The discipline to remove almost everything

Thesis Series #10

Focus is about having the discipline to remove almost everything else:

Yesterday, I shared that to understand the external drivers of transformation firms are facing, I identified 1,234 peer-reviewed research papers.

Over 10 million words.

The challenge was how to remove almost everything without losing any insight.

Here is how I did it:

1) Read every abstract.

I read all 1,234 abstracts and assessed whether each paper was genuinely about drivers of transformation.

Five minutes per abstract.

6,170 minutes.

103 hours.

Spread over four months, before work and at weekends.

This reduced the set to 171 papers.

2) Filter for journal quality and full article access.

I removed papers published in lower-quality journals and those where the full text was unavailable.

That reduced the set to 115.

3) Read every remaining article.

I read 115 articles in full.

That’s over 1 million words - and not words we enjoy reading in a novel.

Academic words. Very hard to read (especially for someone with a mild form of dyslexia, as I have).

This excluded some more articles due to relevance and other factors.

The result was a core set of 88 papers representing the serious body of work on external drivers of transformation:

Only then did the real analysis begin.

The next step was to reread those papers again and again to extract and synthesise the drivers of transformation they discussed.

I will explain how I did that and what emerged tomorrow.

Be sure to like this post and follow me, Dr. Ian Hallett, so it shows up in your feed.

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This post is part of a series of notes I am writing on my PhD thesis, sharing how I approached it and what I learned. You can see the entire series on my website.