Evidence-based management is an approach that involves consciously setting aside the accepted conventions and hierarchy of opinion, using critical thinking and the best available evidence to make decisions. Using it to make managerial and people-related decisions can drive better outcomes in every aspect of a business, from diversity and inclusion to profitability.
How to Use Evidence-Based Management
Falling back on acquired best practices can result in bad decisions, poor business outcomes, and a limited understanding of why things went wrong in the first place
- Adoption of evidence-based management approaches can prevent this
- The practice became popular in medicine in the 1990s and spread to other disciplines like public policy, education, and business management
Tools to Enable Evidence-Based Management
Subscriptions to academic journals: JSTOR, Directory of Open Access Journals, and ScienceDirect
- Business intelligence tools: Internal business data is an essential source of evidence
- Membership to industry associations: Provides access to perspectives outside of your personal experience and distinct from your organization’s experiences
- Enterprise discussion management: Gives insight into a big group of people in a short amount of time and makes internal evidence gathering easy for leaders
The Future of Decision-Making is Evidence-Based
Evidence-based management approaches can change how we think and act for the better
How to Use Evidence-Based Management
Six steps to increase the likelihood of a favorable outcome from your decisions
- Asking: Translating a practical issue or problem into an answerable question
- Acquiring: Systematically searching for and retrieving the evidence
- Appraising: Critically judging the trustworthiness and relevance of the evidence
- Aggregating: Weighing and pulling together the evidence, Applying: Incorporating the evidence into the decision-making process, Assessing: Evaluating the outcome of the decision
Sources of Evidence for Leaders
Scientific literature: Knowledge from scientific evidence is more accurate than the opinions of experts or their best practices
- Internal data: Professional judgments based on hard data are far more accurate
- Professional expertise: The professional experience of many people results in more accurate decisions than the personal experience of one or two individuals
- Stakeholders’ values and concerns: Consulting the people affected by our decisions can be done with focus groups
