Dr. Dennis Tourish - Torturing the Data Into Confessing

Dr. Dennis Tourish is Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the editor of the journal Leadership, and the author of several books including The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership, published and Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He is a proponent of the Responsible Research of Business and Management Network an organization that envisions a world where business and management research is used in practice to improve the lives of people.

Learn More About Dennis' Work

• Article: The Triumph of Nonsense in Management Studies
• Book: Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research 
• Dennis Tourish at Google Scholar

Quotes From This Episode

• "Too much of our research has driven around what statisticians call p-hacking, where you keep on running statistical analysis beyond the point of reason to torture the data into confessing."
• "It’s entirely possible to have a satisfactory and interesting career without ever publishing an article in the Academy of Management Review. And very few academics will do it. So by that standard, we are all pretty much failures."
• "I think it’s more important to have an enjoyable career, to do work that matters to us, and remain interested, focused, and curious, above all be curious, throughout our academic careers."
• "The world is moving fast and our scholarship needs to reflect that in a more timely manner than it does. I don’t mean that we should cut corners on our work. But we can certainly offer interesting ideas in a more timely manner than we seem to have been doing in the past."

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Responsible Research for Business and Management (RRBM)

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Transcript

Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate. 

Scott Allen  0:01  
Everybody today on the podcast, we have Dennis Tourish. And this is the first time we've met. And Dennis, I'm excited to learn about you. I'm excited to learn about the journal Leadership. And you have recently at least in 2019, wrote a book - Management Studies in Crisis. And I'm sure COVID-19 hasn't helped any of what you've written about in the least. So, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for being here. And if you would, Dennis, tell listeners a little bit about you, sir.

Dennis Tourish  0:35  
Well, Scott, it's great to meet you and I look forward to an interesting conversation. I currently work as a professor of leadership and organization Studies at the University of Sussex Business School. Attentive listeners might know to my accent is Irish, I come originally from Northern Ireland. I also added the journal Leadership, as you mentioned, and I published this book in 2019, Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception, and Meaningless Research because I have become increasingly concerned by the state of scholarship in our field, and its failure as I see it to engage, clearly enough with important issues that face the world.

Scott Allen  1:18  
And I am really, really excited to have that conversation to explore that a little bit. Let's start there. Let's start with the book. The first chapter caught my eye very, very quickly. And it's titled for listeners Flawed From the Get Go: The Early Misadventures of Management Research. So tell us a couple of stories that come to mind for you from this chapter - Flawed from the get-go?

Dennis Tourish  1:45  
Yes, I think sometimes we realized that there was a previous golden age of whatever it is that we're talking about, that we should aspire to return to. But in fact, management research has always been, in my view, fatally flawed. Up until not that long ago, there wasn't that much of it, to begin with. It was only in the 50s, and some very prominent management journals began to appear. Before that most of what was published was an opinion, I give the example in that chapter, I think of paper and one of the earlier editions of the Academy of Management Journal, which talks along the lines that executives, as they were then called, must make decisions. And they must make decisions because as organizations develop problems exist, therefore they must make decisions, who would have thought it? 

Scott Allen  2:34  
There's wisdom there, right? 

Dennis Tourish  2:36  
This was very elementary. But then also, if you go back into some of the so-called classics of management that we still study in business schools, like the Hawthorne Studies, or the work of Frederick Taylor, that quickly becomes a part that many of the claims based on that work are hopelessly exaggerated, that the original studies were fundamentally flawed, that some of the things that Taylor, for example, claimed to have happened didn't happen. You know, he had a theory before he went into the Hawthorne plant, and discarded many more obvious explanations for his findings, to support the theory that they had already settled himself upon.

Scott Allen  3:22  
I didn't know any of this. Talk a little bit more about some of the early foundations that may be, like you said, flawed from the get-go. Is there anything there that didn't know any of this?

Dennis Tourish  3:33  
Yes, I must admit, as I dug into the took me a little bit by surprise as well. For example, some of his claims and males work rests upon a small sample of something like five or six employees that he and his colleagues allegedly studied intensively. But even that's an exaggeration because it turns out a couple of them were removed from the experiment whenever they didn't display the behaviors that he wanted and new people were drafted in. And then this was used to make monumental claims of global significance. And also turns out that the experimenters interacted frequently with the workers that they were observing and discussed what they were doing, what types of things were opened, defined, highly felt that it was all going. So these are violations of the most elementary experimental protocols. I mean, you could say, well, this was in the late 20s, early 30s. And they had not as much of an idea then as we do today, and that may be true, but nevertheless, it means that we should perhaps stop venerating studies that are quite obviously very much flawed, and most of us will never hear about them these days through looking at simplified textbook accounts. And any event, you know, and asked Frederick Taylor, and his work, he claimed that he had managed to boost productivity significantly as soon as of fundamentally, time and motion studies that he allegedly carried out. But these were also flawed. And, you know, he claimed a certain target of positivity that had been reached. But this was, this was based on a study of, I think, one individual over something like a day. And as another commentator observed, trying to extrapolate that onto what somebody could have sustained throughout their career will be like trying to extrapolate the running time of an athlete and 100-meter dash to a marathon that was impossible and unsustainable. And yet too much of this stuff has been taken at face value. And I think many of these problems in one form or another, unfortunately, persist today.

Scott Allen  5:43  
Dennis, I was just gonna go there. Because in your role as the editor of Leadership, the academic journal, you're seeing all kinds of stuff come across your desk. What do you see today that's perpetuated, that continues, that fundamentally gets under your skin, you see more and more of it, and you think this has to change, this has to shift and you're smiling. So I know you have a few ideas in mind!

Dennis Tourish  6:11  
I mean, it's great being an editor of a journal, but it can also be frustrating when you get monumentally weak work coming your way. One of the things that I think I find most often, that annoys me is that increasingly, people are designing studies, and to, for example, leadership, and which not only is there a bias to publishing only statistically significant results, but only statistically significant results are possible from the nature of the study. And sometimes this type of work gets published in so-called top journals. I am thinking, for example, about one paper that I encountered which claimed to support the now rather popular theory of authentic leadership. And this was based on an experiment involving students, not employees, students about whom we were taught very little, they were given two versions of a story about an Australian political leader, one of them had a headline, something along the lines of this man changes his mind, for personal reasons. The other had headlines such as this man changes his mind for the public good. And people were then asked to assess what they thought of the leader in these two conditions. So naturally enough, would be astonishing if anything else had happened, the leader who changed his mind for the public good, and it was all the same information about them both came out, much, much better, better admired as a leader. And this was taken as conclusive evidence in support of some called Authentic Leadership Theory. I mean, that any undergraduate student should be able to see that the headlines themselves completely skew the responses that respondents actually get. So I think it is an example of a tendency to conduct empirical research with a theory already in mind, to be absolutely determined to prove that that theory is correct. And then conduct rather shoddy empirical work that comes accompanied by very substantial claims about its significance, but which in actual fact, tells us nothing worth knowing about anything of interest. 

Scott Allen  8:18  
How does this turn around? What are your thoughts? What are two or three things that need to be done to help set us on a firmer foundation? 

Dennis Tourish  8:33  
Well, I'm delighted to say that I think more and more academics are getting concerned by these issues. I'm proud and pleased, for example, to be associated with the Responsible Research of Business and Management Network, which was founded by a former president of the Academy of Management. I encourage listeners to look up its website, or RRBM.Network, if memory serves me correctly. And this is gathering scholars around the world together to commit to doing what is called responsible research, that is research that deals with important issues, that is conducted in an ethical and transparent manner, which tries to make a difference to the world that we live in. Because you see, I think part of the reason why some of the shoddy work is published that I'm talking about, is that due to perverse incentives in the Academy, for many academics, publishing has become an animal itself, rather than a means to try and influence the world in which we live. So I think one thing that's required and one thing which the RRBM is playing a very positive role and is reminding everybody why we became academics in the first place. And I think we need to build this into doctoral education as well, as well as into the mission statements of our journals, and the practices of our faculty, that we come into this business to ask interesting ideas to write well, to address important questions to, in a way change the world around us and A very poor article, however, sophisticated statistics that don't really address things in a rigorous manner and, and is biased in favor of a particular theory, to begin with, that isn't going to achieve those objectives.

Scott Allen  10:14  
Yeah. Well, in your third chapter when the Levee Breaks, academic life on the brink now, I don't know if that's a Led Zeppelin reference, subtly that I'm picking up on a potential with which I enjoy. But, you know, talk a little bit about that. Is that is that aligned with what your previous statement was just suggesting?

Dennis Tourish  10:37  
Yes, it is. I mean, well done, on picking up the Led Zeppelin references, a great, song well recorded by them. But I do think that there has been deterioration and the conditions of academic labor over a prolonged period of time. The report was published in Britain in 2015, called the Metric Tide, which I think sums us up very well that we are audited, measured, and monitored more frequently and more things. And there are no high productivity standards on people where we are expected to publish a significant volume of papers and top journals are a relatively short period of time. But I think that has multiple problems, because, among other things that discourage us from asking big questions with uncertain answers to important issues, because that might not be ballistic publish within 12 months, and the all-important so-called top tier journals, you get one example. I think, if you look at the Academy of Management journals, only one paper, if memory serves me, correct, has been published on the great financial recession of 2008. And that wasn't in the Academy of Management Journal, or the Academy of Management Review. And you can understand why people don't try and address those questions go too complicated, they're difficult, it might be difficult to produce a paper within a very short period of time. So there are these perverse incentives that are there, which encourages down this road, and people are pressurized a lot to go along that way. So I often encounter Ph.D. students these days who have become old before their time, and some nickel and advance about the motion on which they have found themselves engaged. And so I think one of the things that we need to do with them as well, as they say, look, we have more agency, in part all stages of our career than you often imagine, for example, It's madness to think, as a young academic and our field that you must publish only in so-called top tier journals. And if you are a failure, if you don't do so, it's entirely possible to have a satisfactory and interesting career without ever publishing an article on the Academy of Management Review. And very few academics will do it. And so by that standard, we are all pretty much failures. I think it's more important to have an enjoyable career, to do work that matters to us, and remain interested, focused, and curious, above all be curious, throughout your academic careers.

Scott Allen  13:10  
Well, and be curious. And to your point, the system in so many places just doesn't promote that I was at a conference about two years ago. And there was a gentleman who was from a research one institution, and we were talking he was an assistant professor. And I said, so what is your...how does everything work for you at XYZ institution? And I believe he said this to me now you can let me know if this sounds outside the pale, but he said his clock was about eight years, so eight years, and the expectation that it was that he would have about a tier-one hit, which as you know, is what six or seven different journals that were on the possible list - each year. Now that that seems to be a fool's errand, that doesn't seem like it's even possible. And I'd said, what happens when your article is rejected from one of these tier ones? You submit it somewhere else? And he said, "No, we wouldn't want to be associated with publishing in a less than a journal that would ruin my career." So this individual is set up, in my opinion, to maybe get three or four because when the time horizon on an article and Academy of Management Journal is what, year and a half, two years, most likely? It's, it's, it's impossible. And that was this, this individual's job, that was their job, it was just, that was the task and how they did in the classroom...and they were actually chastised because this was more of a teaching-oriented conference. And the people were like, why are you doing this? This is a waste of your time, you should just be publishing.

Dennis Tourish  14:45  
Well, I think, you know, the situation you described was all too common. And I view it as madness. I note that there's nothing in what you said about what this individual was supposed to publish or what he or she might address. It was all about. publishing a small handful of elite journals within a very narrow time frame. So I think that's First of all, practically impossible. But secondly, and I write about this in that chapter in my book When the Levee Breaks, it's almost calculated to drive any individual and seem to create an environment in which the only thing that matters to them in their life is work. I saw an amusing post somewhere quite recently, I think on Twitter, where an academic had gone for a walk on a local graveyard, do you see this? And he found a headstone and on the headstone was one of these little QR codes. And you could use that to go to the individual's Google Scholar profile and their H-index is all utterly, utterly out of proportion. And I do suspect that some of our leading institutions, the academics within them are a bunch of lonely lunatics, the whole hole up in their offices madly obsessing over the next grant getting offensive or publishing offensive that they need to be involved in. I think real academic work means that we must have permission to feel, we must have time to think, we must recognize that there is value in publishing beyond the so-called top-tier journals. And, you know, I was I treasure the examples of, for example, Jay Barney, who has published one of the most cited papers in the history of our field, I checked it just the other day. And so on resource-based theory, it has 79,000 citations, which is incredible. And in a wonderful book, Great Minds, and Management, where a number of senior scholars explore the origins of their theories. He explains that his paper was rejected by the key journals and the speed when he first wrote it. And it was eventually accepted by the Journal of Management, which wasn't as well known as it is now, only because he was editing a special issue of the journal and accepted his paper himself. And that was about to have this impact. So I think many of our leading support leading journals can be quite conservative in their methods and their approach. And I mean, even if you look today, the Academy of Management Review publishes a scandalously limited amount of critically management-oriented work. And why is that it's because of the unique conservatism of those traditions that it represents. And I think we need to fire up the enthusiasm of our younger colleagues to be motivated much more by the possibility of doing really good work. And I also feel sorry, sometimes for people who land jobs, so-called top schools, and then there must have a moment of horror where they realize, "Good God Almighty, I'm expected to maintain this unseen workload for the next 40 years?"

Scott Allen  17:53  
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Tourish  17:55  
What a nightmarish prospect shows that sometimes the thing that is worse than having your dreams frustrated is having them realized.

Scott Allen  18:04  
Well said, that's well said. Well, I was on a call with Brad Jackson, whom, you know, and he had mentioned, he had mentioned the journal leadership, pivoting fairly quickly, and writing some very publishing, I should say, some very timely articles we just spoke about, at times that long time horizon that can occur in some of the journals, talk about that talk about the last year of articles. And I would love to, I would love for listeners to have that perspective.

Dennis Tourish  18:38  
Well, this is a great concern of mine about the nature of our field. I came across an interesting article recently, an Organization Science, I noticed in the top left of it, that it had been between four and five years from when it was submitted to when it was published by the journal. And sometimes, and I pointed out that AOM journals haven't yet published anything worth thinking about and the financial crisis of 2008. So I sometimes feel that our journals and we're like history journals, but the time articles appear on issues, the issues have receded far into the distance. We haven't seen much in so-called top journals about climate change, for example, and the role of management and leadership and addressing that. So I have taken steps with my journal to try and encourage the opposite process. Last year April, for example, we published a special issue on the court leadership and the COVID crisis. I suspect we might have been the first social science journal to do that. We have just published an issue on leadership and race, which was inspired by the Black Lives movement, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. We are in the process of pulling together a special issue on climate change as well. The world is...and we have published on the Post-truth issue and the fairly recent period as well. The world is moving fast and scholarship needs to reflect that and a little bit more timely a manner that does. I don't mean by that, that we should cut corners on our work. But we can certainly offer interesting ideas much more in a more timely manner than we seem to have been doing in the past.

Scott Allen  20:18  
And when you look at the landscape, from your purview, what are some opportunities that you see, for scholars to be investigating to exploring? Maybe some articles that could come across your desk that you would think, "wow, this is cutting edge? This is interesting, this is timely." Can you think of - you've mentioned climate change Black Lives Matter and COVID. Are there other topics that are on your radar that you would just love to see academic work around?

Dennis Tourish  20:47  
Well, I mean, my specialty is leadership. And I'm not just interested in leadership in the business sector, but more broadly as well. So I think we could, for example, deal with much more insightful analysis from leadership scholars on populism and what it represents on the phenomenon that Trump personified, for example, and this is an example to the difficulties we have, I had a correspondence recently with the editor of one of our prominent journals, where I suggested that it will be a good idea to maybe have a paper looking at the leadership of Donald Trump and what it represents and so on. He said, "No because we do not publish case study work, because it isn't scientific. So, therefore, we can't explore this particular issue in that way." So I think we need to have a much more open approach to different methodologies as well, by the way. Well, as part of that, I would say that I object very strongly to the fetishization of theory development in our top journals, which prevents us from making very useful contributions to problems that we can observe. I don't, I can't think of any other field that shares that obsession. I absolutely accept that empirical material must be framed in the context of some theory to explain it. But to try and insist that every paper must develop theory in some way, as a recipe for madness, because we can have interesting observations about emerging a new phenomenon that we can explain perfectly well, using the existing theory. And my mind is still insightful, important, and valuable work. And I do think that the insistence to the contrary, is one of the things that is contributing to major problems that are discipline, where hardly anybody I'd cited reads it. And certainly, nobody would do so unless they were masochists of some kind. Well, look at the prose the horrible writing, as people try to pretend that they're producing theory, even when they are not and I published a little paper last year in the Academy Management Learning and Education journal adapted from my book. This was called the "Triumph of Nonsense in Management Studies." And I argued in it that we've often heard of imposter syndrome. And the academy people feel that they're not really as qualified for a job as they should be. And in comparison to their, their peers. They're somehow just pretending. And I argued in this paper that many of us have become what I call genuine imposters. That is we pretend to be doing more meaningful work than we are more competent than we are. And we're claimed to be developing theory when we really aren't when we're oftentimes just using big words and jargon to confuse our readers into powerful and bamboozle editors into accepting our work.

Scott Allen  23:39  
Dennis, I have a colleague that I've gone to the International Leadership Association conference with for a couple of decades now, actually, about a decade and a half. And we always joked because we would made up this fictitious theory called Leader Aura Theory (LAT), or lat we called it LAT. So it was, you know, the leader's aura. And we would in casual conversation, just drop, you know, "it's like Leader Aura Theory" and continue forward. And about half of the people in the conversations wouldn't ever challenge it and say, "Now, what's that? I haven't heard of that." They would just kind of nod. quietly, go off and try and look up if there was a thing called Leader Aura Theory. So yeah, we can get and I was having a conversation with a mentor of mine this morning. And I'm not going to get this correctly. But he had read something where an individual is communicating the levels of knowledge and it went from smart to brilliant, to genius, or too wise to genius, too simplistic, or too simple, right. So that the hierarchy, I think, if we really truly are doing our work in an incredible Einstein-like way, we will take that complexity and at least how to translate it, not keep it in the stratosphere.

Dennis Tourish  25:04  
You see, if you try and work like that, then you will be accused of not developing theory. And suddenly, because your ideas are too simple to understand. And my book, as you mentioned, also, invented a leadership theory and a chapter devoted to criticizing Authentic Leadership Theory. And I think I called my theory, Athletic Leadership Theory explained how you might go by developing this and validating it and, and so on. And of course, there's money to be made by that type of approach, because it can become a consultancy calling card. Well, it doesn't is genuinely advance our knowledge about the realities of life organizations on leadership.

Scott Allen  25:41  
Yes, yes. We even had a logo, Dennis, we had, we had a very beautiful logo for that theory. And I love it.

Dennis Tourish  25:52  
You should develop that into a serious publication. 

Scott Allen  25:55  
Just if we could just kind of put you don't be surprised if you get an article with that. With that logo as...So, okay...we are we're at about 26 minutes, sir. Any other things that you're thinking about? As you reflect on 2019? Work your book? What insights have you had after having it out in the world?

Dennis Tourish  26:23  
Well, first of all, I've been very surprised by the response that has generated and also by the response I got for the paper in AMLE that was adopted from it, I actually had about 100 emails in response to that paper, which is most unusual, you know, most of the time we publish a paper and we never hear a peep from anybody about it. And these emails included a significant number of very prominent figures in our field, including some former presidents of the AOM, which greatly encouraged me, on the one hand, but the volume of correspondence also showed me that there is a deep problem in our field, and that very many of us are concerned about it, you know, and sometimes we have that concern, and we feel "well, maybe it's me, maybe I just don't get it. Maybe I'm not clever enough. Maybe I'm just too stupid to understand." But I think that that isn't the problem. The problem is the field, the way it has been configured, the growing pressure on more and more people they published, by the way, when, I mean, many of the papers that I get across my desk as editor of Leadership, it's obvious that there isn't really anything genuine driving at all in the desire to be published. Because there's nothing interesting to say about anything, and certainly nothing new. So we need to recalibrate our incentives in different ways to try and get more meaningful work. I think more and more of us are concerned about the lack of genuine and meaningful research in the social sciences, including, management and organization studies. So I'll give another shout-out again to the RRBM which I think is an excellent initiative that I hope to see flourish and grow even further in the future. And I hope it influences many of us to adopt healthy research habits.

Scott Allen  28:16  
I will put that in the show notes for sure. So that listeners can check that out and access and learn about that resource. It's not something dentists that I've ever heard of. So I'm excited to explore it myself, I really am.

Dennis Tourish  28:28  
Good. I'm delighted to hear that yes, well worth pursuing and getting involved in it has received endorsements from many prominent people, and also increasingly from business schools, including my own, I'm glad to say...as well. And it feeds into the wall of recognition that we must do more to get better. Awareness created research integrity. I mean, for example, too much of our research has driven around what statisticians call p-hacking, where you keep on running statistical analysis beyond the point of reason to torture the data and to confessing that it's important to assess we began with so there's a lot of work to do and moving us beyond those particular mindsets.

Scott Allen  29:10  
Can I call the episode that - "Torturing the data into confessing?"

Dennis Tourish  29:14  
You can call it whatever you like.

Scott Allen  29:19  
I always close out these discussions, Dennis by asking you what you've been reading or streaming or listening to? And I'd love to hear what that is for you.

Dennis Tourish  29:30  
Oh, well,

Scott Allen  29:31  
other than academic journal articles.

Dennis Tourish  29:33  
Yeah. Well, I have picked up a book in the past few days by a good friend of mine, Keith Grint, looking at Mutany and Leadership, which looks absolutely fascinating as well. I've also been reading a great deal in the past year about an organization called Theranos. I don't know if you've heard of it. I'm working with a colleague to write a paper about that. Because of the intense surveillance and everything that employees there were subjected to, I think is significant beyond its own immediate context. And I think we're entering into an environment in which more and more business organizations are attempting to exert what I think of as an almost totalitarian control over the behaviors and the emotions and the commitments of the people who actually work for them. And the new surveillance technologies that are now being developed, facilitate that to a great extent. So I've been reading a lot about those issues and trying to formulate some interesting thoughts about them that don't just repeat what we already know.

Scott Allen  30:35  
Well, Dennis, you might want to, I don't know. So for listeners, this is, this is going off of my memory only. There was an article a few years ago that alleges that Amazon had fired 400 people, the algorithm fired the people, that the surveillance had their data at a certain productivity level, and then they were just fired by the system. And so I think you are exactly right, as we use sensor technology, Internet of Things devices, which is basically since connected sensors, we're going to see more and more stories about productivity surveillance machine, the machine learning, and the computer vision algorithm, or the computer vision technology and the machine learning algorithms, it's gonna be really interesting to watch that play out.

Dennis Tourish  31:24  
You're right about Amazon, they have a system whereby if you fall below a certain designated level of performance, you automatically get generated a warning by the algorithm. But then if you get beyond a certain number of these warnings, you're automatically terminated. A human being doesn't have to do anything. That's all done by these machines. And that's the world that we're moving into increasingly. So I think that we are probably in a fairly poor period in terms of workplace designs, and organizational structures in which I think that managers, senior managers will probably be even less interested in the welfare of their employees and their intrinsic levels of motivation than they have been in the past.

Scott Allen  32:04  
Yeah, yeah. Well, there's some really interesting there, your story of Theranos reminded me of a new documentary about WeWork. I don't know if you've seen that. That's an interesting view. And then again, you get into some of these technologies enabling disruption, or some of these discussions around technology and how it's being used. And in some cases, cases weaponized, like social media. There are some really interesting documentaries, the Social Dilemma, or the Great Hack that or there's another one on Netflix called the art called Unnatural Selection, where you have people in their shed playing around with CRISPR to make more muscular dogs. I mean, it's really eye-opening as to what's happening out there on that front. But the implications for organizational life for some of those technologies, that's going to be very, that's a passion aside passion of mine, for sure.

Dennis Tourish  33:07  
Yeah. And I mean, again, I think that maybe bringing this towards the end of our discussion, that's really important. The management scholars recognize these issues and try to address them. I mean, I think we're maybe exhausted quite a number of topics in the field. Do we need more articles and organizational discourse, for example, or communication constitutes organizations? Is there anything genuine in UGC anymore about identity work? Or the Big Five? The Big Five? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I suspect that one of the reasons why we still get a stream of publications on these types of topics is that people are heavily invested in their research agenda. And, okay, we have a great recession cut that happened, or we have climate catastrophe staring us in the face, but I will be damned if I will deviate from my research agenda and the next paper in order to try and address them. So those are some of the challenges that we face.

Scott Allen  34:06  
The most important question of the podcast, your favorite Led Zeppelin song?

Dennis Tourish  34:12  
I think it would have to be actually When the Levee Breaks. It's a great fondness for blues-type music. And I think that's just a terrific version, of that particular track.

Scott Allen  34:23  
There was some story I came across that had that he had, he had recorded that drum part in like the Great Hall of a home. So the drums were echoing in the way that they were at the beginning of that track. 

Dennis Tourish  34:37  
that's great. It's great. Just great.

Scott Allen  34:40  
Absolutely incredible. Okay, sir. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate your time today. It was a pleasure to get to know you. Thank you for the work that you do for our field, and I look forward to our paths crossing again.

Dennis Tourish  34:55  
Certainly nice Scott, great to meet you and I look forward to hopefully meeting face to face at some point.

Scott Allen  34:59  
We will in 2021 - we'll make it happen.

Dennis Tourish  35:03  
It's a deal

Transcribed by https://otter.ai