Learning to Love the Swamp: Reshaping Education for Public Service

Evaluating a Leadership Program: A Comparative, Longitudinal Study to Assess the Impact of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program for Women

“…31,32 Our study also emphasizes the many challenges in attempting to evaluate prospectively the impact of a leadership program. 5,33,34 First, the difficulties encountered in the implementation of the study design included the delayed distribution of Time One surveys to ELAM Cohort Seven, as well as issues of recall and response bias. The difference observed between respondents' selfreport data and the data from the AAMC database highlight the difficulty in obtaining completely matched comparison groups in real-time, realworld settings.…”

Living the PhD journey

“…social workers and clinical psychologists in disability services, youth workers and teachers in educational settings), and wondered about the effects of, what I thought were, institutionalising, professional 'blinkers' in how people worked together. I have also been an actor in collaborative efforts to tackle intractable issues, or working in 'the swamp', as Schall (1995) describes it, and the inertia (Huxham, 2005) that seemed to frequently emerge. On arriving in Scotland in 2008 from Australia, I was immediately struck by what I described as the dense partnership landscape in the public sector and attendant performance management frameworks (Ferry & Scarparo, 2015) -an institutionalising of inter-organisational relations.…”

Reflective Practice for Learning From Experience: Navigating the Back Roads at Work

“…Ellen Schall (1995), former dean of the New York University's Wagner School and a public service practitioner, points to Schön's use of the term "swampy lowland" as the terrain for problems of the greatest concern to clients and to society, and his comparison to "hard, high-ground" problems which, while of real, technical interest, are often less likely to be most useful in addressing social problems. Schall suggests public service professionals must learn to love the work that takes place in the swamp in order to be of use to those they serve (p. 206).…”