I have rewritten this in line with the understanding on delivering supervision to our workforce and its role in creating confident practitioners who are able to be flexible in a changing landscape.

As part of our Wisdom Academy, we have delivered educational content to support continuous improvement and a personal learning journey. At the heart of this is the art of reflexivity moving away from reflection.

Uncertainty is not valued in our systems and we are taught frameworks that believe in right and wrong answers, yet we live in an uncertain world where decisions need to be made based upon our experience, emotional responses, intuition and instinct and is a skill which needs to be practiced.

So this blog is to think about how we view the world, make decisions and are able to look at things in new ways using supervision as a forum to develop this talent.

Healthcare has become increasingly complicated creating systems designed to reduce risk and improve quality. We produce new policies, additional risk assessments, templates, pathways and procedures. Every intervention is created with good intent: to make people safer and reduce uncertainty.

Yet there is a paradox.

As systems become increasingly designed, the people working within them often describe feeling increasingly overwhelmed. The answer to uncertainty frequently becomes more information, more documentation and greater procedural control, despite the reality that no human being can consciously hold an ever-expanding number of competing activities in mind at one time.

There appears to be an underlying assumption within many systems: if we can sufficiently control process, we can sufficiently control outcomes.

But human life has never worked in this way.

People do not live in predictable environments. We live in a world of changing relationships, competing priorities, incomplete information, emotions, power structures, histories, beliefs and contexts that continuously evolve. The reality of practice is not linear; it is dynamic and uncertain.

From early education onward, we are often rewarded for certainty. We learn that there are right answers and wrong answers. Competence becomes associated with knowing the right answer. Expertise becomes associated with confidence. Errors become associated with failure.

Yet professional life often asks something entirely different of us.

It asks us to make decisions before we possess certainty.

It asks us to act while information remains incomplete.

It asks us to tolerate ambiguity whilst carrying responsibility for others.

This creates tension.

Because while organisations frequently seek standardisation, human beings navigate the world through judgement.

Long before we consciously think, we are already experiencing.

We are scanning environments for threat and safety. We are noticing emotional signals. We are recognising patterns from previous experiences. We are responding to relationships and social expectations. We are attempting to understand our place within groups and systems.

Only afterwards do we often create a rational explanation for what occurred.

The story we tell ourselves frequently arrives after the decision has already begun.

This is important because many of our approaches to reflection assume we can simply revisit an event objectively and identify where things went right or wrong.

Traditional reflective questions often ask:

“What happened?”

“How did you feel?”

“What would you do differently?”

These are useful questions.

But perhaps they are not sufficient.

Because they risk creating the illusion that events emerge from isolated decisions rather than from interaction between individuals and their environments.

Perhaps a deeper question is:

“How did I come to understand the world in this particular way?”

This moves us from reflection towards reflexivity.

Reflection looks backwards.

Reflexivity looks inwards and outwards simultaneously.

It asks:

• What assumptions was I carrying?
• What was I paying attention to?
• What did I fail to notice?
• Who held power?
• What emotional responses were influencing me?
• What did my environment encourage me to do?
• What previous experiences shaped my actions?
• What possibilities was I unable to see?

This matters because professional practice does not emerge solely from knowledge.

Two people can possess identical information and arrive at entirely different conclusions.

Not because one is necessarily right and the other wrong, but because human beings do not simply process facts; we interpret reality through different lenses.

Perhaps this is where restorative supervision becomes important.

Restorative supervision is often described as creating emotional safety and providing a space for support and wellbeing. This remains critically important. Human beings do not learn effectively when operating in states of shame, fear or exhaustion.

However, emotional release alone may not be enough.

If supervision simply becomes a place to feel better before returning unchanged to the same thinking patterns, we may reduce distress without increasing understanding.

The deeper opportunity within restorative supervision is not only restoration. It is discovery. It becomes a space where uncertainty can be explored rather than removed. A space where people can say “I do not know.”

This requires psychological safety, but perhaps more importantly it requires openmindedness.

To do this, we need to move beyond seeing ourselves as detached observers of events.

• We need to understand ourselves as participants within living systems.
• We influence situations and are influenced by them simultaneously.
• We shape environments whilst environments shape us.
• To notice our own reactions.
• To recognise assumptions.
• To listen to perspectives different from our own.
• To tolerate discomfort.
• To remain curious.
• To create space for imagination.
• To continue asking questions.

Mastery in complex environments may therefore have little to do with achieving certainty. Instead, it may involve developing wisdom: the ability to integrate facts, experience, emotion, intuition, relationships and context into action.

By understanding our own minds, that of others and the context we are able to make sense of complexity.

Expanding our questions

I propose the following questions to ask yourself wehn writing reflexive accounts.

• What was I paying attention to?
• What was going on that I was not aware of and do I have a sense of this?
• What did I feel and was it a stress response?
• What was my mind thinking?
• What was my body doing?
• How was I connecting to others?
• What was I saying?
• Was this in any way related to knowledge that I have been taught or acquired somewhere?
• Was this in any way related to processes, procedures, custom and practices which I followed?
• Was this in any way connected to wanting to do what others wanted or rebel from what others wanted?
• Who held the power in the relationships?
• Who else has relevant ideas and what would they say?
• What did the context tell me – what is the unknown or the surprise?
• Did I use my imagination to identify a way forward from first principles?
• Did I use intuition and felt it to be right or wrong?
• How did this align with my values – did it feel fair or unjust?

Using a wider questioning technique allows us to understand our experience.

Through self discovery and practice, we will become more confident decision makers to make decisions.