Teaching Evidence-Based Management

Teaching evidence-based management to executive doctorate / DBA students

• Season 1 • Episode 4

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This episode explores the teaching challenges and rewards of Executive Doctorate or DBA (Doctorate of Business Administration) programmes. Executive Doctorate / DBA students may be pursuing a move to academia - in which case the task for their professors is to make them better teachers by adding a research component to their practitioner expertise. Alternatively they may be seeking the research component to supplement and deepen their existing expertise, in which case the teacher's role is to help develop already good managers and executives into better ones. 

We explore the power of fostering a community of practice within DBA programs, the importance of using a cohort model for the teaching phase, and the challenges of matching professors with students in terms of their experience and expertise during the dissertation or project phase. This calls for different skills from the teachers and a willingness from both learners and teachers to share strengths and reveal weaknesses - all in the pursuit of learning, developing and tackling real world problems.

Our guests have years of experience supporting expert practitioners in organisations to challenge their thinking and approaches through evidence based management practices. They share their experiences and teaching methods, including advice for the next steps that could take teachers or learners to the next stage.

Host:

Karen Plum

Guests:

  • Denise Rousseau, H J Heinz University Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, USA
  • Lars Mathiassen - GRA Eminent Scholar, Regents Professor, Computer Information Systems, Center for Digital Innovation, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University
  • Jo-Louise Huq - Assistant Professor (Teaching), University of Calgary, Cumming School of Medicine | Community Health Sciences, Haskayne School of Business |Entrepreneurship and Innovation Haskayne University Calgary
  • Doug Gilbert - College of Management and Human Potential, Walden University, Minneapolis, Minnesota


Mentions:

Contact:

Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management

Karen Plum:

Hello and welcome to the Teaching Evidence-Based Management podcast. I'm Karen Plum, a student of evidence-based management, and through this podcast I've been exploring the approach to teaching students with different levels of organizational experience. Teaching undergraduates is very different to teaching people who spent a few years in an organization. What the teachers are trying to instil in those learners is different to, say, executive students who've spent a few years or more navigating and getting things done in organizations. Those executive students have had more time to see how decisions are made and maybe lament that they're often made without the benefit of any form of real, reliable evidence. Through an understanding of evidence-based management, the executive student is guided towards the use of multiple sources of evidence and a way to use it to make better decisions. And then there are students who want to add a deeper understanding of research to their existing expertise as a practitioner in their organization. It isn't necessarily a desire to move fully into academia and focus wholly on research, although for some it might be that eventually. The qualification here is described as an executive doctorate or sometimes a DBA, a doctorate in business administration, and I wanted to find out more about what's involved in teaching it. I was lucky enough to chat to four really experienced executive doctorate teachers and even managed to get them on the same call so they could share their experiences. They are Denise Rousseau, Lars Mathia ssen, Jo-Louise Huq and Doug Gilbert. Let me tell you a little bit about them.

Karen Plum:

Denise Rousseau is from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and works with a community of colleagues at the Center for Evidence-Based Management in promoting the practice and teaching of evidence-based management.

Karen Plum:

Lars Mathiassen is a professor at the Business School at Georgia State University and was a founder of the university's DBA program in 2009, and they've just seen their 200th graduate. Lars was co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Digital Information and Transformation and is co-founder of the International Community at the Executive DBA Council. Jo-Louise Huq has a background as a practitioner consultant in healthcare and teaches at the University of Calgary, where she's part of Cumming School of Medicine and Haskayne School of Business. She teaches the DBA programme, which is now on its sixth cohort of students. And finally, Doug Gilbert is part of the substantial DBA programme at Walden University, based in Minneapolis. Although he's been a full-time academic since 2005, he originally worked as an attorney, then spent time working overseas in a Swiss multinational and then as a consultant, so he says academia is his fourth career chapter. To get us started on the discussion, I asked Denise to describe the Executive Doctorate, or DBA, and how it's connected with evidence-based management.

Denise Rousseau:

What I see as the fundamental connection there is, t he practitioner scholar concept was really foundational when we were first thinking about how to make better use of research evidence in practice. A nd the idea that there would be knowledgeable practitioners who really understood their own domain of work, who tapped into and connected with, contributed to and put to use, the scientific literature in their own practice. Over time, evidence-based practice expanded to be four sources of evidence, not just scientific evidence. But at the heart, nonetheless, of the use of an evidence approach to management is the idea of a hybrid skilled, hybrid identity person who is both an expert practitioner but deeply knowledgeable about the science relevant to his or her practice. So that's I think, where, in my mind, the idea originated. But I think it's operationalized differently in different programs and by different individuals, which, of course, is the beauty of an emerging professional identity.

Karen Plum:

Okay, well, let's broaden that out a bit and ask others to say how that is operationalized in their program. Lars, do you want to weigh in on that?

Lars Mathiassen:

Yeah, I think it's important to stress that there are sort of two market needs, t hat drives the way I see it. One and we're talking here not about universities at large, we're talking about business schools or, more broadly, social managerial sciences, and one force is educational. Many business schools have become too theoretical. Many business schools have lost their touch with practice in the way that they educate future professionals and therefore for many years, of course, we have had MBAs and other folks who come in as teachers in these programs and you can see the emergence of these programs as a way to source them in a much better way, in which they actually add a research component to their already existing practitioner component and therefore become much better teachers of students in these business management schools. So that's one force. The other, maybe more important force is that the speed of change in industry goes up and up and up.

Lars Mathiassen:

And as the speed of change goes up and up and up.

Lars Mathiassen:

You know, institutionalized structured knowledge, although still being very, very relevant, becomes less relevant. Because you need to, all the time, apply to new, emerging situations. You need to deal with problems that are very complex and often difficult to address, and that calls for a shift from disciplinary knowledge towards methodological knowledge.

Lars Mathiassen:

That is, it's not only a question of knowing the right thing. It's important to be able to engage in a process that addresses emerging problems and generates new knowledge and therefore, you can say, a different source is simply to continue to develop high-level professionals into better and better managers and executives by giving them an applied research component to their already existing experience and disciplinary background. So I would think of these two forces as very important, and that is what distinguished the idea of the DBA program from the PhD program, which is more like why don't you come here? You're smart, you're intelligent, you can get a PhD and then you can have a life as a professor. So these are two different markets we are addressing and two different types of terminal degrees we are developing, and that's what we've done at Georgia State since 2009.

Karen Plum:

Right. So in both cases we're adding a research component to people's existing practitioner expertise, and in doing so we can either make them better teachers for our business schools or develop already good managers and executives into better ones through the use of applied research. Thanks for that, Lars. What about you, Doug? What are your thoughts?

Doug Gilbert:

Well, I think the executive doctorates are broad and varied, as we have a lot of diversity in higher education. But what I can see is there are two defining characteristics that kind of run through most of these degrees and one is an orientation toward adult learners as opposed to young and career learners. So typically we see these learners in mid to late career. That's a part of looking at the persona or the market that we look at. The other is going back to my MBA school, talking about real-world problems and real-world solutions as opposed to simply theoretical solutions which might be of interest to an academic community. So there's grounding in kind of not only relevance but also materiality, meaning something is relevant but it's important, and that's the materiality part. So if you look at kind of those two characteristics, I think it pretty much defines what is an executive doctorate versus a theoretical doctorate.

Karen Plum:

Right, Jo-Louise, anything to add to the discussion so far?

Jo-Louise Huq:

When I think about what an executive doctorate is, I know many of our students that come into the program think of it as an extension of an MBA and, as we've heard, that's not what it is.

Jo-Louise Huq:

It's not a degree that teaches you what to do based on what we know, whatever.

Jo-Louise Huq:

But it's more about what questions do I need to ask and then where do I look for the evidence that exists to answer my question, and then what else do I need to know?

Jo-Louise Huq:

And very much that engagement with the complex or wicked real world problems that many of our practitioners come into the program hoping to resolve and they learn in the program the challenge of that and what they need to do to approach understanding their world through a research lens, through a scientific lens, through a lens where we can ask specific questions, generate evidence, understand what to do and figure out what to do next. And I feel the other piece of this is executive doctorates I feel really teach students about the process of asking questions and exploring their world through very different philosophical approaches than they maybe have been exposed to over the course of their practitioner. So it really is a journey in becoming this hybrid practitioner that Denise talked about. So I do approach the idea of an executive doctorate as a journey with these expert adult learners, becoming this hybrid practitioner and helping them engage in their world in a very different way.

Karen Plum:

Who's the typical executive doctorate student? What attracts these folks to enter into this level of study and draws them to want to become more expert in the field?

Denise Rousseau:

Lars has seen more of them than all of us together.

Lars Mathiassen:

So I can speak from the point of view of this worldwide organization we have created - the EDBAC, the Executive DBA Council, which is a worldwide organization of credited business schools that have executive doctorate programs. So here's a way to characterize the students. I mean the average age is typically in the 40s, the youngest people that come in are normally in their early 30s or mid-30s because they, as a criterion, must have some non-trivial practical experience to engage in these programs. So therefore that makes them a little bit older than just coming out of school and the high age group is in their 60s.

Lars Mathiassen:

It is not unusual in our program, say, out of 25 students to have two or three that are in their 60s, and these are basically people that have done what they want to do in life, are very accomplished, but they want to learn more and they want to give back.

Karen Plum:

Who do they want to give back to?

Lars Mathiassen:

That's a good point. You can give back by becoming a university professor, but you can also give back by being a full-time consultant and have your own small consulting shop, or by being a freelance researcher, showing up at conferences writing about the things that you think are important for practice. So that's one way to characterize and I will make another point.

Lars Mathiassen:

And now I speak specifically about our program in Georgia State. We are by far the most diverse program in Georgia State. It's diverse in gender. We are right around 50-50, always a little more men than a little more women, but it's around 50-50. We are very broadly distributed across ethnical backgrounds, across the color of your face, across even the industries in which you work. So our students are of course mainly with, say, business education.

Lars Mathiassen:

But many of them also have an engineering education, have advanced in the industry to do managerial work, and we could talk about nursing as well in the health industry. It's not only doctors, its also nurses and other people that work with health that enter these programs. So these are very diverse. This is very important because most schools have a problem in matching their professorial profiles with the profiles of their students. So, for example, at Georgia State we are the university that educates most students from an African-American background in the United States, but our professors look more like me than they look like the African-American students. That's a problem. Or most professors are male, though half the students are women, and on and on and on. So these programs attract much more broadly and effectively the population more broadly than sort of a select minority of types of professors.

Lars Mathiassen:

And I really love that.

Jo-Louise Huq:

Lars your comment about the challenge of matching students to the professors and supervisors. It's certainly a challenge that we see as well, in particular because the students are coming in not with the intent to contribute to theory development to solve real world problems and we know from the academics that's not always where the incentive is. That's not what the academic role is necessarily about and so matching can be quite challenging, I think, for the students and challenging in terms of the students - my experience, anyway, is that they very much want to stay deeply embedded in their practice environments. That is what interests them, and so they come into the program as those deeply embedded practitioners and in the floor of their mind is always. This is the problem I see in the real world. This is the phenomena that I'm experiencing and how do I work to resolve that.

Jo-Louise Huq:

But overall, I mean what Lars was saying. I think that's what we're seeing here in Canada. I think the students don't always know necessarily what they want to do with their degree once they earn it, aside from wanting to be seen as expert in a field, wanting to feel more legitimate in what they are saying and bringing forward in their different environments and wanting to change the world in which they work in very much so . We wanted that to change in one way or another.

Karen Plum:

Does that make the program more challenging to teach?

Karen Plum:

Doug I'm interested in bringing you in here just thinking about what Lars and Jo-Louise have been saying about matching students and their passions and objectives to those of the academics teaching them.

Doug Gilbert:

Well, there's really two pillars that take place in a typical executive doctorate or DBA/DM, whatever we call it. One is the teaching of courses and the other is then the stewardship and the coaching through the dissertation process, and both actually require different skills than we see in many traditional academic settings. In the teaching of courses, I rely on this idea of andragogy, in other words, teaching adults. It emanates from Malcolm Knowles, as one of the well-known scholars in that area, but there are others. And the idea is that you respect the experience and the life experiences of the people that you have. You also have to understand that they have certain gaps and you have to work with them to fill those. So that's the people that we have teaching the courses. They have to be very skilled at that, and it's a different set of skills than the traditional academic.

Doug Gilbert:

On the dissertation side, I always tell my students you are not here to completely change the world with some new, novel theory that no one has heard of. First and foremost, you want to demonstrate that you are an effective manager of a research project, and that means you can come up with an idea, you can put a project plan in place, execute the plan, interpret results and then publish and disseminate the knowledge that you've created. That takes a different type of approach than someone teaching courses in what we have eight-week segments or soon to be quarters at Walden, and what that takes is really a coaching model, and you have to learn to assess the areas where students are in need and get them into self-assessing that and then help them find solutions, and so I use a very defined coaching approach. So it's these two different pillars I think make a difference in terms of successful executive doctoral programs and those that are just on the market and may not be too successful.

Karen Plum:

Right. Denise, what does this mean for what's required of somebody quote 'teaching' these programs?

Denise Rousseau:

My experience in teaching in different DBA or DM programs is the idea that to become more expert at something where you already have practical experience, training and education, but you're going to deepen it - my encounters with learners to call them students is, you know, they're pracademics, practitioners, students, scholar types. They're this hybrid critter. And the pracademic.

Denise Rousseau:

Many of my conversations center around - they're developing their scaffolding, their mental architecture for how to think about this problem, doing research in this fuzzy or changing area, how I take what I'm learning that has been applied in a corporation to the area in real estate where I work, and that they're consciously pursuing understanding and a way of thinking, kind of a hierarchical set of mental models that they can draw on for this problem.

Denise Rousseau:

But they can develop and foster over time as they continue to become more expert in the domain they're working in. So to help scaffold, I'm resonating with what Doug has said, I think the idea of a coach is the model that seems important, because you can't give somebody the answer to help them scaffold. You can help probe their thinking and work their way to a path of learning. And so it is a different model of supporting a learner in when you're dealing with, I think, an executive doctorate, because you're helping them change and expand and deepen the way they think, which is very different than teaching somebody content or helping them understand structural equation modeling or how to write an article for the Academy of Management Review. You know, the changing how people think is a byproduct, whereas here it's actually the target.

Lars Mathiassen:

These programs are interdisciplinary. This is very, very important because in most universities and business schools the basic structure is disciplinary, not interdisciplinary. People reside and employed in accounting or marketing or management or you have it, and that's where their authority comes from. They must be willing to drop that when they step into these programs they are no longer disciplinary experts. Of course they are, but very rarely is that the most important meeting place between the student and the professor.

Lars Mathiassen:

What we start out from in these programs, as described, is always a problem. Problems tend to be interdisciplinary in nature. They cannot be solved by just putting a little bit of marketing on them or a little bit of management on them. You must draw on different disciplines. This means that the basic contract between the professor and the student is that the student comes in with problem and requisite knowledge about what that is in practice and how that plays out.

Lars Mathiassen:

The professor comes in with methodological knowledge, as Denise beautifully describes. So you are now a methodology expert that might need to stretch yourself out of your comfort zone of knowing about XXY and ZZZ within management science. So you need to meet them on an equal basis and engage in a dialogue where they bring in as important knowledge as you bring in. And I always say that a DBA degree is a test of method. It's not a test of concept. Of course it also is but it is a test of applying rigorous methods to solving real-world problems with some level of success. So you see, the equation has changed and therefore, if you look at a business school and ask yourself how many professors can come in and teach in this program, 20%. The rest are not qualified because they're too narrowly boxed into their disciplinary safe haven and are not willing to engage in broader discourses about solving problems in industry.

Karen Plum:

That's not been their trajectory, that's not what drives them, that's not how they're rewarded.

Lars Mathiassen:

Exactly.

Jo-Louise Huq:

I just want to build on the ideas of like what is actually the working with adult experts not just adult learners, but adult learners who are experts in their own practice domain and what it means to coach and scaffold somebody. What I draw on here is the literature and research that we know about professional identity change and the tensions and similar to what happens as residents become expert surgeons or experts in their areas. We know that the tensions that they experience on professional identity as they move through their learning journey are very strong and there's specific types of identity work that they do to help to move them towards this more expert identity. When we have these expert practitioners coming into our programs, who in the end, will be these hybrid practitioners have a hybrid identity. It's not just the knowledge base and experiences that the supervisors and teachers bring to that. It's an ability to actually coach through the tensions of professional identity change and what that means, and that's not easy work.

Jo-Louise Huq:

I know my personal experience is lots of conversations with students about what it means and the struggles they're facing and the tensions, and there's some interesting literature being published around the personal and professional challenges, severe challenges that people are dealing with as they go through DBA programs. It's difficult. Imagine spending 40 years of your working life becoming an expert and then coming into a DBA program and saying now w e're going to change how you think we're going to help you

Karen Plum:

Now, you know nothing!

Jo-Louise Huq:

Yeah, that is a challenge, and so I feel that that 20%, or whatever number it is, of academics who can function really well and really support students in this type of a program are ones that recognize it's not just technical skills, it's not just the work required to learn how to do research and see problems, but you really are working through professional identity change that's deep-seated and that requires a certain approach to coaching and supporting students.

Karen Plum:

And have the four of you been through that sort of identity change, I wonder, in order to empathize and coach other people through it. Doug, how about you?

Doug Gilbert:

This is kind of my fourth chapter of career progression and going from trial lawyer to corporate executive to consultant to now academic. Each of those has involved a pretty substantial role change, which never is easy. It's always hard and I think if I make a fifth chapter change we'll see if that actually happens or not. Maybe I'm a little more aware of that because of having gone through these things in the past. But the first couple were very difficult and I would see this as also a challenge that many of our students have.

Doug Gilbert:

They often are looking to be what we call switchers and they sometimes want to switch their job function from usually specialist to more generalist in terms of management. Some of them may actually want to change their country because I deal with a lot of students outside the US, that happens quite frequently. And they may also look to change their economic or business sector. So they may want to move out of finance into a small business or into franchising of restaurants or who knows what. But they will go through this identity. So I think having a bit of empathy toward that is helpful.

Denise Rousseau:

There is a cognitive change that people undergo in terms of kind of the capacity to face uncertainty with a questioning mind as opposed to a fearful one or a avoidant one. But related to that is having a broad sense of what constitutes relevant information to solve a problem or progress an issue that's problematic in a practice way. The idea that science can tell us some things, or the scientific method; organizational data may need to be used better and differently; paying a lot more attention to the stakeholders of our decisions and having hard conversations with people so that you have to listen - important. But then another area is their access to expertise on the part of a broader sense of community, both through the university environment that they've entered, but also in terms of an appreciation of the distinctive ways in which people's approaches to questioning and looking at problems can help them. So expanding their idea of what is relevant information to my practice. There's a recognition that you're now part of a social endeavor. It's a networking process to build those kinds of connections so that you have access to that information.

Karen Plum:

Yes, and probably something that you only get to later in your career, when perhaps you know the other priorities in your personal life are different and that you therefore have the intellectual and curiosity bandwidth to tackle those sorts of pan-organizational issues.

Lars Mathiassen:

I've been doing research and worked at a university for 50 years, but over that time I've always worked with industry. I've always felt uncomfortable sitting in the safety of an office in a university and then saying what I think or what I read or what others should understand. So I've always worked with practitioners and I've had a consulting operation for many, many years. So I want to say something about the challenge that I have felt in going from being a more ordinary professor to being a professor for these students. One of the things that is difficult to teach, coach, develop inside these students is an ability to not only make a description of what they have done. I've interviewed a ton of people and this is what I've done, and we earned a lot of money, okay, okay. So the question then comes who can benefit from what you've just said, and how do you know that someone else can benefit? And now we come into rather difficult things like accumulation of knowledge, which is essential in research and it's also essential in practitioner research. You cannot just say what you did, and because you earned a lot of money, then that's a good dissertation. It's not a good dissertation. You somehow need to get into the issue of generalization, not in the traditional, only statistical sense, but in sense of applicability by others in other contexts. That's a tricky thing and it's a very tricky thing to teach.

Lars Mathiassen:

Now a number of things come in there that you have to put on the table. The rigor of concepts. What words do you use? How are they defined? Do you use them consistently. By the way, how do they relate to each other? Okay, are they sufficiently powerful to articulate your essential experience and the key lessons from that experience? And then to go to the next step how does that relate to theory? What is theory? Could you leverage what theories have already said by applying them to the practice that you are now recording? So the reason I bring this forward is again back to Doug's excellent point about the two things we do and coaching, et cetera, et cetera. I mean you need to have a different skill in helping others bring experience from the pure level of experience to a knowledge level where it can be shared with others, and that is a challenge and you must appreciate that challenge if you want to be a good coach for executive doctorates.

Denise Rousseau:

Lars, I'm very interested in what you've just said. You're sort of talking about sort of like creating a social life for the experiences that the student has had and the critical tests that they have run in their own research. What is that process like? Is it by vetting through their peers in the class? Is it vetting with different stakeholders to kind of distill the commonality across settings? How have you approached that with these learners?

Lars Mathiassen:

That's an excellent point. Though we have mentioned it, we have underplayed that these are always taught in cohorts, okay? PhD programs are never taught in cohorts, and I would just, as a question ask, why are they not? We'll not go into that. But I think PhD programs would be much enriched by being taught in cohorts. But anyway, these programs are taught in cohorts.

Lars Mathiassen:

So there's a concept called communities of practice. A community of practice is a group of people that share a certain type of problem, struggle with it, share what they do to overcome these problems and address them and reveal their weaknesses but also celebrate their strength. And as academic director and founder of this program over 16 years or so, I have had as the basic goal of mine to cultivate the community of practice so that that becomes a safe haven; but also a challenging environment for each of the students to find themselves and develop themselves and for the professors to engage and reveal their own weaknesses but also to share their strength, of course. So I think the social dimension, as you point to that, Denise, is the tool. I think if these programs were taught by one professor and one student and then one other professor and one student, we wouldn't have it. It wouldn't work. And maybe Doug and Jo- Louise can say something about that. I think this is a distinctive feature of these programs.

Lars Mathiassen:

And if you're not able to create a community of practice in which we share the problem of becoming practitioner researchers that can produce relevant evidence, then you will not have a good program.

Karen Plum:

Doug, do you want to share your thoughts on that?

Doug Gilbert:

Well, I can bring in experience. So the DBA program at the time I took it at the University of Phoenix relied roughly about 30% on what was called learning teams and we completed about 30% of our assignments, and therefore credits, in these learning teams. This was during courses and this required us to build team management skills to deliver some type of a written project. Not that different than what I did in consulting when I was a manager, senior manager in the consulting space. I have to get a team together, we have to do data collection, memorialize what we've done and create some type of recommendation for the client. Very similar to the assignments. So that was a very good component of how that program was structured.

Doug Gilbert:

Now, not all programs are structured that way. They have a cohort model. Often there's a cohort model in, say, the courses, because this is a very economical way to deliver courses in those programs. But then once you get off into dissertations or what are sometimes called projects, then we kind of lose that bit of this commonality and this group coaching. So I think there's definitely, as Lars is saying, some room for improvement, particularly in the dissertation phase.

Karen Plum:

Jo- Louise, your thoughts?

Jo-Louise Huq:

I think that was actually fascinating listening to what Lars was saying. This idea of the community of practice, fully agree. I think that is where our cohort, in particular the school I'm at, the cohort model could actually be pushed further in towards a community of practice. But, Lars, I want to go back to your earlier comment when you were talking about the challenge of taking the 'my experience' description and moving it into something more generalizable that could be moved forward. Because certainly, seen that in the DBAs that I have worked with, very grounded in, here's my experience, here's the description of my experience, but then so what? Where does that take us?

Jo-Louise Huq:

And I taught qualitative methods this year to the DBAs and we did an interview activity where the DBA students interviewed each other about their journey to becoming a practitioner scholar and then we transcribed in class and then together they actually had to analyze their identity journey and come up.

Jo-Louise Huq:

And it was fascinating, the comments it was like oh, my experience actually was kind of similar to yours in these ways and different in these ways. And here's the concepts that we can help emerge from the data through our analysis. And it was interesting doing that activity with the students because for many of them, as they articulated it to me, i t was the first time where they thought oh, here's our interview data, the description of what happened to me, and here's how we actually start thinking about that more conceptually and then starting linking those concepts into their you know grounded theory of becoming. And I found that exercise was really helpful for them. I'm going to do it again and keep building on that, because that was the push for them to start thinking more conceptually about their individual experiences. I think it's the first time that they've actually been pushed that far. It's just an interesting reflection on, as I'm listening to this conversation, on how to help the students move beyond descriptions and into some more conceptual thinking.

Karen Plum:

It's so interesting to hear all of your thoughts and to see what you're learning and exchanging with each other, which reflects everything you're saying in terms of helping learners to evolve the way they think. I did want to ask for your thoughts and advice. For anyone thinking about teaching, supporting, coaching, an executive doctorate program, what next steps could they take?

Denise Rousseau:

For me it was to put it out there and say, hey, I'd kind of like to know more of what you're doing. I think that what has been helpful to me is I've always been a field researcher. I've done lab studies and policy capturing studies, but my life is building quality relationships with people in a field setting and you know, I've met the most amazing theorists in my life have actually been in executive education programs. These people are able to both abstract and recognize some overarching phenomena in their practice space and I meet those in my field work and so, you know, when the opportunity came to teach in such programs and I've taught in about five or six, because my own university does not have such a program, it's been fascinating to me to get to apply that to individuals who actively want to learn to think more deeply about something. That's not my experience. I don't teach undergraduates. Perhaps I'd have a different experience. I teach graduate students. They want knowledge they can use, not necessarily knowledge that changes the way they think.

Karen Plum:

So, Doug, how about you?

Doug Gilbert:

Well, I think, if I can kind of use two analogies to illustrate the difference and well, actually three, with modern technology. The first two that we've talked about for a long time is are you thinking of being a sage on the stage? Or are you thinking of being a guide by the side? This is kind of a well-known and used analogy that's out there. So in these programs you really have to be much more of a guide by the side. So it's not the sage on the stage which I would typify in the PhD area, and to a certain extent the stage is a facade of ideas and concepts emanating out of the 1950s, so it's outdated.

Doug Gilbert:

But the guide by the side is to really get involved with the students and understand how that works. And the third one, which I think is emerging, is now we call the star from afar, and that is because of our technology. It's now becoming, I think, a necessity for those wanting to teach in this to learn how to deal with these types of technologies, such as creating podcasts, such as creating small little knowledge snippets that the students can use and have some interactivity in them. It's no longer just enough to record your lecture and put it up on, whatever your learning management system is. So I think if you look at kind of those three different types of analogies, you can see definitely we need to be the guide by the side, but I think we're evolving to a guide by the side, with some parts of stars from afar.

Karen Plum:

Fantastic.

Lars Mathiassen:

Yeah, I think I'll simply refer to the Executive DBA Council, if you just Google EBA-C. The organization has been around since 2010 and it's a fantastic place to meet and to know and to learn. So let me just point to the fact that this summer at Henley on Thames, just outside London, there will be the 15th Annual Engaged Management Scholarship Conference. It has recently been in Calgary. It's been many other places. Folks meet there. They come from all over the world, from various programs, they are professors, they are administrators and, more than anything, they're students and graduates from these programs. So if you want to stick yourself closer into what's happening, go there, because you will quickly find out that, although there is an identity, as we have talked about, through all of these programs and people, there's huge variations and that variation is actually beautiful. So going there, you can learn a lot.

Lars Mathiassen:

Besides the conference, it has its own journal. It's called Engaged Management Review and it publishes online. It's a free access journal and it's a journal that tries to report from practice, but in a rigorous way, and give voice to these practitioner scholars in writing and communicating what they're interested in. This is all work in progress, but there's room for many, many more. We started out with four schools. Now there are more than 70 schools involved. I bet that 10 years from now there will be more than 125, because it's much needed in industry and in academia to have these types of graduates.

Karen Plum:

Thank you, Lars, and if you're interested in the DBA Council, the Henley Conference or the journal, I'll put some links in our show notes. So we've talked about the teachers and what they might do to move forward with their thinking. What about students? If we've got students listening who could be interested in the executive doctorate, what potential steps might they take? Jo- Louise, perhaps you could finish us off with your thoughts.

Jo-Louise Huq:

If students are interested in, or potential students are interested in, an advanced degree, a terminal degree, a DBA or executive doctorate, if they are interested in better understanding what we mean by evidence and what we mean by evidence-based management, more interested in understanding that research practice gap that we hear about and know that exists. That's a group that I think we need to encourage more of them, in particular in jurisdictions where we haven't had long-standing DBA programs. Help them understand the potential of this degree as they either remain in the workforce or in the world of practice, or as they start building these bridging roles as teachers. If I would recommend next steps to that particular group is read broadly, think more about what is the difference between academic literature versus practitioner literature. With open access now there's far more easy access to our academic papers. Have them really think about what that and then really start thinking about what is it you want to study and learn about.

Jo-Louise Huq:

What is it you want to know more about? What are the big burning questions? And then can you start thinking of sub questions, can you start narrowing down, can you start even approaching your world through more of a questioning mindset and then explore what sort of DBA programs are out there for you, because I do think there's a need for this type of experts in the world of practice. And there'll always be a need for them in the world of teaching and academia. But we need more of these people in practice and I don't think that the traditional PhD path helps create that practitioner who is comfortable enough to really move in and start changing their organizations, really move in to start changing the social world in which they work. PhDs can get there once they have the practice experience, but the DBA is the step for those experienced practitioners to move into those kinds of roles.

Jo-Louise Huq:

So that's what I would encourage them to think about.

Karen Plum:

Thanks, Jo- Louise, for rounding off the advice to our potential executive doct orate learners and teachers. It's been so interesting to hear the conversation and to see the really free exchange of ideas and experience between you, which I guess enforces the nature of the CEBMa Teachers Network. And for our listeners, I'll put a link in the show notes if you'd like to find out more about the network, which is a place to connect, to share ideas, get insights on best practices and get your hands on some tools that you can use in your evidence-based management classes. Before we finish, do you have any final thoughts, Denise?

Denise Rousseau:

For me very exciting to be part of this conversation and to learn from the people here Involved in an innovation in higher education and an innovation in practice in terms of developing practitioners and the expertise of people whom I believe will develop kind of the creme de la creme of expertise is adaptive expertise.

Denise Rousseau:

It's not just in your own domain, but your ability to confront problems that are new and novel and use your tools of questioning but not necessarily your answers from prior experience in order to address the kind of emerging issues that cross domains and that seem to be coming at us faster and with greater pressure to address, because there's many pain points with a lot of the changes that we face climate-wise, industry-wise.

Denise Rousseau:

And I would underscore that the connection between the practitioner scholar education, that is, the DBA or the executive doctorate, it's kind of the culmination of the community building capacity of evidence-based management. You can't practice careful, thoughtful use of evidence on your own. Nobody can know it all. You can't get at it through your computer. Yet each and every one of us is pointer knowledge of where something might be found or how a question might be understood, for each other. And I think that one of the beautiful modeling of the executive doctorate is the community of practice that people become, or communities, perhaps plural, become part of. It's very consistent with what we've learned about advanced evidence-based management - that they are members in diverse communities. This is kind of what makes it fun to get this group together and to continue that learning.

Karen Plum:

And that's the end of my discussion with Lars, Jo-Louise, Doug and Denise, who I'd like to thank for their time and insights for this episode. I was really struck by how the executive doctorate enables close relationships between teachers and expert practitioners, enabling everyone to learn together. I guess, if you put it simply, students or learners can access research expertise from their academic teachers and the teachers can access the expertise of their practitioner students who are actively seeking to use the available research in real world situations. I love that Denise said you can't practice the careful, thoughtful use of evidence on your own. There are no right or wrong answers. There's always something to learn and it seems that the combination of having a guide by your side and other expert learners accompanying you on the journey helps everyone to modify their thinking and approach when tackling these big real-world problems that they're faced with.

Karen Plum:

That's it for this episode. If you'd like to know more, there are links and contact details in our show notes or you can look at the Resources page of the CEBMa website. Just go to cebma. org. If you'd like to get in touch, there is the usual Contact Us page on the website and Managing Director Eric Barends will be delighted to hear from you. Thanks for listening to this episode. See you next time. Goodbye.

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Karen Plum

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