What does practitioner rigor actually look like?

A recap of this month's Office Hours, where I tried to figure it out in public.

At this month’s Office Hours, I ended up chasing something I’ve been circling for two years: what we actually mean when we call something “rigorous.”

I just got back from my final two weeks at Columbia, finishing the coursework for my doctorate (sad about that, because it’s my favorite thing to do), and rigor has been on my mind the whole way through. Here’s what I keep noticing, even in my own GPTs: when I say “rigorous research” or “a rigorous person,” the assumption underneath is almost always academic. Peer-reviewed. Empirically tested. Published in a scholarly journal. That work matters, and I want to be clear about that. But when academic rigor is the only definition of rigor, a couple of things happen.

First, we get a farmers-and-cowmen, oil-and-water split between practitioners and scholars, as if the two have nothing useful to offer each other. Second, the people sitting on genuinely good work (years of client data, real patterns, hard-won judgment) have no recognized way to earn the same respect a scholar gets. I’ve spent the last few weeks talking with scholars, practitioners, scholar-practitioners, and “pracademics” (a term I love), and we mostly agree on two things: practitioner rigor is real, and we’ve never been explicit about what it looks like.

So I’ve been trying to get explicit.

Where the question started

It started with my dissertation for my doctoral program at Columbia. One of the first big pieces of that is a “literature review”: a structured look at what’s already been written on the question I’m asking, so I can see what’s been said, what hasn’t, what the dominant themes are, and what’s been overlooked. The problem showed up fast. If I followed the strict academic standards for what “counts,” I’d cut out practitioner work that’s arguably just as important to my topic.

So I had to define for myself what practitioner rigor looked like. What I landed on, at least as a starting line: someone else had to publish the work. A rigorous editor or a rigorous process had to put their name on it. Think Harvard Business Review, an established management journal that accepts practitioner work, or a book that wasn’t self-published. The point isn’t the prestige. It’s third-party validation: someone other than the author vouched for the work. (By that test, I’m not even sure my own hybrid-published books qualify, which tells you how slippery this gets.)

From there, a few other marks of practitioner rigor came up:

• A practitioner version of a literature review. I honestly don’t know what that looks like yet, so if you do, or have ideas, please share!

• Engaging the work that disagrees with you, not just the work that supports you.

• Saying what you chose not to do, and why. (Credit to Henna Pryor, the author, speaker, social fitness and workplace-performance expert, who writes about “show what you didn’t choose” in her upcoming book.)

Rigorous, rigor-ish, rigorless

Here’s a distinction that seems to be resonating with both practitioners and scholars alike: Most work falls somewhere on a line from rigorless to rigor-ish to rigorous.

• Rigorless is not paying attention at all.

• Rigor-ish is a practitioner’s honest best attempt without knowing the standards: research done, sources cited, but not at the level truly rigorous work reaches. But it can also be a different standard of or different definitions of academic rigor. For example, in adult learning, a scholar’s own lived experience, rigorously documented, absolutely qualifies as rigorous qualitative research. Other disciplines don’t yet recognize that form as much, yet, but frankly, it makes me wonder why not….

• Rigorous is meeting the recognized standard for the kind of claim you’re making.

I’ll put myself on that continuum. I can see it now: my first two books are rigor-ish. I did the research, I cited my sources, I’m proud of them. And they were a practitioner-who-didn’t-know-better’s best attempt. Rigor-ish beats rigorless.

But the real question is what it would take to get to rigorous—even as a practitioner—on purpose.

One thing that helps: different fields define rigor differently, and most of them have written it down. Management science (think Adam Grant, Amy Edmondson, Rita McGrath, Herminia Ibarra, Francesca Gino) has clear, published standards for what good theory-building looks like, and you don’t have to be an academic to meet them. If you want to know the standards in your field, that’s a good use of AI. Ask your LLM what the go-to sources are for good scholarship or good qualitative research in your discipline. (One concrete example I mentioned: the Gioia methodology, described in a 2013 paper that lays out a rigorous way to build theory from interviews. Anyone can follow it.)

The part that connects to sensegiving

Here’s where this loops back to what I actually do. One of the clearest marks of rigor is transferability: telling people enough about how you did something that they could try it themselves. Not just the answer, but the path you took, how you decided whether it worked, and what you’d do again.

That’s the same thing I mean by sensegiving. Instead of selling your expertise, you make sense of it. Even more, you make it make sense for others. You show the recipe, not just the finished dish. (As my husband likes to remind me, owning an Emeril cookbook doesn’t make you Emeril. But a good cookbook still gives you every ingredient and every step.) The rigorous way to build on someone’s work—for both practitioners and scholars alike—sounds like this: “I followed Tamsen’s approach to this point, disagreed here, did this instead, and here’s what I got.” That kind of explicit exchange is how thinkers and doers can become extremely useful to each other.

One more piece: positionality

The other idea I’ve been working through (it’s a whole series here on Substack right now) is positionality. Just as your personality describes the nature and characteristics of a person, positionality is the nature and characteristics of your position on something: your starting assumptions about what’s real, what’s knowable, and what’s worth knowing. The rigorous practice is to name that starting point out loud, then make sure everything that follows lines up with it.

A quick example from class. Take a loaded topic like gun control (I’m not staking a position; it’s just the example I’m using here). Someone who believes there’s a firm, knowable, black-and-white answer—a positivist, if you want to get technical—will reach for hard quantitative evidence about what happens with or without gun control. Someone working from a constructivist position (the belief that what’s meaningful and real is the meaning each person makes of it) will study the same topic by talking to people about the meaning they hold about guns and gun control. Same topic, different positions on what is or what “qualifies” as worth knowing, but completely different approaches to what follows. In academia, rigor also means making sure your approach to finding information matches both your view of the world and your question. To bring this into a practitioner example, I happened to speak to a woman recently working on a book about leadership, where she’s talking to and documenting people’s stories of leadership and what it means to them. We can make some assumptions about her positionality and what she thinks qualifies as valuable information on leadership from her approach: narrative accounts indicate that she puts value in individuals’ own experiences. That not only takes her out of the positivist camp, it would also eliminate—rigor-wise—her ability to claim “this IS the way to lead, full stop” in her descriptions of the book, etc. See how that works? For the record, I’m a critical realist: I believe there’s a real world, and I also believe your experience of it and mine will never be identical, which means I have to stay careful and clear about whose view is whose, and it’s also why you regularly see me state my position on things through the regular use of statements like “I believe,” or “positivists say….” That’s me saying, “here’s how I see it, but I acknowledge you may see it differently.”

As a critical realist, the approaches I use to collect information (research!) attempt to see where there’s agreement across views (that’s me trying to get the “real” part) and at what level, as well as to see where, how, and why that agreement starts to split and splinter.

That literature review I mentioned earlier? That’s the critical realist approach at work. I’m looking at three different disciplines—one rooted in post-postivism (which says, “this is black, and this is white, at least until we find something that says it isn’t”), one rooted in constructivism, and one that’s generally considered critical realist—to see where they do and don’t agree on a particular phenomenon that all three recognize and describe.

Where I’m leaving it (for now)

I’m still figuring this out, in public, which it turns out I enjoy! It’s why I do these monthly Office Hours that produced this line of thinking.

Going forward, I’m think I’ll announce the topic ahead of time (borrowing Frances Frei’s approach) so you can think about it and bring questions. I also think out loud on Substack between sessions too, if you want to follow some of these threads on rigor and positionality threads as they develop.

To wrap up, though, I’ll hand you the same questions I’m sitting with.

• Do you think practitioners have a rigor problem, even if it’s only a perception problem?

• When you decide that someone’s work is solid, what actually tells you that?

• What would it take to build a shared vocabulary so the thinkers, the doers, and everyone in between could be maximally useful to each other?

Join me for the next session and let’s learn together.