This section will argue that the reflective culture of the individual and organisation is critical for effective reflective learning to take place (Schon, 1995; Mathiassen and Sandeep, 2002; Seibert, 1999; Raelin, 2001; Ayas and Zeniuk, 2001; Brockbank and McGill, 1998). Individual reflective culture is defined as ‘the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties’ to reflect (Merriam-Webster). It can be difficult for an individual to acquire the skills of reflective learning (Alvesson and Skolberg, 2000) as these skills do not occur naturally. Accordingly, opportunities and education need to be provided to stimulate the practice and develop the individual’s culture (Raelin, 2001). Ayas and Zeniuk (2001) agree that a reflective culture based on the search to improve knowledge by questioning one’s assumptions and understandings, and the consequences of one’s actions, starts at an individual level and can be practiced in the workplace in such situations as project development.

The reflective culture of an organisation is defined as: ‘The set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterises a company or corporation’ (Merriam-Webster). If reflective learning is to take place at an organisational level, the culture of the organisation needs to be sympathetic to reflection. Raelin (2001, p. 13) maintains that an individual’s background has a significant effect on the propensity to reflect with others; some marginalised groups have difficulty in developing trust and a sense of security so reflective learning can be threatening unless the environment ‘intellectually and emotionally supports individuals in their learning and development’ by allowing them to challenge ideas and practices without the threat of reprisal. It is a common trend in the busy workplace for reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action to be discouraged and resisted due to time pressure (Brockbank and McGill, 1998; Ayas and Zeniuk, 2001), and any type of learning to be deferred to the future. Project work, in particular, allows opportunities for learning, but evidently these opportunities are rarely explored. Sharing of lessons learnt from experiences, successes and problems does not happen in many organisations (Mathiassen and Purao, 2002).

Mathiassen and Purao (2002) suggest that what organisations strive for is a culture that instigates the evolution of a ‘community-of-practice’. This is where colleagues collaborate and share work experiences with the intention of combining individual learning in a localised context to allow the creation of knowledge that can be generalised to other organisational contexts and perhaps lead to changes in practices, modifications to design, etc. Communities-of-practice cannot be designed – they emerge as colleagues collaborate to solve problems together. Mathiassen (2002) explains ‘membership [of communities-of-practice] is informal and based on participation in diagnosing situations and telling stories about them. The resulting communities are fluid rather than bounded, evolve rather than being designed and typically cross the formal boundaries of an organisation.’

Successful reflection, therefore, is dependant on culture at both an individual and organisational level. On an individual level, one needs to be in a philosophical position to feel comfortable about questioning long standing assumptions, values and understandings, and with using the reflection process to reach new knowledge. Individual reflective culture can determine organisational reflective culture but organisational culture can also dictate individual behaviour (Ayas and Zeniuk, 2001). If organisational learning is to take place, there needs to be an environment in which individuals feel psychologically safe to challenge organisational norms and practices so double-loop and triple-loop learning can take place.