Someone in your cohort WhatsApp group mentions they’re three chapters ahead. You close the laptop and don’t open it again that day. Cohort comparison is one of the most common, least useful things MBA and DBA students do to themselves during a dissertation — and I want to be specific about why it’s misleading,…

Draft one comes back: “This needs more theoretical grounding.” You add it. Draft two comes back: “This section is too theoretical now — bring it back to practice.” Or, if you’re a DBA candidate with a two-person supervision team: your primary supervisor wants more practitioner detail, and your co-supervisor wants more academic rigour, on…

You’ve submitted. There’s nothing left to write, revise, or check. And somehow, you feel worse than you did the week before submission. This catches a lot of DBA and PhD candidates off guard, because the assumption going in is that submission brings relief. Often, it instead brings a strange, anxious limbo: no task to…

You’ve picked your test. You’ve even run it. And you’re staring at the output with a familiar, sinking feeling: I don’t actually know what this number means. This is one of the most common — and most quietly avoided — points in a quantitative MBA or DBA dissertation. I want to say clearly, because…

Forty hours of interview transcripts. A cursor blinking in an empty spreadsheet. No idea where to actually start coding. This moment catches a lot of DBA and MBA students by surprise, because reading the transcripts feels like progress — you’ve done the interviews, you’ve read them closely, surely the hard part is behind you?…

Your data collection timeline said six weeks. You’re in week nine, and you have four responses. This is one of the quietest sources of dissertation panic, because it doesn’t feel like a research problem — it feels like a personal failure to convince people to help you. In my experience coaching MBA students through…

“I’ve read the theory” and “I’ve chosen my theoretical framework” sound like the same stage of a dissertation. They’re not — and the gap between them is one of the most common reasons markers send a chapter back with some version of: “why this theory, and not another?” Where This Goes Wrong It’s entirely…

Two months into data collection, something feels off. You can’t quite name it – until you sit down to analyse your first few responses and realise: this instrument can’t actually answer the question you’re asking. This happens more often than you’d think, and it’s rarely carelessness. It usually happens because the research question was…

Ten months in. Forty open tabs. Still “doing the literature review.” If that’s you, I want to say something that might be a relief: this usually isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a sequencing problem, and it’s fixable without reading a single new article. The Sequence Almost Everyone Uses (and Why It Fails) Most students…

If you’re a DBA candidate, there’s a good chance your research site is the organisation you already work for. You know the politics. You know the history. You know why certain decisions got made, even when the official record doesn’t say so. Is that an advantage or a problem? Honestly, both – and how…