How Information Systems Practitioners Think in Action: Instantiating Donald A. Schön's General Theory of the ‘Reflective Practitioner’

To examine how information systems (IS) practitioners think in action, we rely on Donald A. Schön's general theory of the ‘reflective practitioner’—a theory that Schön developed to explain how practitioners in architecture, psychotherapy, engineering, planning, and management think in action, and that we apply to IS practitioners. We go over Schön's explanation that a practitioner's thinking‐in‐action consists of what he calls five moments: knowing‐in‐action, surprise, reflection, criticism and on‐the‐spot experiment. Then, based on our interviews with a technical IS practitioner and a managerial IS practitioner, we show how their thinking in action demonstrates each of the five moments. Finally, based on the five moments, we offer recommendations to IS researchers on how to write papers to better support the work of IS practitioners.