Public scholarship · Leadership and institutional practice

Reflection Is a Leadership Practice

Why the leaders shaping our future must first understand their past

William W. Towns · August 23, 2026

When I welcomed the Kellogg School of Management Class of 2028, I asked the students to do something that can feel counterintuitive at the beginning of a new chapter: look backward.

Business school is built around the future. Students arrive thinking about the knowledge they will gain, the relationships they will build, and the opportunities they will pursue. Institutions reinforce that orientation. We ask emerging leaders where they want to go, what they hope to accomplish, and what kind of impact they intend to make.

Those are important questions. But they are incomplete.

Before leaders decide where they are going, they should understand what they are carrying with them. Our histories do not remain outside the organizations we enter. They shape how we interpret authority, approach risk, respond to conflict, define success, and understand responsibility. They influence whose ideas we trust, which problems we notice, and what we believe institutions owe the people they serve.

Reflection, then, is not nostalgia. It is a leadership practice.

We Do Not Enter Institutions as Blank Slates

Every person enters a classroom, workplace, boardroom, or community with a lived curriculum. Family, culture, education, opportunity, hardship, place, and prior institutions have already taught us lessons—some explicit and others absorbed without our awareness.

Those lessons can become sources of strength. They can cultivate resilience, empathy, ambition, discipline, or a sense of obligation to others. They can also produce assumptions that go unexamined: about who belongs, what competence looks like, whose voice carries authority, or which outcomes matter most.

Leadership development often focuses on adding new capabilities. We teach strategy, finance, operations, negotiation, communication, and organizational behavior. Yet development also requires examination. Leaders must become capable of asking not only, “What do I know?” and “How do I know what I know?” but also, “How did I come to know it?”

That distinction matters because experience does not interpret itself. Two people can encounter the same institution and leave with very different understandings of it. One may experience a system as welcoming and meritocratic; another may experience the same system as opaque and exclusionary. Both experiences can be valid, and each becomes part of how that person later leads.

Self-Awareness Becomes Institutional Awareness

Reflection is often described as personal work, but its consequences are institutional. Leaders translate their assumptions into decisions, and decisions become structures. What begins as an individual belief can become a hiring practice, an investment standard, a promotion process, a performance measure, or an organizational norm.

This is one reason institutions can reproduce inequities even when few people consciously intend to do so. Leaders inherit systems designed under earlier conditions, often by people whose experiences and assumptions differed from those now affected by them. When those systems are treated as neutral or inevitable, history continues to govern the present without being named.

The same dynamic can prevent adaptation. The Societal Recalibration Cycle illustrates how technological innovation, expanding access to information and ideas, changing public expectations, political and regulatory shifts, and evolving economic conditions continually reshape the environment in which institutions operate. Yet an organization may continue relying on a business model, operating practice, or definition of value created for an earlier set of conditions.

As the surrounding society recalibrates, the institution becomes increasingly disconnected from the markets, stakeholders, and communities it serves. Institutional memory becomes a liability when it hardens into “the way we have always done things” rather than serving as a foundation for learning and renewal.

But memory can also be an asset. It can preserve purpose, illuminate past mistakes, and remind an institution of commitments that should not be abandoned simply because circumstances have changed. The leadership challenge is to distinguish between what should be carried forward and what must be redesigned.

That requires more than respect for tradition or enthusiasm for disruption. It requires disciplined reflection.

The Future Is Not a Rejection of the Past

We often speak about innovation as though the future begins with a clean sheet of paper. In practice, leaders rarely have that luxury. They inherit organizations with histories, cultures, obligations, assets, and relationships. Transformation occurs inside systems already in motion.

Effective leaders should therefore ask three questions:

1. What should we preserve? Which values, relationships, practices, or commitments remain essential to the institution’s identity and legitimacy?
2. What should we reconsider? Which assumptions or structures may have worked under earlier conditions but now limit performance, trust, or inclusion?
3. What must we create? What new capabilities, partnerships, or models are required for the institution to remain relevant and useful?

These questions apply to individuals as well. Each leader must decide which lessons from the past provide a foundation, which require reinterpretation, and which should no longer determine the future.

This is especially important during periods of continuous change. Artificial intelligence is altering work and decision-making. Economic and political volatility is reshaping institutional choices. Public expectations are changing how organizations earn trust. Demographic and cultural shifts are broadening the range of people who rightly expect to participate in decisions that affect them.

Under these conditions, technical knowledge alone is insufficient. Leaders need the capacity to examine how their personal histories interact with institutional history—and how both shape their responses to change.

Education Should Expand Identity, Not Replace It

At their best, educational institutions do not ask students to leave themselves at the door. They create the conditions for people to bring their experiences into conversation with new knowledge—and with people whose lives have unfolded differently.

That exchange is one of the great promises of a diverse learning community. Diversity is not simply the presence of difference. Its value emerges when difference improves the quality of inquiry, challenges untested assumptions, and expands what a group is capable of seeing.

For the Kellogg Class of 2028, the years ahead will provide extraordinary opportunities to learn from faculty, peers, alumni, organizations, and communities. But the deepest learning may come from the interaction between those new experiences and the lives students lived before arriving on campus.

The objective should not be to emerge with a polished professional identity disconnected from the person who entered. It should be to develop a more examined, expansive, and intentional understanding of oneself—and, therefore, a more responsible way of leading others.

Reflection Must Lead to Choice

Reflection without action can become a form of self-observation. Its purpose is not simply to understand the past; it is to improve the choices we make in the present.

For leaders, that means noticing when a familiar instinct is helpful and when it is constraining. It means listening for the experiences absent from a decision. It means questioning whether an inherited process still serves its stated purpose. It also means recognizing that adaptation is not always about abandoning what came before; sometimes it is about recovering a mission that institutional habits have obscured.

The future is shaped by what leaders choose to carry forward, what they have the courage to leave behind, and what they are willing to build together.

As the Class of 2028 begins its Kellogg journey, my hope is that each student will pursue the future with ambition—but not without reflection. The experiences that brought them to this moment are not separate from the leaders they will become. Properly examined, those experiences can become sources of judgment, empathy, clarity, and purpose.

We look back not simply to remember where we have been, but to understand where we might go.

This essay is adapted from “Reflections: A Look Back Towards the Future—How Our Past Helps Inform Who We Will Become,” presented to the Kellogg School of Management Class of 2028 during Complete Immersion in Management at Northwestern University.