Reflective Management

Reflective management constitutes an epistemological approach to executive management that is based on late modern social systems theory's focus on the dynamics of social forces. A reflective management paradigm of organizational legitimacy has four cornerstones:

• The evolution of society changes the legitimating notions and legitimizing practices that mediate interrelations between organization and environment.
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• The formula for organizational legitimacy today is reflection.
• Reflective management requires a triple synthesis of self-understanding, sensitivity, and self-presentation.
• Six megatrends carry forward these transformations.

New legitimating paradigms evolve to cope with modernization's increasing strains on life and nature, society's accelerating complexity and diversity, and growing global interdependence. Managerial decision making has to relate not only to market and state but also to the public sphere (a specific way of reasoning on matters of common interest from a societal perspective) as well as to publics (different stakeholders, each with its perspective on the world and the organization). Public relations competencies and processes grow increasingly essential to managing organizations legitimately.

In the vast complexity of legitimating notions and legitimizing practices, a general formula for legitimacy can be identified: reflection (adjective: reflective). In reflection, a perspective is raised to a second-order observation of its own observations: the organization sees itself as if from outside, and as mutually interdependent with its environment. It learns to develop restrictions and coordinating mechanisms in its decision-making premises. This broad, open, polycontextual perspective on its own role and responsibility in society facilitates flexible and inclusive ways of coordination in the increasingly complex, diverse, and dynamic society of liquid modernity. The reflective paradigm replaces solid modernity's reflexive paradigm, based on the first-order perspective of reflexivity (adjective: reflexive) that implies a self-centered perspective from within and consequently a narrow, unambiguous, monocontextual tunnel vision.

Reflective management practices require three interrelated organizational functions: self-understanding, sensitivity to environment, and self-presentation.

Self-understanding is about the organization's understanding of its role and responsibility, and of the nature of its decision premises. Reflexive decision making is based on given, inevitable, taken-for-granted premises and is inattentive to its unintended consequences, despite often far-reaching, side effects. When the organization conflicts blindly and negligently with different worldviews, it reflexively sees itself as victim. In contrast, the reflective organization sees its decision premises as contingent, resulting from choices that could have been made differently. It opens up to change, flexibility, and continuous deliberations on the company's role and responsibility in engagement with its environment.

Sensitivity refers to the way the organization constructs and understands its environment. Whereas reflexive management sees an environment to be managed, the reflective approach implies an environment to be respected and aspirations of engagement. The first-order reflexive perspective does not distinguish between the environment as it is observed and as it is. The result is prejudiced and frozen positions. The environment remains an unproblematized mirroring of the organization; companies reflexively see the environment mainly as markets, investments, employment, resources, and consumption. In reflection, from a second-order perspective, the organization sees itself within the condition of sociodiversity, and as environment to its environment.

Self-presentation is about the organization's more or less intended way of presenting itself. Reflexivity means blind, self-absorbed self-presentation. From this enclosed first-order worldview of uniformity, the organization does not see conflicts or try to cover up, silence opponents, or dissolve disagreements by information. In contrast, reflective management openly acknowledges responsibility as decision maker. From its second-order worldview of sociodiversity it sees the inevitability and potential of conflicts, exposes their background, and facilitates exchange of views.

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