Meta reasoning

Rather than just doing things and reasoning about the best solution to problems teams should also spend effort on meta reasoning. This involves thinking about the process itself, what is your process, how you do your work and why.

The most important and direct use for this is that it exercises abstract and logical thinking which will improve your ability to do that type of work. Trying to step outside of daily routine gives perspective and can lead to insights leading to major improvements. Thinking on how and why you do things forces you to make active decisions this will give you confidence that you are doing the right thing or push you to realize that you are responsible and need to act if you want to change. This is highly valuable both from an individual perspective but also in teams.

 

This is related to the type of help you should be willing to accept, while someone telling you exactly what to do or how to do it might feel like a quick win in the end it's not going to help you on your way to continuous improvements. Coaching should take this into account to avoid creating a dependency.

 

Reasoning together with others about the work you do creates common awareness about choices and compromises which in turn generates mastery and acceptance. Handing out tools and rules leads to a feeling of being forced into poor solutions and in worst case generates uncertainty and criticism.

If there is a best practice and tooling for solving the type of problem the team is working on it can be tempting to reuse this blindly and without internal understanding. When complexity increase or when facing new issues the team is not experienced enough to tackle these problems.