Perception, Reflection, Interpretation

 It’s important to do self-reflection via direct experience; we can also learn from others’ experience to build professional competency. 

People are intelligent beings. Perception is based on one’s cognitive ability to understand and interpret what they see; perception matters because it affects how you are going to respond to “what happened,” and which influence you would make on the surroundings. Reflection is about proactively engaging in what you perceive.How you interpret what you perceive and create narratives. They are all important cognitive humanity activities.

Perception: How you notice what’s in front of you—what information you pick up through attention, senses, and context. You can’t perceive everything; you sample reality. Perception can be positive or negative, objective or subjective. Common failure modes in perception include such as selective attention, habits, stereotypes, stress narrowing focus.

Reflection (processing): Reflectionism encourages people to engage with their learning processes actively.  How you think about what you perceived—your internal check, weighing, and mental simulation. The bottleneck is that your working memory is limited and your mind “fills gaps. The Common failure modes in reflection include such as: confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, overconfidence, recency bias all make yourself perception inaccurate.

Interpretation: How you interpret what you perceive and how you turn information into a story about what’s happening and what it means for you. That bottleneck is that interpretations are hypotheses, not facts. The Common failure modes include such as hindsight bias (“it was obvious”), attribution errors (assuming motives too quickly), category errors (treating one situation as another). Most decision errors come less from “bad facts” and more from bad perception, unexamined reflection, or overconfident interpretation.

Some perceive the world as black and white, others see the full spectrum of color. It further reflects into our inner world, helps us to develop understanding abilities and professional competency. Some people reflect more often to develop fresh insight, some perhaps not. Some articulate their perspectives more objectively, some interpretation are distorted.It’s important to do self-reflection via direct experience; we can also learn from others’ experience to build professional cognitive competency for effective decision making.

Posted in: Decision Making,Digital Frameworks,Hybrid,Innovation