Stop Deriding Theory

Deriding theory has become a crowd-pleaser at industry events, and vendor-driven events are the worst for it. Announcing that there will be no theory today, that we are here to do things rather than talk about things, tends to land well. For a while, I was guilty of nodding along, even using this myself.

I’ve changed my view on that.

The frustration driving it is understandable; our field has spent decades producing elaborate conceptual frameworks that didn’t connect to anything anyone needed to do on a Monday morning. The backlash makes sense, but the conclusion being drawn is wrong.

When we talk about practical application as though it exists independently of theory, we are describing something that cannot exist. Every decision a practitioner makes, every design choice, every facilitation move, draws on some explanatory model of how people learn, what motivates behaviour, and what causes performance to change. The question is never whether theory is present; it is whether the practitioner is aware of the theory they are already using.

Note: The above does assume that what the practitioner is doing is effective, but let’s make that assumption for the purposes of this article.

Someone who designs spaced retrieval practice into a programme because they understand how memory consolidation works can adjust, adapt, and explain their choices when the context shifts. Someone who does it because a conference speaker said it was good practice cannot. They are executing a behaviour without a model, which makes them dependent on instruction and unable to respond when conditions change.

This connects to something I wrote about recently on best practice: the label does not confer universal applicability. A technique or approach is only useful in proportion to your understanding of why it works and under what conditions it stops working. Strip out the theoretical grounding and you are left with a list of things to copy, which is a fragile position for any professional to be in.

None of this is an argument for theory in isolation. Knowing something and being able to apply it are different capabilities, and our field has sometimes confused the first for the second. But the direction of travel in too many conversations, particularly in spaces shaped by commercial interests, is to treat the theoretical foundation as optional, even as a sign of over-complication.

Meaningful practical application is not the opposite of theory. It is theory, made visible through action.