From Professional Experience to a Doctoral Research Question

Professional experience, especially when graced with responsibility, deliberation, and real power, represents a fertile terrain for conceptualizing at multiple interconnecting levels. The question of whether it can lead to doctoral research is almost self-evident. Figuring out how is a different matter altogether. When the concerns become pressing for deeper understanding, choosing the best suited research environment actually becomes part of the solution.

The Monarch Global Research Institute (or, MGRI) offers areas of study that have been crafted to reflect the types of knowledge acquired from professional experience. Its framework brings together a rich history accumulating academic scholarship, knowledge management, and societal and public policy. The MGRI's dissertation supervisors have been carefully selected to bring state-of-the-art assistance to doctoral candidates on their journey.

Experience acquired at the professional level is not unlike experiments performed in the scientific context. The framework is goal-oriented. The requirement is toward dedicated involvement with a team, although leadership is focused. The timeline can be tight depending on the nature of the budget. The steps have to be meticulously recorded, described, and retrieved with ease when prompted. Efficiency in the way tasks are carried out depends on the quality of expertise. The machines have to be running when knowledge management reaches peaks of intensity.

As detailed as the rolling out of common features can be, one of the parameters is seldom exceeded. Tight constraints and a narrowed-down field of activity both contribute to the finesse of the information being organized.

Such information is doubtless adequate, but when does it become knowledge? The common feature between experience and experiment tends to converge on how each derives patterns from particular perspectives, particular results, and particular assessments.

Nothing in this approach spontaneously prepares practitioners for broader systemic considerations. Few are the formative areas of study that refine the sensibility for formally abstract takes on the datasets compiled. Theories are first to become filters. Once these filters can be classified according to quality and priority, the journey becomes more defined.

Engaging in doctoral studies in the social sciences simply involves reconfiguring the way we think and work. The understanding is that, outside of social scientific training, attaining general spaces through the connective instruments of formal science, meaning epistemology, mines deeply into a different set of models and know-how.

How does one go about it? Take two relatively simple case studies.

CASE ONE: You are attending a meeting focused on project management. The presentation has been rigorously assembled. The delivery is efficiently given. Despite your colleagues’ engagement with the material, something remains unconvincing. The colleagues assembled in the room leave with their particular views intact. Yet they are unsatisfied. The day disperses, as do the people.

Such cases are relatively common. They have little to do with individual professional competence. Managers and engineers seldom draw the galvanizing drive that consolidates projects from public speaking. For them, numbers should do the talking. And yet in cases when a company is on the verge of a breakthrough, which in today’s world often goes by the buzzword of scaling, numbers mean a lot. To get your people onboard, words can do more. When this is a recurrent experience in your professional life, when you find yourself to be the agent or proponent, you own the opportunity not only for improvement, but something more, the extra-step. The quest for understanding leads to research when the objective is to understand datasets structurally. And understanding structurally tends to arise from methodic comparisons—at scale.

CASE TWO: In another meeting, a project you stand by has come under question. Costs are building, the deadline has been thrice postponed. Obstacles seem to mount higher than do the paths toward success. You maintain your position, but you are challenged. Questions become increasingly critical, scrutinizing your recommended takeaways ever more finely. You feel your patience on edge, even though you know your material perfectly. You come to believe your experience has failed you partially. Understanding has never appeared to you as connected to the patience required to confront and wade through critical waters. At first, critical opinions appear to you as inherently negative. Then, by disassembling a criticism that was well within your reach, you notice the critique beyond the criticism.

From the Particular to… Researching

Case One revealed an abstract fact that may have lain beyond the horizons of professional experience. Namely, structural understanding tends to arise whenever rigorous comparative methods are put into action.

Case Two unexpectedly triggered an intuition whereby critique appeared as an art, which left the negativity of much "criticism" and “arguments”, according to common parlance, to merge with knowledge production, conceptual reasoning, and even general argumentation theory.

The path from professional experience to the spark of engagement in research has raised you to another patamar. You find yourself on a plane on which questions related to research do much to the contrary of the standard reaction that brushes it off as tedious. You discard suggestions to shelve the idea for another time that is less stressful and tiring. Although in such opinions, you feel the agitation from below, a feeling that a drive can actually rise to the occasion and find inspiration.

The image of moving forward propels you through patterns of varying shapes and dimensions. Yet you cannot deny it looks massive. Like a cloud, some parts are brighter than others, denser and more foreboding, depending on the angle at which you look at it. And as you hesitantly source some higher education institutions that give value to business studies in association with the classical fields of higher academic learning, as you hear your name resounding in unison to the tone of “doctor” or “PhD”, you realize the path forward reveals no obvious impediment.

It is what in technical terms goes by the name of a doctoral research problem and what the supervisors at the MGRI have been primed, by experience, to assist you in refining.

The Gateway toward a Research Problem

What a research institute such as the MGRI delivers is a manifold of knowledge and improvement proposals. Instead of studies, let us call these by another, even more precise term: self-improvement activities building from that very deep sense of fulfillment the Greek Master thinker Aristotle called eudaimonia.

For Aristotle, it is a feeling, a deep and perhaps the deepest feeling in which satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness merge in virtue of achieving a major objective, an ideal end. An almost divine end. Daimon used to be seen by the ancient Greeks as a higher spirit. As embedded in the concept, such a feeling results from partaking in the spirit wrought by its presence. It is what the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal referred to as the esprit de finesse, the crafted logistics by which to elude obstacles and proceed through gateways.

No less crystalline than is a gemstone, the cut shines from its perfection. Those straight lines, rarely found in nature, suddenly beckon further exploration. You are on the research path and have chiseled down the perfect key. Almost oblivious to its disappearance, the resistance that held back has morphed into a circuitous path. There are issues to learn, but especially to read about. You have answered to a task that is not a question. That is because the task at hand was to craft a question initially by delimiting a problem, the research problem.

Onward toward the Doctoral Research Question

Reaching the research question presupposes delimiting the research problem. Basic notions of logic applied to thinking clearly and reasoning conceptually are very useful to provide you with control features as you make your way around a field of increased abstraction.

Does it have to be this way? Can one not somehow transform sequences of professional experiences and the insight gained at a personal level into new knowledge without synthesis and filters? Surely it can, but the discursive technologies at hand to produce knowledge differ, say, once you reduce a biological narrative to its conceptual configuration. Even temporal sequences differ when submitted to synthesis and formalization.

In biological narratives, the temporal sequence tends to be diachronic and linear, stimulated by occasional flights back in time through memory. Discursively formalizing expressions is very similar to the narrative writing of fictional accounts. When this is the chosen path, a researcher or writer actually approaches themselves, although at varying distances and rates of progression. The more varied the perspectives, the richer the account. Critical inversions and counterfactuals blossom into crucial tools for mounting a solid argument.

In research, analysis proceeds by complications, problematizations, self-doubt, and even self-critique. What becomes a precious guide in the process of taking a step away from yourself is compensated for by the bibliography you are now challenged to compile.

You are reading at oscillating rates and rhythms with strategy. A research problem arises from the effect of carefully setting parameters to a mass of data and delimiting the nature of systemic processes occurring within the field. What comes next is the synchronic slicing through the data at an opportune moment.

Before formulating the research question, an insight streams by your attention. You may grasp it from its tail end. You come to understand how doing research proceeds from all cardinal directions.

At that very point of realization, you have entered into the research stream.