The Swamp Remembers What the Hilltop Forgets

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Written By Nikoleta Adam

A Pracademic POV by Shubhaangi Trivedi

Donald Schön once spilt the world into two places: the high, hard ground where problems are clean and technique is king, and then there’s the swampy lowland where the problems that actually matter to people are messy, ambiguous and resistant to a tidy method. Most professionals, he wrote, must make a choice; stay on the hill and solve important-looking problems with rigour or wade into the swamp and solve important problems with judgment. I didn’t understand the metaphor until I stopped being a full-time resident of the hill.

For the past year, the hill was LSE. Now I spend my days in the swamp at Qrata, on calls with founders whose moods can turn a Tuesday morning inside out. A year ago, sitting in a lecture theatre on that same hill, I heard Marina Mayer say something that has stayed lodged in me ever since: "let your body finish the work." At the time it sounded almost poetic, the kind of line you nod at and underline without quite knowing why. I didn't have a swamp yet to test it against.

I am in the swamp now. And the line has stopped being poetic and started being literal.

Eventually, months later, thousands of miles from that lecture theatre, I started noticing something peculiar. On a call with a founder who is unravelling, I didn't register their words first rather I registered my own shoulders creeping up toward my ears. Marina had a name for that, embodiment, she said, is contagious and once I could name and label this, I couldn't unsee it. It rearranged how I sat through every difficult call that followed. I would hope it has made me better at what I do.

That's the part that travelled home with me, not as a theory I quote, but as a habit I now practise, on the ground, in Mumbai, with a team that has never sat in that lecture theatre and doesn't need to. It's why, when the chance came up, I pushed for that dance workshop instead of another slide about culture. Not because I could cite Marina to justify it, but because I already knew, what forty minutes of finding a rhythm together could do that a content heavy all-hands never would. Picture the room: our founders and associates who normally speak to each other through Slack threads and calendar invites, suddenly barefoot, out of sync, trying to mirror a stranger's movement. Nobody took notes. Nobody needed to. The point wasn't the choreography; it was that the room ran on a completely different currency than the one it runs on every other day.

The session with Marina was part of the LSE Pracademic Lab (www.Pracademiclab.com). It recently pooled the reflections of twenty-five practitioners on a blunt question: is our field even still relevant. One answer that surfaced repeatedly was that our most useful contribution may no longer be a body of knowledge to defend, but a willingness to keep translating, moving between worlds that don't naturally speak to one another, and refusing to settle for the finished answer on either side. That's what the commute between hill and swamp actually is, I think.

This is the part of what it is to live a pracademic life, you don't graduate from the hill into the swamp. You keep the commute, permanently. But every so often, something said on the hill waits patiently for months, travels home with you, and only really makes sense once your body has lived it. So, here's what I keep sitting with: as AI hands us thinking that always sounds finished and complete, will we still remember that some ideas need the insight and experience of the swamp, and the time to sit messily in it, before they're actually ready?

Further explore…

For those interested in exploring the framework of reflective practice, organizational learning, and the space where theory meets execution, here are a few recommended resources:

Nikoleta Adam
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