The Translation Fallacy

If you have ever been unlucky enough to attend a large gathering of strategy academics – as I have, many times – it may have struck you that at some point during such a feast (euphemistically called “conference”), the subject matter would turn to talks of “relevance”. It is likely that the speakers were a variety of senior and grey – in multiple ways – interchanged with aspiring Young Turks. A peculiar meeting of minds, where the feeling might have dawned on you that the senior professors were displaying a growing fear of bowing out of the profession (or life in general) without ever having had any impact on the world they spent a lifetime studying, while the young assistant professors showed an endearing naivety believing they were not going to grow up like their academic parents.

And the conclusion of this uncomfortable alliance – under the glazing eyes of some mid-career, associate professors, who could no longer and not yet care about relevance – will likely have been that “we need to be better at translating our research for managers”; that is, if we’d just write up our research findings in more accessible language, without elaborating on the research methodology and theoretical terminology, managers would immediately spot the relevance in our research and eagerly suck up its wisdom.

And I think that’s bollocks.

I don’t think it is bollocks that we – academics – should try to write something that practicing managers are eager to read and learn about; I think it is bollocks that all it needs is a bit of translation in layman’s terms and the job is done.

Don’t kid yourself – I am inclined to say – it ain’t that easy. In fact, I think there are three reasons why I never see such a translation exercise work.

1. Ignorance

I believe it is an underestimation of the intricacies of the underlying structure of a good managerial article, and the subtleties of how to convincingly write for practicing managers. If you’re an academic, you might remember that in your first year as a PhD student you had the feeling it wasn’t too difficult to write an academic article such as the ones you had been reading for your first course, only to figure out, after a year or two of training, that you had been a bit naïve: you had been (blissfully) unaware of the subtleties of writing for an academic journal; how to structure the arguments; which prior studies to cite and where; which terminology to use and what to avoid; and so on. Well, good managerial articles are no different; if you haven’t developed the skill yet to write one, you likely don’t quite realise what it takes.

2. False assumptions

It also seems that academics, wanting to write their first managerial piece, immediately assume they have to be explicitly prescriptive, and tell managers what to do. And the draft article – invariably based on “the five lessons coming out of my research” – would indeed be fiercely normative. Yet, those messages often seem impractically precise and not simple enough (“take up a central position in a network with structural holes”) or too simple to have any real use (“choose the right location”). You need to capture a busy executive’s attention and interest, giving them the feeling that they have gained a new insight into their own world by reading your work. If that is prescriptive: fine. But often precise advice is precisely wrong.

3. Lack of content

And, of course, more often than not, there is not much worth translating… Because people have been doing their research with solely an academic audience in mind – and the desire to also tell the real world about it only came later – it has produced no insight relevant for practice. I believe that publishing your research in a good academic journal is a necessary condition for it to be relevant; crappy research – no matter how intriguing its conclusions – can never be considered useful. But rigour alone, unfortunately, is not a sufficient condition for it to be relevant and important in terms of its implications for the world of business.