# Reflective Writing and Analytics By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2022-11-16 There is a tendency to segment. One way of segmenting populations is into number people and word people. Through that process, people are funneled into different education, training, and career paths. To the degree that this occurs, analytics tends to contain more number people than word people. Consequently, analytics tends to be computationally rich and linguistically poor. Incorporating reflective writing into this domain might be a seemingly foreign step that contributes to ethical, humanist, and organizational analytics. Doing so requires understanding a little more about reflective writing in general. Reflective writing involves critically analyzing experiences. As part of reflective writing, one assesses what happened, how it made one feel, who was involved, and what one plans to do with the knowledge generated through the reflective writing process. This process aligns well with analytics as it is, in fact, analytical. Reflective writing is not creative writing. One is producing material that is and could be analyzed both at the individual experience level or in the aggregate across multiple experiences. Reflective writing diverges from standard analytics as it is subjective. The focus of reflective writing, as was mentioned, is critically analyzing experiences. One’s experiences are inherently subjective. Reflective writing is an attempt to unpack these experiences critically to reveal and challenge underlying assumptions. Once identified, these assumptions can be examined more rigorously through standard analytic techniques. Specialization segments. Dividing organizations into number people and word people limits the synergy that emerges from unified perspectives. Incorporating reflective writing into analytics provides a new and potentially informative source of material to analyze. Interrogating and curating what one thinks, through reflective writing, could form a basis for ontological insights. It is perhaps worth noting that the English word robot comes from the Czech word robota, which means forced labor. Computational analytics largely transforms analysts into robots. Reflective writing provides a way for analysts to perpetually reassert their humanity in the process. Moving from the forced labor of robotic computational analytics to the empowerment of reflective writing is one of autonomy. Analytic transformations occur when fundamental assumptions are challenged. These assumptions are identified and challenged through reflective writing more so than computational analytics. #### Related Items [[Reflective Writing]] [[Analytics]] [[Organizational Analytics]] [[Robots]] [[Ethics]] [[Writing]] [[Thinking]] [[Autonomy]]