EMPAC’s Professor John Coxhead has been supporting the Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW) in their efforts to improve continual professional development (CPD) for police officers – particularly those in middle ranks who feel left behind.
Dr Coxhead has previously presented research to the Department of Trade and Industry and the American Society of Criminology about the benefit of metacognition circles and communities of practice to organisational performance improvement. Whilst some of the terminology sounds at first technical the working principles concerning adult learning applied here are simple. The approach itself is non bureaucratic and fits well into a busy operational workplace, drawing upon the principle that ‘change is caught not taught’.
Working through some of the technical sounding concepts first will allow the reader to make sense of how metacognition circles could be used dynamically to enable CPD and a learning organisational culture in a very practical way. For the reader preferring to initially skip the technical explanation offered, they may jump straight to the section below entitled Operationalising MC-CPD-OPO.
Metacognition
Metacognition is to think about your thinking, informed by the discipline of cognitive psychology (Lai, 2011). We all think consciously or subconsciously and often in a process of assessing situations, forming judgement and making decisions (Kahneman, 2011). We may use prompts in how we think (technically termed heuristics) such as the National Decision Making Model (NDM) (College of Policing, 2013).
The difference between thinking and metacognition is the reflective act of, debriefing and prebriefing: why you are thinking what you are thinking in order to understand your internal cognitive processing. The benefit of metacognition, particularly when done explicitly (rather than implicitly) and in groups (rather than individually) is to expose, and learn from, cognitive bias, blind spots and neurodiversity (Merchant, 2010).
Cognitive bias
Cognitive bias can come in many shapes and sizes, such as status quo, bandwagon effect, anchoring and base-rate fallacy. All biases are able to thrive unhindered internally if not exposed to discussion and challenge and can also unfortunately even thrive within groups too, if groupthink creeps in (Sunstein and Hastie, 2015), resulting in a form of unhealthy echo chamber (Edmondson, 2019).
Cognitive biases without critical reflection can reinforce deductivity (when you’ve made your mind up) overpowering inductivity (keeping an open mind) (Evans, Ball & Thompson, 2022). In the worst cases such behaviours can lead to skewed judgement, such as reported within the Stephen Port investigation (HMICFRS, 2023).
A conversation amongst peers
Whilst unfettered cognitive bias might thrive alone, in circles of discussion and enquiry not only can bias be reduced but dynamic learning can be exposed and accelerated (Cheng and McKinney, 2024). Using circles of peers for discussion utilises the prosocial strength of the workplace, and assuming people feel comfortable enough to be honest, can create a useful opportunity to ask Socratic questions about why others think the way they do.
Such a circle of peers, explicitly exploring each other’s practice rationale through conversation, is the opposite of groupthink, and offers a surprisingly powerful way to improve individual learning and group performance (O’Connell, 2020). The ethos is understanding, not blame or judgement. Such circles can also be used in other contexts, such as with the public, to also gain insights and improve outcomes (Reilly and Bramwell, 2007); indeed this approach is advocated to apply neurolinguistic cognitive psychology for community goal and solution setting (Coxhead, Pancholi and Uduwerage-Perera, 2024).
Metacognition circles to enable Heutagogy
Heutagogy simply means self-directed learning (Hase and Kenyon, 2001; Kenyon and Blashke, 2021). It is different to being told things (pedagogy – like a nursery teacher instructing infants) or having someone assist you finding things out (andragogy – like a librarian showing you which shelf a book is on).
Heutagogical approaches align well to workplaces for continual professional development and have been used in the medical profession where busy environments can ill afford continual training abstractions (Hainsworth, et al, 2020; Green, 2021).
The act of metacognition circles (discussing why people think what they think) stimulates a natural culture of heutagogy and hence a learning organisation empowered through psychological safety (Edmondson, 2019). Such a ‘Golden Circle’ (Sinek, 2009) culture is a direct operational answer to the workplace toxicity exposed in policing (Casey, 2023).
Learning as performance improvement
Heutagogy is a relatively recent term but it draws on well-established research in educational and performance psychology (Dewey, 1974; Deming, 1985; Gibbons, 1991) and can be framed entirely around dynamic learning agility motivated by a desire for continually improved outcomes.
The notion of continual improvement (Seddon, 2005; Koskela, Tezel & Patel, 2019) and quality enhancement are well established concepts that most organisations pursue but struggle with how to operationalise such a learning culture in practice. In short, a learning organisation is a performing organisation and for any organisation, through its people to perform without continual learning (meaning agile evolvement) the research is quite starkly social Darwinian in its clarity: adapt and evolve or die (McCullen, 2021).
MC-CPD-OPO
Deming (1985) and Engen and Magnusson (2015) point out that front-line workers are often the best resource for an organisation to identify both shortfalls and process evolutionary adaptations, which has influenced quality circles in Total Quality Management, LEAN and Six Sigma over the years (Näslund, 2008).
Metacognitive circles for continual professional development (MC-CPD) are a broader expansion of such previous thinking, whereby the behaviours are mainstreamed into workplace occupational working culture, and as business as usual, should be measured by organisational performance (metacognitive circles [MC] should be a mainstreamed formula as [CPD] and measured through organisational performance outcomes [OPO] = MC-CPD-OPO).
Operationalising MC-CPD-OPO
First, assemble peers in a room. Technical job roles do not particularly matter as the exercise is not about knowledge but thinking styles. Three to nine people variations will all work, ideally in a place where interruptions for an hour are minimalised but ideally at the workplace rather than away from it. Participants are briefed on why they are there: to help their own, and the organisation’s, continual performance improvement. To achieve this a discussion is to be held about how they form judgements and make decisions. None of the proceedings are about blame or who may be right or wrong: the purpose is simply to understand each other’s collective experience and thinking, better.
Second, use a common concrete experience (which can be facilitated by the use of a short video clip whether from body cam, interview footage, TV documentary or fictional episode) that everyone watches and listens to, without comment, in real-time together. Such clips can be short (i.e. one minute).
Thirdly, the facilitator asks each participant, individually, what they thought of what they saw, in plenary. The question(s) asked invite the individual to comment on whether what they saw / experienced represented good practice or not, and (most importantly) why.
Fourthly, the facilitator then opens the plenary discussion to compare and contrast why perceptions and judgements were diverse. In particular the facilitation process open up the rationale of how judgements were made, rather than just focusing on resultant conclusions. In this sense, the discussion is as used within debriefing mathematical assessment: not so much focused upon the answer you came to, but rather how you reached it.
Follow-up
The facilitator is non-committal throughout in terms of judgements themselves; they are not there to judge but to help draw out insights about how and why participants think they way they do. The facilitator would ideally be the first-line supervisor for the peer group, who should pursue all insights, not just any majority view expressed.
After the session, a follow-up around a week later introduces a further different clip. Whichever type of clip is used, any relevant organisational occupational standards should be explicitly referred to, such as Professional Investigation Competencies. The session is run along the same lines, but as time goes on, the facilitator encourages the participants to ask each other questions rather than just from the facilitator (to clarify and explore – explicitly – the rationale for judgements made).
A third session may be required, but the ongoing strategy is for the facilitator to model the act of asking non-confrontational questions of each other to understand why peers think the way they do (to disclose their ‘working out’ without rebuff or ridicule). People should not feel cornered into not being able to change their mind as insights emerge: this is a just a conversation, not a competition. A sign of output success will be continuance of this behaviour within the generalised workplace.
An indicator of outcome success will be improved performance, aligned to existing core individual, and then also organisational, metrics. Additional outcomes may be explored over the reduction of the number of amplified mistakes made and how earlier identification of flawed thinking is amended / corrected.
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