it.
- End on what you would do differently, named as precisely as you can bear.
- Ban your six words from Lesson 6 for the whole piece.
Task card · Checking · Pairs · 6 minutes
Swap. You are not marking. You are counting and asking.
Six minutes, four answers, written in the margin.
- Circle every Latinate verb that has an ordinary equivalent. Write the equivalent beside it.
- Check every phrasal verb with a pronoun object: is the pronoun in the right place?
- Find the reclassification. If the problem is still the one they were given, say so.
- Last: does the final paragraph name something specific, or does it say that communication matters?
Writing makes the escape route easier, not harder. You have time to reach for the impressive word, and the page does not sound wrong when you do. That is why the six banned words matter more here than in speech.
What the margins said
Two questions.
1. How many Latinate verbs got circled?
2. Did your last paragraph name something specific?
Plain is not casual
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. Why is the escape route easier in writing?
2. What makes a reflection actable?
Next. The same account, spoken, to somebody who will ask what you actually got — and a look back at the unit.