Janine sat at her desk with yet another set of dismal monthly performance figures. Over three quarters, she had met with various managers and staff to pinpoint the problems.  She consulted industry best practices.  Issues we identified and resolved. Each month, she hoped for strong end-of-the-month numbers. And each month, her hope was dashed.

She had some ideas about the challenges: Her company was entering a new stage of growth and competition was steadily increasing. New hiring challenges were emerging as their staffing needs increased. Despite the tremendous effort she and others across the company had invested in meeting these and other challenges, something was still off. Janine knew she needed a new approach to devise an effective solution.

Action learning: an approach to new and complex problems
For the most part, we have created and fine-tuned how to solve the routine problems we regularly face. For such situations, we rely on analytic processing and left-brain thinking. These codified or routine problems are stored in our basal ganglia associated with things like motor movements, procedural learning, routine behaviors, eye movements, thought, and emotion.

But all bets are off when we face new, complex, and urgent problems. In such cases, our tried-and-true approaches and even industry best practices fail to deliver.

David Rock explains in his book, Your Brain at Work, that because we have not faced problems quite like these before, we have no pre-determined solutions ready and waiting in our working memory. When we try to mentally search and retrieve answers, we come up short, saying things like, “I don’t know,” “I’m having a mental block,” or “I’m at an impasse.”

In these new situations, we need action learning, a problem-solving methodology that uses the power of questions to trigger reflection, insight, and breakthrough thinking. According to action learning, you cannot have insight without reflection, nor can you have reflection with a question:

Question → Reflection → Insight

This is the secret of getting from impasse to insight, and it is rooted in brain science. This article focuses on reflections and insights.

Reflection: a time to think about thinking
Reflection, sometimes called metacognition, is a time to think about your thinking. Insights may emerge only once you pause to reflect on the fact that yo