Building Bridges Between Theory and Practice

I often wonder why "airport books" on leadership are often more popular with practitioners than empirical evidence from solid research studies. To many people, the answer may be obvious but I find it amazing that leaders often fail to do things we know work and often do things we know do not work - a point made by Pfeffer and Sutton in their 2006 book: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management. It is hard to imagine an engineer ignoring the empirical knowledge of metallurgy when designing a new bridge. So why do leaders ignore the empirical evidence when designing high performing organizations? With respect to the incorporation of empirical evidence, why is leadership system design any different than designing a bridge?

Part of the reason may be that some of the research produced is not presented in a way that is easy for practitioners to consume. A quote from the practitioners at our 2006 Summit meeting between practitioners and researchers, success is “not academic arcane language in some obscure journal” (Latham, 2008, p. 20). Improving organizational performance is a complex task and most attempts fail. Yet, we continue to try again and again - often without changing our approach or changing the approach without knowing why. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. On the other end of the spectrum is what we often call the "book of the month club" approach to leadership and management. One antidote for both of these diseases is empirical evidence and organizational learning.

At the Institute we use 10 criteria to design and evaluate our research projects and outputs. These 10 criteria are described in our research lab on our website. The criteria help guide the design and execution of our research projects. Ultimately, research is judged by the impact it makes on our organizations. Do the insights from research help leaders create sustainable organizational change? Creating excellence that is truly sustainable will require more bridges between those that produce new knowledge and insights and those that use that knowledge to create high performing organizations.

References:

Latham, J. R. (2008). Building Bridges Between Researchers and Practitioners: A Collaborative Approach to Research in Performance Excellence. Quality Management Journal, 15(1), 19.

Pfeffer, J., and R. I. Sutton. (2006). Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.