OUBS Alumni Careers Network Industry Insights:
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How might creative writing improve reflective practice amongst
managers?
Author Gillian Gustar
Gillian Gustar is a management learning specialist who practices
through teaching, consulting and writing.
In this article Gill explains the importance of reflection on creative
writing. Gill tells us about the process of freewriting as an aid to unlock
hidden insights to create successful writing.
© Gillian Gustar, 2014
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OUBS Alumni Careers Network Industry Insights:
Created by Alumni for Alumni
Harry stared at the stone basin. The contents had returned to their original, silvery white
state, swirling and rippling beneath his gaze.
“ What is it?” Harry asked shakily.
“This? It is called a Pensieve,” said Dumbledore. “ I sometimes find, and I am sure you know
the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”
“Err,” said Harry who couldn’t truthfully say that he had ever felt anything of the sort.
“At these times” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “I use the Penseive. One
simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into a basin, and examines
them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when
they are in this form.’
( J.K. Rowling – The Goblet of Fire)
As Open University Business School alumni, you are already skilled reflective practitioners.
You may be wondering how the serious business of reflecting on yourself and your
professional contribution, connects with creative writing. More specifically, you may be
questioning why this article opens with a quotation from a children’s novel about wizards and
witches. Apart from the obvious answer that J.K Rowling is a successful writer, and that this
piece aims to connect her professional practice with yours, the extract captures the essence
of what imaginative writing brings to reflective practice.
In the Harry Potter series, the ‘pensieve’ is a magical repository for memories. The wizard
Dumbledore says that pulling out and examining his thoughts and memories from the
pensive helps him to see patterns and links. You can create this same opportunity through
the process of writing. Notice the focus on process rather than product. Most often when
writing your focus is on the output. You ‘produce’ essays which demonstrate your ability to
critically examine concepts and ideas. You create reports designed to inform or persuade
colleagues. You learn what ‘good looks like’ to the audience of these documents and aim to
get as close to that as possible.
What gets less attention is the process by which you achieved those outputs. You may have
reflected on how you approached the task of writing a particular assignment, especially it
went badly. If so, you probably implicitly followed one of the experiential learning models
you knew. For instance, you considered the actions you had taken, decided what impact
these had, drawn conclusions about what was helpful or not and resolved to do things
differently the next time.
Learning from reflection on experience is a skill you honed. However, one limitation of this
approach is that it relies on what you can consciously access and recall about your thoughts
and actions. This is one reason that you are encouraged to keep reflective journals.
Journals act as a bridge between experiential learning and a reflective approach. You write
accounts or ‘stories’ of your practice, which is “one of the best ways of exploring and
understanding experience.” (Bolton2005)
When you write a log, however, you write what comes to the fore of your mind, what is
consciously available to you. However, there is a different way of thinking about reflection.
© Gillian Gustar, 2014
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OUBS Alumni Careers Network Industry Insights:
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Schon (1982) suggests that there are two types of professional reflection; an intuitive
judgement, or ‘knowing in practice’ and a kind of tuning into the moment, or ‘reflection in
action.’ This is not about retrospective analysis, but about shaping insights in real time,
about accessing what you ‘know’ without sometimes knowing how you know it. Malcolm
Gladwell’s book ‘Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking’ gives some great examples
of this process in practice.
It turns out that people ‘know’ quite a lot unconsciously, or intuitively. However, as Gladwell
points out, this knowledge, about which people are often very certain, is not fool proof. It is
open to error. It is in your interests, therefore, to surface your thinking and to make it
accessible to reasoning and evidence based information. This is particularly important when
thinking about your professional practice. It is not enough to feel or intuitively know that you
are doing good work, or having positive impacts. You need to know what impact you are
having so that you can adjust and improve. Many of you will have found useful ways of
testing your own assessments of your contributions. You will use performance review data,
360 degree feedback instruments or simply informal feedback from colleagues or clients.
Few of you will not have had one of those moments when you feel ‘Really? That’s how they
see me?’ often if you feel the comments are harsh or challenge your view of yourself. They
are valuable, but sometimes painful pieces of information to acquire. What if, then, you could
confront yourself first? If you had strategies for examining what is less obvious to you? This
is one of the options creative writing can offer to you. It allows you to tap into your insights
about yourself and your situation.
Let’s try out an example which might encourage you to accept what I am saying. You will
need paper, a pen and a way of keeping time. First, imagine I was interviewing you as part
of a developmental process and asked the question, ‘if you were guaranteed you could not
fail, what would you do?’ Write down your first answer and put it out of sight.
Next, write on your paper ‘if I knew I could not fail I would…..’ Using this as your start point,
begin writing, adopting these rules: Write for 3 minutes without interruption (set a timer)
 Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, sentence construction, or even if you
are making sense
 Do not stop at any stage. If you get stuck, just keep rewriting the last word
you had until another one comes.
 Write quickly and without much thought
Now, read back over what you wrote and choose a word or phrase that attracts you for some
reason. Use this as your start point and repeat the 3 minute writing process, adopting the
same rules. Then, read over your second piece of writing and again choose the word or
phrase which attracts you. Begin writing again, using the same rules, but this time speed up
if you can and allow yourself 5 minutes.
Read back over all three pieces. Compare them to the initial answer you put out of sight. Do
they say the same thing? As you read look for things which surprise you, where you find
yourself thinking things like ‘didn’t know I was bothered about that’ or ‘interesting that I
described that in language which sounds like we are on a battle field’. Notice whether you
enjoyed the experience or not and why that might be. Did you find out anything about what
you might do if you were sure you wouldn’t fail – or about something entirely different?
© Gillian Gustar, 2014
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If you tried the exercise, rather than just read my description, you have just experimented
with something often called ‘free writing’. It is a technique often used writers to ‘loosen up’
before they start writing something they intend to be read. Freewriting might spark of the
germ of an idea for a story, a character, an emotion, a place – or it might simply act as a
repository, much like J.K Rowling’s ‘pensieve.’ It is a space in which you have captured the
things swirling around in your mind. It is like looking into the mirror and seeing your own
mind.
You may have found this difficult to do or be disappointed by the outcome. If it didn’t work
for you first time, don’t worry. Just try to again later, in a different place, or at a different time
of day, or in a different mood. If you didn’t take my suggestion that you write by hand, and
used a laptop, try it again without your keyboard. It makes a difference. You are aiming to
bypass the control your mind customarily exercises, to access those things it ‘knows’
beneath the chatter. It is messy, and confusing and sometimes worrying because it is a
relatively unbounded form of discovery and you do not know what will be uncovered.
The act of writing is a form of independent inquiry, a way to “investigate how we construct
the world, ourselves and others.”( Richardson, 2005) It is also a dialogue with yourself and
so offers “a comparatively gentle way of facing what there is to be faced” (Bolton, 1999). It
does not generally “allow onto the page more than the writer can bear at the time” (Bolton
1999) If freewriting practice does surface uncomfortable issues which you are not ready to
confront, imply stop writing. You are in charge.
Because writing constructs things from a specific point of view, unlike feedback from other
people, which we can choose only to accept or reject, writing can be ‘worked on.’ You can
revisit and rewrite it. You can turn it into a story, a poem, or a scene in a play. When you do,
it offers different insight or imagines different courses of action.
This short article offer up the idea and provides a glimpse of the possibilities creative writing
has for supporting professional practice. Freewriting is one of many available writing
exercises. Others might focus, for example, on specific questions about your practice. If you
are interested in pursuing the topic further, then you might want to consult some of the books
and articles referenced.
On a final note, some of you may have noticed that J.K Rowling’s creation of the word
‘pensieve’ is a play on the word ‘pensive’, meaning ‘engaged in deep thought.’ I hope this
article has encouraged you to see that ‘deep thought’ is not something you have to do, but is
something you can learn to access and put to good use in your personal and professional
development.
Gillian Gustar,
September 2014
© Gillian Gustar, 2014
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OUBS Alumni Careers Network Industry Insights:
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References
Bolton G. (1999) ‘The Therapeutic Potential of Creative Writing’, Jessica Kingsley
Publishers, London and Philadelphia
Bolton G. (2005) ‘Reflective Practice – Writing and Professional Development’, Sage
Publications, London,
Gladwell M. ‘Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking ‘, Penguin; Re-issue edition (23
Feb 2006)
Richardson L. (2005) “Writing: a method of inquiry” in Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln Y. (Eds) ‘The
Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research’, Thousand Oaks, CA; Sage, 959-78
Rowling J.K. ‘The Goblet of Fire’, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, (2000)
Schon D. A. (1982) ‘The Reflective Practitioner’, Basic Books Inc., USA.
© Gillian Gustar, 2014
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