A Practitioner’s Long Way Home
I have been a researcher for thirty years — though not in the way most people imagine.
I began in the corporate world as a research analyst. Like most analysts, I followed set templates — careful, structured, focused on the “what”: what the market showed, what the data said, what the numbers meant.
It was only as head of IDC in India that the “why” and the “how” became prominent — not just about the market, but about the organisation I was running. Delivering performance opened up questions I hadn’t faced before: about strategy, about structures, about organisational change and development, and about what actually makes high performance happen. Data alone rarely changed behaviour. Training created energy but not always skill. The best organisations shared something I couldn’t quite name, and no popular business book seemed to explain it.
It all started in the field, not in a library or a classroom. Without realising it, I had already become a practitioner doing research to answer my own questions — watching, forming hunches, testing them through action. I was building my own working theories, shaped by years of experience. But I didn’t yet know how to turn that experience into knowledge others could use.
That curiosity led me to MDI Gurgaon, where I joined the doctoral fellowship twelve years into my career, carrying strong views and deep experience. What followed was a journey of being challenged, again and again, to see that experience — however rich — is not the same as knowledge. Turning one into the other takes method, discipline, and a fair amount of humility.
That journey changed how I asked questions, not just what I knew. And over the years, working with hundreds of practitioners, I have come to recognise something many of them carry.
If you are reading this, you may know the feeling. An unanswered question that won’t go away. A sense that you understand something others don’t — something you have lived, but never quite put into words. A quiet pull to lift what you know from experience into something sharper, something others can learn from too.
What holds most practitioners back is not a shortage of insight. It’s not knowing how to carry what they already know into a form the scholarly world will recognise.
I have spent the years since running my own research practice — teaching, writing, and guiding others through the same fellowship I once went through. Again and again, I see my own story in them: the same restlessness, the same quiet question — can someone like me really do this?
Scholarly Yours exists because I know the answer is yes. It is the gateway I wish I had when I started. If you have been watching something for years without being able to fully explain it, you are closer to scholarship than you think. In a very real sense, you may already be doing it.
Dr Kapil Dev Singh, Chief Architect, Scholarly Yours
