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 the same chapter, at the same time.
Both versions of this experience are more common than students expect, and I want to say clearly upfront: you haven’t misunderstood the brief, and the feedback isn’t necessarily inconsistent even though it feels that way.
Why This Happens, Even With Good Supervisors
Number 1 (The single-supervisor version) usually happens because feedback is a reaction to the specific draft in front of a reader, not a fixed, standing instruction. A supervisor pushing you toward more theory in draft one may genuinely be reacting to a lack of grounding in that draft. Pulling you back toward practice in draft two may be a genuine reaction to overcorrection, not a change of mind about the underlying standard. Both comments can be locally true and globally consistent, even though reading them side by side feels contradictory.
Number 2 (The two-supervisor version) usually happens by design, not accident. DBA supervision teams in particular are often deliberately built with one more academic and one more practice-oriented member, precisely because the degree sits at that intersection. That’s a strength for the thesis as a whole — it’s also, understandably, a difficult position for the student caught delivering one document that has to satisfy two genuinely different, valid standards simultaneously.
What Doesn’t Work
The natural instinct in both situations is to try to fully satisfy both standards in every single section — adding theory here, adding practical detail there, trying to hedge every paragraph toward both readers at once. In practice, this usually produces writing that satisfies neither fully, because a paragraph trying to serve two different standards tends to do a mediocre job of both rather than an excellent job of either.
What Actually Helps
Ask for a concrete example, not just more explanation. Rather than trying to reverse-engineer what “more theoretical” or “more practical” means in the abstract, ask directly: “Can you point to a paragraph, in this draft or elsewhere, that gets the balance right?” A concrete reference point does far more work than another round of guessing at an abstract instruction.
With two supervisors, ask each what they see as the central balancing act of the thesis, separately. Often, described independently, their answers turn out closer to each other than you’d expect from the disagreement on any single chapter — the tension is frequently more about emphasis in a specific section than a fundamental disagreement about the whole thesis.
Where supervisors do genuinely disagree, it’s fair to ask them to resolve it between themselves. You are not obligated to act as a silent go-between, guessing at a compromise position and hoping it satisfies both readers by accident. A direct, polite request — “I’m getting different guidance from each of you on this section; could the three of us align on an approach?” — is a legitimate and often necessary step, not an admission of failure.
FAQ
Is it appropriate to ask supervisors to meet together to resolve disagreement? Generally yes, particularly for DBA supervision teams, where joint meetings are common practice specifically to prevent this kind of student-caught-in-the-middle situation.
What if raising the contradiction feels like criticising my supervisor? Framed as seeking clarity rather than pointing out an error — “I want to make sure I’m applying your feedback correctly, and I’m finding the guidance pulls in two directions” — this is a reasonable, professional request, not a criticism.
Does this pattern mean my supervision relationship is dysfunctional? Not necessarily. Some degree of shifting or seemingly contradictory feedback is a normal part of a document evolving through drafts, and of supervision teams with genuinely different areas of expertise. The pattern only becomes a real problem if it persists after you’ve directly sought clarity.
Next Step
If you’re stuck trying to reverse-engineer contradictory feedback from one supervisor, or caught between two, that’s worth talking through before you spend another draft guessing. I offer a free 15-minute introductory call.