Monthly Message Design Office Hours 📱

Hey, how's everyone doing? I'm Tamsen Webster. I am the a sense giver. I'm not saying I'm the sense giver, I'm just here for the sense givers and all of us. So what is sense giver? What is a sense? What is sense giving? It is the act of making things make sense to other people. And today, as we do, or I do once a month, we are doing Office Hours Live. So this is where if you've got questions about this act of how people make sense, how you can make things make sense to other people, and how some of that information travels downstream when it comes to creating content, uh, of any kind where you're trying to make something make sense to somebody else, um, even if that's just a conversation, then that is what today is all about. Uh, often we have topics, uh, in advance. Sometimes people come on and ask questions. Sometimes people come with their message or sense-making, sense-giving questions. Questions. Um, in case there isn't anything, I'm always happy to carry forth on some topic that happens to be, um, happens to be on my mind at the moment. So, uh, full disclosure, I am like still trying to find my footing, uh, because I just came back from my final 2 weeks at Columbia finishing up my doctoral coursework. And yeah, I am actually sad about that because it's my favorite thing to do ever. But it was good. I am on my way to my dissertation and I am still trying to figure out what makes sense as far as— speaking of making sense— what makes sense as far as what what the next stage looks like, inclusive of figuring out and finishing out my dissertation. So my thought today, top of mind as I look back on these 2 years that I've been working on the coursework for my program and starting to think about where I am now, is really very much about the idea of rigor. And what I mean by rigor is that strenuousness, that, that high standard, that fastidiousness that, that shows that someone's been very, very careful with something, that they've dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's. And what's really interesting to me about this concept of rigor is that there is a strong bias towards academic rigor, and that is good. Let me be super clear, um, academic rigor is very important. I will talk about that. But I think what's also missing is the idea of what does practitioner rigor look like? Because for, to be quite honest, I have captured in my, even in my own GPTs, this concept of catching it when I talk about rigorous publications or rigorous people, rigorous work, that it often defers to whether or not that has been— if that person comes from a scholarly background, or whether or not that work has been, uh, tested empirically and published in a peer-reviewed journal. Again, let me make it clear that that is really important stuff, and as long as that is the only definition of rigor, then I would suggest that a couple things happen. Number one, we end up with this kind of farmers and cowmen, chalk and cheese, you combine two others, the oil and water kind of perspective on what practitioners and scholars, uh, can do, can be, and what— how useful they can be to each other. Um, because I, I've had a lot of conversations with scholars, practitioners, scholar-practitioners, and pracademics— love that term— over the past couple weeks. And everyone agrees that there, A, is such a thing as practitioner rigor, and B, we need to be explicit about what that looks like so that we can start to really establish that kind of, um, in baked-in respect and recognition that comes from academic rigor for practitioners as well. Now, why might that be important? Well, first and foremost is that the reason why I see that as important is that, just to give an example from my dissertation, as because one of the things that I'm doing for this dissertation, which is basically, if you're not familiar, it's just a big, like, huge project, uh, for which in my case there will be multiple, hopefully scholarly published journal papers coming out of it. Yes, I realize the irony. But the other thing, um, that part of that piece of it, that big project, one of the first big projects that I'm trying to do with it is what is known as a literature review. And a literature review is exactly what it says. It's reviewing what has been written the literature on the particular question that I am asking so that I can establish where— what has been said, what has not been said, what the dominant themes are, what may have been overlooked, where one kind of area of study may have covered something that another area of study has not covered, etc. And so in order to do that, you go and look at what respectable, rigorous people have said about those things that you're curious about. And what I ran into immediately was that by following some of the academic standards, it would cut out some of the practitioners, um, and their work and their writing and their research that is arguably just as important for one of the topics for kind of the topic that I am looking at. And so we had to start to figure out what does it look like? What does practitioner rigor look like? And for the literature review, we settled on this idea of somebody else had to publish this person's work. Somebody else with a rigorous editor or rigorous process had to publish this work. So for instance, something like Harvard Business Review or, may it rest in peace, Loan Management Review, something like that, or a publishable, like a published book by a practitioner that wasn't self-published. Now, some people might be like, oh, well, hey, you've hybrid published your book. And frankly, I don't even know if I would qualify my own books in this because of the hybrid publishing piece. But I'm really curious, uh, the reason why we chose that was that there's this third-party validation that someone had done the work and it was somebody else was kind of putting their name on this person's work besides them. So this really started this conversation that I had with a few other practitioners and a few other scholars, etc., about what might practitioner rigor look like. Um, And we came up with certain things off the tops of our heads, like, uh, actually doing and publishing the results of at least a practitioner version of whatever a literature review might look like. Um, I don't know what that looks like. If you've got thoughts, let me know. I know what an academic literature review looks like, but I'd be really interested in thinking through what does a practitioner literature review look like. Um, Another thing that we talked about, one of the things that would be in that literature review is— and this is kind of extends to some other concepts as well— is being— is actually talking about the literature that does not agree with where you are coming from or that your work builds on, right? That is an establishment of rigor right there. Another thing was talking about if you've made a decision or you've decided to go a particular way, to also talk about what you chose not to do. Full credit here. That is something that my friend, author, speaker, social fitness expert, workplace performance expert Hannah Pryor talks about in her upcoming book. This idea of show what you didn't choose is also a a mark of rigor. But this idea of, I think, rigor, practitioner rigor, and what that looks like in general beyond publishing, I think is, is really important. Because there are, for instance, folks that are sitting out there on quite a lot of very good data, um, that could become rigorous, but it, but it isn't yet because of either how it's represented or how it's, um, how people are traveling on all of that. People are traveling, that's what I get for looking at comments. How people are thinking through these various things and all of that. And part of me comes down to this idea, the reason why I want to think about rigor and practitioner rigor and where we can make practitioner rigor and scholar rigor, academic rigor, talk to each other is because these two camps need each other. And in fact, I've talked with a couple of folks in the last couple of weeks about how I would love to have like a practitioner and scholar matchmaking service somewhere. And here's why. As I was saying before, there are certain folks that I know that have, you know, they've been collecting data from their audiences, from their clients, etc. Anonymized, but volumes of it for, for in certain cases, years through polling, polling devices they use or surveys they gather, etc. And while there's, there may be some issues with how some of those questions were asked, etc., it still is a huge amount of data that if processed and kind of given a little bit more of the academic-like rigor around it, could turn into something quite, quite rigorous and basically make public in a, in a useful kind of reputation-building way some of these folks, some of the work that people have already done. At the same time, there are scholars who study certain areas who would, I mean, give their eye teeth to have access to some of the clients, some of the some of the workplaces, some of the workspaces, some of that data that some practitioners are just kind of collecting as part of their normal work. And they're just kind of like, oh, this is my job. And here then to me is this beautifully symbiotic relationship where we've got a certain set of practitioners who want more academic rigor, and we've got academics who have the rigor who want more practitioner-focused, practitioner-applicable, practitioner-useful, uh, work and/or access to kind of real-life conditions, participants, research sites, etc. And y'all, like, nobody's talking to each other, and that to me is like cuckoo bananas. Um, so what can we do about that? At the very least, if you live in a town where there are— like, if you're a practitioner and you want that kind of rigor and there is any kind of university or college in your town, um, I'd highly recommend that you look up and see if there's anybody in your area who is focusing on the topic that you, that you practice. Um, and even if there's not immediately in your area, you can go on to something like Google Scholar and Look for people who are studying the thing that you do every day and reach out. That's a, that's a place to start. If you're not sure what practices, what disciplines cover or call the thing that you study, this is a place where AI can be super useful, where you say to Claude or to Perplexity or whatever your favorite LLM is, This is what I do. This is what I'm curious about. What is this called across, like, in as many different, like, what academic disciplines cover something like this? First question. Second, what do they call it? Third question. Who's studying it? Fourth question. Who's studying it near me? And you never know, right? At the very least, as well as if you've got— if you've collected a whole bunch of data over time, then again, reach out to your local college, university, community college, see if they've got a statistics class or a quantitative research class, um, something like that where they're looking for a data set to analyze. Um, because guess what? You have one. And so by doing that, to me, it kind of helps everybody out. All right, um, so I'm wondering at this point, that's kind of my quick thought on practitioner rigor, etc. More to come. Um, still thinking about that kind of stuff, what it looks like. Uh, if you've got thoughts on that, if you want to kind of put your head together with me on that at some point, let me know. I'd love to do that. Um, related, uh, but if you've got questions about sensemaking making things make sense, sense giving, which is making things make sense to other people, message design, which is what do you do to like create the things, whether that's conversation or content that can make things make sense to other people. Um, pop your question in the comments. Uh, Jen is on the— she's in the background. She is the goddess of all things and she can help, uh, bring that forward to me and let me know. Meanwhile, I'll continue to riff. Um, one of the reasons why I want to bring up this idea of rigor is that, uh, and I think we've talked about this a little bit before, but this, this idea between, um, rigoros, rigorish, and rigorless. Um, and one of the things that was, that is also very clear, um, from even be, even in academia, is that various disciplines have different definitions of rigor. So for instance, and I love, I love my home discipline of adult learning, but their, their standards, their ideas, their approach to what is rigorous and what is, what counts as research, etc. Et cetera, is fundamentally different than even other social sciences. It's again, a thing that I've discovered from doing my— some of my work on my dissertation is that A, things like management science, which sounds very fancy, but that's things where if you know Adam Grant, he's definitely in the management science camp. So does Rita McGrath. So is Amy Edmondson. So is— Arminia Ibarra, Francesca Gino, um, all of these folks are in generally what is known as management science, different subsets, etc. But that group, um, the, the scholarship in that group has, has very clear standards about what, uh, what rigorous looks like and what doesn't. Um, they've even written articles on it, papers on it, in fact, uh, so that you can see what it means. Like, what does it mean to create a theory? What is it? What does require? What do other management scientists require? Now, to me, that is incredibly useful whether you are in academia or not because it at least tells you what the standards are for those kinds of publications. And it does not mean that you have to be an academic in order to publish in those publications, but you do need to meet those standards. So I think understanding what those look like, et cetera, can be very helpful. So again, that's another place where if you are in a particular field and you are curious about how you can be recognized as a, you know, for your practitioner work in certain other fields and other disciplines, it can be useful to say, you know, again, ask, you know, AI is a great place to start. Ask what do— what does this field— like, what, what are the go-to, uh, sources, resources for what good scholarship looks like, good theory building looks like, good qualitative research looks like? Um, so for instance, and, and the thing is, is again, you do not have to be in management science because by moving, uh, by looking at the approaches that certain certain other— like, let us say the management science discipline has said, hey, here is an approach to qualitative research. In other words, how can you talk to people? How can you interview people and start to build theory from that in a way that academics consider rigorous? There is a whole article on that. All you need to do is search for the Gioia methodology, G-I-O-I-A methodology. It is a paper from 2013. You do not have to be an academic to figure that out, right? Like they are outlining their whole project and how they approach this work so that yes, other academics, but again, practitioners can follow this too. Do you need to be in management science to follow that methodology? No, you do not. If you are in another discipline like me with adult learning, I can follow that methodology and it makes it much more likely that something that I write either as a practitioner or scholar or yes, would be published and/or accepted by that group because it's following a methodology that they already recognize as rigorous and valid. The issue, I think, to some extent is mistaking kind of the output of rigorous stuff as the whole thing. You know, and I saw this a little while back with somebody, you know, with— and I've made this mistake myself, so let me be completely clear on this, that this is a— this is something where, you know, my previous books are rigorish. I'm proud of them, happy about them, but that they are— they follow kind of a a practitioner who didn't know better's best attempt to be as rigorous as possible. So did I do a lot of research? Yes. Did I cite my sources? Yes. Did I do it at the level that, like, truly rigorous, even as a practitioner, could be? No. Um, but it's still— so again, I'd say, like, in my mind, rigorish is better than rigorless, uh, without even paying attention. Uh, but the— again, the best is like, what would practitioner rigor look like? I think one of those things too, and by the way, it is consistent with the sense-making approach, is explaining what you did. So one of the big— so one of the things that a lot of academics and scholars talk about, and it is one of the ways by which rigor is established, and I think it is one of those transferable concepts, is the exact word I just talked about, which is transferability. Can I, can I follow this thing that you did over here and transfer either the approach or the idea over here? Which means you have to tell me enough about what you did for me to at least try. Now, transferability is, um, similar to— you may have heard this idea of replication and how sometimes that, you know, the social sciences have gone through a replication crisis. And, um, and replicability— like they say, replicate, it's kind of like replicant if you're a Blade Runner fan, uh, which means basically duplicate. Again, academics being silly. Um, but replicatable means that if you give me the study and you write up your— what you did, also known as methodology— I should be able to pull together the same kinds of people ask them the same questions, analyze the data in the same way, and I should be able to get something that looks, as far as results go, very similar, if not pretty much the same as what you did. Now, that is a little easier when you are not dealing with humans because humans are, you know, a little different. And so this is where in certain of the academic disciplines there is this idea of transferability is really the is much more of the gold standard, meaning replicating somebody else's study exactly isn't easy. There's a lot of factors in it that sometimes can't be accounted for. And so, and by the way, sometimes people like do a study never intending for it to be replicatable. They're just trying to bring about some insight from it. And then people are like, oh, you can't replicate it. And they're like, Dude, I wasn't trying to make it duplicatable anyway. But this idea of transferability, again, as a mark of rigor or as a stepstone to rigor, I think is really useful. Um, so what would be required to think about it? Well, think about kind of anything that you're trying to do for the first time. What kind of information would you want or need to know in order to be able to do what somebody else did and try it for yourself? Um, so this is where, again, I think any academic, any practitioner, any academic— like, academics know this, but this is something any practitioner could do, where you're really saying, this is how I do what I do, and I'm not holding anything back. Now, for some people, I get it, that is absolutely terrifying as a way to approach something. Um, but to me, that's— that is the— that is the sense-giving approach to, uh, getting information out there. Instead of selling it, you are making sense of it. You are helping people, not selling to them. If it happens to turn into hiring, great. But the— the really— the sense-giving approach, this kind of making sense approach, means talking about what you do in a way that other people could do it themselves if they so chose. Um, think about it like a cookbook, right? Uh, as my husband often said to me, just because, you know, just because you have Emeril's cookbook doesn't make you Emeril. So again, there is that, but at the same time, like, we, we, we like and respect the people who tell us exactly how to do what they do. Uh, they give us pictures to show us, like, what— they tell us all the ingredients, they tell how to put them together, they tell, like, give us a picture of what it's supposed what it's supposed to look like at the end. If you're watching a TV show like America's Test Kitchen or something like that, again, they're going to walk you through and show you exactly how to get the thing that they're trying to get. Will you be able to absolutely replicate their precise results? Maybe not. But again, there's a whole bunch of other factors. But can they transfer the idea to you? That really, to me, would be an interesting line to follow when it comes to practitioner rigor, is this idea of transferability of your information. Not just, here's the information, here you go, but it's also, let me show you the path that I took to get here. Um, let me show you how I do it, uh, and let me, and let me give you the, the, the the analysis, the conditions, the criteria that I use to decide whether or not that was successful or not. Because what that allows someone to do is A, do it. B, if they've got a different opinion, do their own version and again build off of what you've done. The rigorous thing to do would be to cite that and to say, hey, I followed Tamsen Webster's approach up to this point, but I do not agree with her on this, so I did this instead, and here is why, and here were the results that I got. So I think this idea of transferability, kind of this idea of lit review is a way to get to practitioner rigor. I think kind of pairing with a scholar is a way to get there. I think also, you know, there is on Substack right now, I am kind of doing, I am in the midst of a series on this idea of, you know, what academics call positionality, which is a silly name, but it just like a personality or is the nature and the characters of characteristics of a person, a positionality, think of it this way, is the nature and the characteristics of your position on something. And so one of the things that can be useful, I think, again, as a way to establish practitioner rigor, um, because it's one of the ways that academics establish rigor is to understand what your point of view is, that, that position that you're starting from, um, say that out loud. And then one of the things that academics do is they kind of make sure that everything that they, they, that follows aligns with that. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, here's an example. I, you know, we had this, uh, one of the, one of the last exercises we did in one of my classes last semester, um, was that they presented— our professors presented us, our cohort, with a, with a topic. Um, let's say it's something like gun control. I am not making a statement, I'm just saying it's a topic. Now, based on— and then what they had us do is say, how would scholars from different positions, not what their position is on gun control, but their positionality— how do they, how do they look at the world? How do they judge what's important and what's knowable? How do they judge what's real? How would they go about exploring that particular topic? So for instance, right, if you are somebody who believes that there is— if there's a firm, knowable answer, that things can be rendered in black and white, then you would go for hard facts, hard quantitative evidence about, you know, this is what happens with or without gun control. Or you would be— if there's a particular topic within that, you could say, you know, this is what it looks like when there are You know, this is just, again, describing what happens with or without gun control. That is kind of one way to approach that. If you're somebody who believes that and operates from a position of what's known as constructivist, then where do you believe that what is meaningful and knowable and real is the meaning that any particular person makes of it. Then your approach to studying that topic is going to be talking to people about the meaning they have around issues related to gun control. Do you see how that— those are kind of two— the topic is the same, but kind of where people are coming from are very different. Again, not on what position they take on gun control, but what position they hold on what we even need to know and what's important relates differently. It creates a different expectation of the kind of thing that they would study and how they would study it. Now, why does this matter? Because, uh, fast forwarding to last week, uh, we had some research presentations that we were doing for some of our faculty, and one of our groups said that they did something in what was called a mixed methods. They described it as a mixed methods approach. Okay, all right. And, and one of the faculty said later, like, actually it wasn't mixed methods, meaning mixed methods means that there is a, there is a, uh, a quantitatively rigorous study and a qualitatively rigorous study, and those two things are assembled together to create findings. The issue was, is that, that, um, the, the, the quantitative part of it couldn't be— couldn't meet the standard of rigorous because they didn't have enough responses. This is probably more than you ever want to know, but because of that, it couldn't be a fully quantitative study. So meaning they couldn't do that whole part, but they could still do rigorously the qualitative part. They just had a survey that helped them find respondents. But the minute they called it mixed methods, they undercut their rigour. Now, that might seem like really minor to you, but that idea of understanding what the expectations are and then like meeting those expectations that people have is really important. So why do I say all of this? Because that is another way I think that practitioners could achieve rigor for themselves is again understanding like what some of these, what some of these terms mean. Again, I'm not saying you have to go and do research and you have to go get like statistically significant quantitative set. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is if you understand and if you come from a point of view, for instance, that thinks that it is possible to know, um, you know, this is that and this is not that. And that that can be objectively— I obviously have my own opinions about that— that can be objectively known. I am not of that position. Then your research, your practice, what you write about that practice should match up to that approach. Versus if you are somebody who— well, what am I? I'm what's known as a critical realist. Silly title, uh, but I believe there is a reality. I don't believe— like, I believe that it exists. I don't believe we're a part of the simulation. I don't believe this is all figment of my imagination or of yours. But at the same time, I also believe that my reality and your reality are never going to be quite the same because we are two different people and each of us experience this reality like through our own lens of experience, of our own perceptions, our own values and beliefs. Et cetera. That is again known as critical realism, um, meaning there is a reality, but I also understand that mine is not the same as yours, and therefore I need to be really conscious about what I think versus what you think and be super clear about it. Do you see how this is all consistent with what I am saying? Okay, um, what is also consistent with that point of view is an approach to research that that's known as— these terms driving us— pragmatism. Again, just is it practical? What is the most practical way to figure out the answer to a particular question? I am, as a practitioner, it's very consistent for me being someone who's spent all these years, 30-plus years in the field doing work around sensemaking and message design and content development and all of that. That I want to solve the problems that I see. And I want to make sure that like— so that is the standard by which I judge whether or not something is valuable or good, is whether or not I can establish whether or not it solves the problem. Does it address the problem? Does it actually do what it says it's going to do? I personally— again, you're going to see my position, my bias come out where I say I can't know that if I don't know how to do it. Right? If you haven't shown me how to do it, how to assess what good or bad looks like, you haven't told me what problem it is that it's going to solve, then I can't judge that. So again, where does this all come to? You might be going, what is she talking about? Um, I think it really comes down to understanding, A, that there's a big old question mark when it comes to how can practitioners establish earned rigor. Um, how can they earn that, that badge? Because academics have to earn it. Um, and for all the good that things like content marketing and inbound marketing and self-publishing and whatever have done for us, that isn't the same oftentimes as earned, right? And some of the things that we use as proxies for earned reviews— what else? Reviews, testimonials, things like that can be gamed, to be quite honest. And so it becomes hard to establish, like, how you know whether or not somebody has done the work whether or not they're rigorous, etc. So where do I leave this? A: still figuring this out. As you might have figured out, this is what I like to do. I like to figure things out, and I like to figure them out in public. Um, B: if you think that, uh, practitioners have a rigor problem, even if it's a perception of rigor problem, I'd love to know what you think. Uh, C: I may be mixing my letters and numbers here. Um, what are some of the things that you've seen that tell you that somebody has it, whatever it is? What are some things that you think that we could do to establish practitioner rigor and what that looks like? And ultimately, this is coming down to how can we get to a point where the thinkers and the doers and the thinker-doers and the doer-thinkers can all benefit much more from each other by having more of a shared vocabulary. So any— again, as always, any thoughts on that? So for anyone who's left, if there's any questions, please feel free to ask. Otherwise, thanks for watching today. If you have any additional thoughts, questions, comments, happy to answer. And that's what we got. So, Jen in the background, thumbs up, thumbs down, nothing, nothing, no, no, no other people in the background, right? Okay, fabulous. Well, as I said, this happens once a month or so. I'm going to work to make— in the future, my plan is to be a bit more planful and thoughtful and borrow from Francis Fry's approach, for instance, of really saying what is the next one going to be about so that you can think about it, you can plan for it, etc. You can submit questions about it. Another place where I think out loud is over on Substack. Yes, I'm on LinkedIn, but the place where I am generally more often and post more frequently is over there. So if you can't find me over there, I'm literally the only Tamsen Webster on the planet. And according to intheweights.com, I've looked at what the GPTs know, I'm pretty much the highest ranking Tamsen Webster there too. So yay. There's not a lot of us. Anyway, may you make sense to other people, and if you need help with that, then I hope you will, uh, ask those questions in the future, and let's figure it all out together. So thanks everyone, thanks for coming.