Immediately after my post on well being of the evidence based management movement, Tracy Altman responded on her blog EvidenceSoup. She also thinks that without a collaborative effort, evidence based management is heading for failure. Her blog focuses on the large variety (like law, medicine, dentistry, business, education, etc.) of evidence based practices. The Evidence Soup Guide to keeping the Evidence-Based Movement Alive. She recently started an new venture called Explanation Science. More about that later.
Part I. How to kill the EBM movement. If people do these things, we’ll be writing an obituary:
- Frown on new evidence. Develop an environment where people are discouraged from challenging tradition, scrutinizing old habits, or asking tough questions.
- Oversimplify things that are tremendously complicated. Insist on clearly delineating which decisions are evidence-based, and which are not. Doggedly pursue a set of formal rules for determining precisely whose actions are evidence-based, and whose are not.
- Make evidence exclusive. Behave as if certain insiders (or groups) are the keepers of the evidence, and the rest of us (outsiders) had better sit up straight and pay attention.
Part II. How to pump more life into the EBM movement. Here’s how we can nudge EBM into the mainstream:
- Avoid painting all fuzzy stuff with the same brush. Resist the urge to divide the world into two distinct hemispheres: One where all things are evidence-based, and one where people are just plain wrong. It’s not that simple, and we should know better.
- Accept that we often lack good evidence. It’s better to openly acknowledge where solid evidence is missing than to pretend. It sends the wrong message when we try to force-fit or stretch uninteresting evidence where there is none.
- Set a good example. Encourage people to do things that are evidence-guided (or evidence-informed) every day, to the best of their ability. Create a corporate culture where its okay to ask intelligent questions that challenge authority, myth, and tradition.
- Use smarter technology. Find better ways to distribute more good evidence to more people. Make evidence easier to interpret so people can appreciate its value and apply it more easily.
Relevant websites
Thanks, Richard, for following up on my post. I see some reasons for optimism, but also some signs that we aren’t making much progress.
Overall I believe managers, leaders, and other professionals are becoming more likely to ask for explicit evidence/data — technology is making data-gathering and sharing easier and more widespread, so that’s good. I do believe that transparency is, ever so slowly, becoming the expectation. And the global turmoil of the past year has certainly encouraged people to question assumptions and look for new forms of evidence.
However, we have a long way to go in terms of packaging and presenting evidence in easily digestible formats. It’s imperative that we do more to encourage the dissemination and uptake of useful evidence by people who must make difficult decisions under tight time constraints and conditions of information overload. With clever technology design – software design and information architecture in particular – we can make meaningful changes in how people discover, present, and apply evidence.