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Beyond the illusion of change: bridging the ‘classroom’ and the workplace via processes of temporal re-contextualisation
Abstract
The application and use of formal knowledge in the ‘real-world’ is highly problematic. This problem is neither new nor straightforward. In practice, it is deeply embedded in issues surrounding how we value knowledge, experience reality and see time. Building on the concept of visibility this essay explores how participants on a highly ‘successful’ learning programme sought to implement their change commitments in the workplace. The process of seeing change was constantly challenging. Living ‘in’ and ‘over’ time produced a sense of temporal shock that significantly undermined well-intentioned commitments to practice within days of returning to the office. Programme success created the illusion of chance as commitments fell victim to the action, traction and distraction of post-programme chrononormality. This long-running (18 year) empirical account charts the evolution and development of a visualisation tool that sought to make temporal context visible. Facilitating temporal recontextualization, the methodology delivered significant results across a range of evaluation criteria but suffered ongoing challenges related to the appropriate levels of analysis and intervention. In a study believed to be the largest, longest and most comprehensive of its kind this pracademic perspective aims to be close to practice, practices and practitioners. It also outlines a temporal methodology of change that enables the capacity to act, ‘in’ and over time.

Acknowledgements:

I owe a deep well of gratitude to many people. To my wife, family and friends for their loving support and belief. To all the team at the IEA Paris for nurturing a very special atmosphere where creative thought flourishes, develops and evolves. Finally, to my Impact colleagues and the 1,800 plus participants associated with this study. Many of us tried, through this work, to make a positive difference to the future of the planet. Only time will tell if it mattered. This is for all of you.

High-level outline

Most of us need little reminding of how difficult it can be to practically apply new ideas, especially formal learning, at work. This field, knowledge Transfer, also has significant theoretical issues. Taken together, these challenges question the fundamentals of an industry that spent US$78 billion, largely uncritically, on corporate leadership programmes during 2023. What has become known as the Transfer Problem has defined much of my professional and academic life.  

This article seeks to craft a novel solution to issues of Transfer. It focuses on the largely hidden role of time in the application and use of post-programme commitments. Based on a multi-level process study spanning 18 years (2006 - 2024), it explores how participants (1,875) of a 'successful' double-loop learning programme ('Impact') sought to apply transformative change commitments in the workplace. Highlighting Schon's (1984) distinction between the mountain-top and the swamp, it suggests that the problems of transfer are deeply rooted in how we value knowledges, experience reality and see time. 

Weaving the central thread of visibility, the article charts the development, evolution and implementation of a visualisation tool. This tool sought to facilitate temporal recontextualisation while connecting change commitments with the flow of work. The findings were stark. They suggested a steep fall-off in the initial practising of commitments as participants returned to their workplaces (e.g. circa 40% in the first 18 days). Furthermore, the visibility of the post-programme context exposed a complex 'timescape' littered with nuanced dimensions of temporality. Here, norma-temporal practices, the dilemmas of liminality and the interactional expectations of others combined to 'crowd out' the practising of well-intentioned commitments. Overall, this produced a visceral sense of 'temporal shock' that limited the capacity to act. Overcoming 'shock' required drilling to the core of identity-laden, temporally infused practices with the aim of reshaping chrono-normative behaviours. This approach generated significant results and fulfilled a comprehensive range of evaluation criteria. There was, however, a painful sting in the tail. Issues relating to levels of analysis and intervention stalked the study. This dynamic reinforced how, as actors, we play with and are played by temporality, at every level, shaping the legitimacy and sustainability of our actions**.** In April 2024, the full ramifications of this statement drew a line under the study.    

What follows is a detailed empirical account of the relationship between temporality and change. The account provides a statement of record that captures the evolving processes of understanding and use, both in and over time. It suggests that the incorporation of temporality changes the way we see formal learning - moving it from a disembodied clinical intervention to a liminal temporal interruption. The story unfolds over 4 periods between 2006-2024. It is based at a multinational energy company ('Forum') facing transformative change as it seeks to navigate the emerging landscape of energy transition. Believed to be one of the longest, largest and most comprehensive studies of its kind, the account has a strong methodological flavour. Sensitive to how we operationalise change, it focuses on the iterative detail of 'how' processes. This approach fills a much-overlooked gap for granularity in micro-orientated process studies. 

The first section outlines the type of empiricism that informs my approach. As a pracademic this approach not only shapes how I understand knowledge and see reality it also informs the type of scholar I am and how I came to see the 'problem' underpinning this article. Each subsequent section drills into the sequenced stages of understanding and use, culminating in a brief final segment that aims to make sense of an 18-year experience.  

The craft of pracademia: navigating the complex terrain of understanding and use

For close to 25 years, I have taught at the LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science). Here, I am a Visiting Professor in Practice of Organizational and Social Psychology - I teach a specialised MSc course aimed at bridging theory and practice by addressing emerging issues in organisational life. Alongside this, I have a non-traditional educational role - I design and deliver customised executive educational experiences for commercial organisations (Anderson & van Wijk, 2010). These experiences are usually short formal programmes aimed at the specific needs of a particular organisation or cohort  (Tushman & O'Reilly III, 2007). Education is my second career. Prior to my current life, I was an Investment Banker, working for 16 years as a US government bond salesperson and a fixed income derivative structurer.  

As a practising social psychologist, I operate between the realms of rigour and relevance. I straddle the settings of theory and practice (Tushman & O'Reilly III, 2007) via a 'third road' (Fukami, 2007), a mediating position that involves translating knowledge to make it contextually fit-for-purpose (Dobson, 2012). In this role, I employ strategies of re-contextualisation (Evans & Guile, 2012) acting as a sense-giver (Sutcliffe & Wintermute, 2016), a role often described as a 'pracademic' (Posner, 2009). This space is far from unproblematic (Carton & Ungureanu, 2018). As neither a pure academic nor a full-time practitioner, it is a role that lacks a clear-cut identity (Vroom, 2007) and one that can be seen as sapping the purity of understanding from either domain. The words of an old Italian expression are instructive in capturing this tension; 'Traduttore, traditore', every translator is a traitor (Shearn, 2016). Despite this, mediating the dual considerations of understanding and use has been the driver of my career over the last 25 years. In this space, I am both a theoretician and a practitioner of practice. 

Background to the 'problem' 

As an executive educator, I tend to witness a recurring phenomenon. No matter how 'successful' a learning programme has been (e.g. top evaluations), I am struck by how quickly participants seem to revert to their 'normality' egged on by the action, traction and distraction of their working lives. I often cheekily suggest that as soon as participants walk out of the classroom, I can see them actively forgetting everything they have learnt. This seems to strike a chord - it invariably brings a knowing, guilty smile to faces. Many of them have been in this position before, a feeling I suspect that most of us have experienced at some stage. 

The challenge of post-programme application is part of a wider problem surrounding the utility of formal programme knowledge in organisations (Faragher, 2016; Glaveski, 2019). In 2024, the global market for training and development was estimated at US$354.97 billion (Research and Markets, 2024). Leadership development makes up an important segment of this. In 2023, organisations spent an estimated US$77.9 billion on corporate leadership programmes, a figure expected to grow to just short of US$200 billion by 2033 (Khandelwal, 2024). As organisations face complex, often existential challenges, this would appear to be money well spent (Huggel et al., 2022). That said, very little is known about the effectiveness of this investment (Baldwin et al., 2017b). This situation is not helped by opaque approaches to evaluation. In reality, most organisations only measure the 'success' of their programmes at the level of reactions and satisfaction (Murray, 2019), something with little meaningful link to behavioural change and outcomes (Saks & Burke-Smalley, 2012; Sitzmann et al., 2008). This has troubled me over the course of my career. What is the point of doing what I do if the backbone of my approach achieves only the illusion of change? Given the expense of programmes, am I just contributing to some form of '(great) training robbery? Or, worse still, might the whole logic of leadership development be questionable? (Rock & Cassiday, 2024). 

I have sought answers to this problem throughout my career. Wearing my academic hat, my first port of call was the existing literature. Surely, I said, I can't be the first to notice the issue?  It soon became clear that literally thousands of articles, journals and books had been devoted to the topic area (Sitzmann & Weinhardt, 2018). What was also clear was that the 'signature' research, the 'transfer of training' literature, had produced few significant breakthroughs (Ford et al., 2018) while simultaneously achieving a state of saturation and stasis. Alongside this, alternative perspectives questioned the basic legitimacy of formal learning interventions and whether they could ever lead to meaningful change (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1999). Whatever the approach, there was almost no consideration for what happens after a formal programme (Baldwin et al., 2017a; Blume et al., 2010) - for some reason, any meaningful understanding of this context was written out of the texts. This space, the space that ultimately matters for application and use, was largely invisible. 

The more I explored the problem, the more it became clear that there was an additional issue at play - something about the relationship between different types of knowledges and their contexts. Early in my research, a Special Edition of the Academy of Management Journal captured this focus on knowledge types quite nicely (Rynes, 2007). Upfront, the editors made the standard plea to contributors for articles that could improve the uptake and impact of ideas in practice. Ultimately, they noted something, however, that resonated strongly with me; the findings presented in the edition, they admitted, bore little connection to the everyday life of practitioners, especially in terms of how their methodology represented the reality of the workplace.

'The real-world of...(the) manager is messy, complex and filled with human drama, making it unlikely that it can be completely understood using 'hands off' methodologies such as surveys and archival analyses'

(Editor's foreword. Rynes, 2007)

This observation made me wonder about the characteristics of the domain in which 'formal' knowledge is generated (e.g. the classroom) and those where it is used, consumed and applied - the 'real world' (McIntyre, 2005; Vaill, 2007; Weick, 2005). Could it be that findings that are legitimately produced and presented in one context and fit-for-purpose for that context, did not connect in other contexts because different rules or dynamics applied? (Astley & Zammuto, 1992). Aspects of this distinction resonated with my own experience. As an executive educator, I often work closely with 'star' academics as programme faculty members. More often than not, if a scholar insists on communicating their ideas via an academic approach, they find it hard to connect with practitioner audiences (Markides, 2007). Far from a need to communicate more clearly or dumb down their content (Shapiro et al., 2007), the issue seems to touch something more fundamental - a difference in the way that knowledge is valued and understood between the academic and practitioner realms (Langley, 2019; Langley et al., 2013; Tushman & O'Reilly III, 2007). 

As the years passed, I developed a hunch that knowledge produced during a learning programme changed in some way as it moved out of the classroom. I was prompted in this regard by the work of Donald Schön (Schon, 1990). Buried deep within the first chapter of his seminal work on reflective practice is a metaphor about the 'mountaintop' and the 'swamp' (Schön, 1984). Schön suggests that there is a choice to be made while navigating the mixed topography of professional practice, a choice between the hard, high ground where clarity of technical understanding is possible and the swampy lowlands where tangled messiness dominates the terrain. 

'There are those who choose the swampy lowlands. They deliberately involve themselves in messy but crucially important problems and, when asked to describe their methods of enquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error, intuition, and muddling through. 

Other professionals opt for the high ground. Hungry for technical rigour, devoted to an image of solid professional competence, or fearful of entering a world in which they do not know what they are doing, they choose to confine themselves to a narrowly technical space' 

(Schön, 1984, p. 42 & 43)

This passage had a profound impact on me. It appeared to capture the essence of a longstanding dilemma in my field of practice, a choice often portrayed as a binary decision between rigour or relevance (Ghoshal, 2005; Van De Ven & Johnson, 2006). Intriguingly, it also seemed to give me a way of talking about something deep and visceral, something that I had experienced but often found difficult to articulate (Astley & Zammuto, 1992). As an academic, I had made a choice early in my career to pitch my metaphorical camp halfway up Schön's mountain - at a place where I could occasionally get a clear view but also had access to the everyday context of organisational life. 

The more I considered Schön's distinction, the more I found myself returning to the implications of his parable. Often it felt that the requirements of so-called 'rigorous' quality research located high on the mountaintop, meant that an issue under investigation needed to shake off the excess baggage of contextual detail, focusing instead on a core theoretical problem (Degama et al., 2019; McLaren & Durepos, 2019). This raised a significant issue for me - it appeared that it was this very detail, the background contextual noise, that gave the swampy real-world setting of organisational life most of its meaning (Langley et al., 2013). From this perspective, the parable seemed to capture a crucial ontological and epistemological distinction between these domains while also exposing the sinewy relational tension between the 'worlds' of theory and practice.  As eager academics climb the designated mountain to get a clearer view of their topic, the process of climbing ever higher appears to drive a wedge between them and the practitioners below. These practitioners are not focused on the valiant efforts taking place above them - they are engaging in the daily grind and multiple dramas of organisational life (Langley, 2019), busy throwing mud at one another (Blackwell, 2008) and desperately seeking some way of making sense of what is going on around them (Weick, 2005). Ultimately, either side becomes so absorbed in their respective activities that they lose interest in one another. 

This way of thinking had a considerable impact on how I viewed my role as an educator. There seemed to be a need to take classroom knowledge and rekindle it in a way that was fitting for the workplace. This required adopting some form of mediat