What is Evidence-Based Management?

For companies to make great decisions management must have the proper tools to make those decisions. As practitioners, we need to figure out how to enhance our decision making process. In these series of blogs. I explore the use of Evidence-Based Management as a tool to help us make decisions. The first blog describes what Evidence-Based Management is, the second and third blogs step through an example of the evidence-based search process, and the fourth provides an example of an evidence-based synthesis. At the end of this series, I want you, as the practitioner, to begin to question if this is a process you can use and maybe, just maybe, try using Evidence-Based Management for a problem in your organization to test the idea.

What are we missing in practice? We are missing access and a conduit to use and analyze scholarly research. If practitioners at all levels had scholarly research to solve problems we wouldn’t be living on a manager’s intuition. Shouldn’t a good decision be based on critical thinking and the best information? In large firms, data analysts have access to scholarly research. For example, the traders have access to scholarly research for trading on a daily basis. Analysts are submerged in this type of financial information.

What is missing from your business? EBM?

Let's get started ...

First in this series, I will provide an explanation of Evidence-Based Management (EBM) and how it can be utilized in the everyday setting. The next three segments will walk through a case study of how evidence-based management can be used to solve business problems.

EBM is integrating stakeholder information, organizational information, professional experience with scholarly or academic research (see Figure 1) (1).

1. Stakeholder information is internal higher level information that may affect the people within the organization.

2. Organizational information is standard day-to-day information that is gathered to complete the task at hand.

3. Professional experience is the information provided by the expert knowledge of the organization.

4. Scholarly information is information that can be provided from academic studies. This is the missing link.

We need to integrate scholarly information into daily practice within organizations.

How is it possible?

There are hundreds of research universities in the USA alone. What does this mean?

These universities are generating and publishing academic articles everyday. This provides thousands of research articles for review and to retrieve information from.

• Disclaimer: Scholarly articles require a quality review. Not all journal articles provide the quality substance we are looking for. Learning to spot a quality journal or source will be covered in a later issue.

What is the process?

Gathering and disseminating scholarly articles can be done through a systematic process. This process is like the scientific process. The steps are as follows:

1. Develop a practitioner question.

2. Locate scholarly works to answer the question.

3. Review each study.

4. Delete studies not applicable to answering the question.

5. Synthesize or summarize the information found.

6. Make recommendations.

We can change how we answer critical questions in the work environment by reviewing additional information; therefore, adding quality to the business decision process.

Also, using scholarly research to enhance problem solving in the practitioner

environment creates efficiencies not currently seen in the workplace setting.

See you next time - when I will discuss and and solve a sample problem using the EBM framework.

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Barends, E., & Rousseau, D. (2018). Evidence-based management. New York, NY: Kogan Page Limited.

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Series 1, Post 1 of 4