What have I learned from teaching Evidence-Based Management to undergraduate management students? James O’Brien Assistant Professor, Human Resources Management and Organizational Studies Program Faculty of Social Science University of Western Ontario

We’re just past the mid-way point in an upper-year undergraduate OB course. The other day, we were working on the subject of teams. A critical incident exercise on “our most vivid failure in a team setting” was yielding some great results, as many of the common team themes from the literature had already emerged (see the photo image for the whiteboard).

“Why do we fail so often, and so spectacularly, in this context?” I asked.

“Well, let’s see how the evidence might help us diagnose the problem, and what suggestions might be available to us for converting our knowledge into action…”

I’m starting to understand that one useful way to teach EBM is to conjure up some vivid problems, and show how the literature has something useful to say in response. It might be a direct suggestion of how to proceed (“embrace task conflict”) or an insight that helps us to reframe the problem (how are nominal and interacting teams different?), leading to a wider range of potentially better responses.

Our lived experience of management problems can lead us to believe that they are dilemmas, or that they will yield to a “brute force” attack of common sense. Working with evidence helps us to understand the common core of management problems, how they have been successfully (and unsuccessfully) addressed in the past.

EBM may also immunize us against fallacies arising out of our biased evaluations of our own experiences. It is also truly amazing how intractable management folklore can become. This seems to hold even among aspiring managers. “Interviewers make snap judgments.” “Two heads are better than one.” “In building organizations, the matrix is the preferred solution.” Some of these student beliefs are romantic, and some are simplifications designed to help us grapple with ambiguous and challenging environments. Most, however, have outlived their usefulness, or at the very least the qualifications surrounding them have melted away.

The merits of different kinds of evidence are another important piece of this puzzle. Listing and expounding beliefs that represent received wisdom in the field is not enough. Why do we believe what we believe? What are our standards for evaluating different forms of evidence? If critical thinking is allowed to drive management education, practice will become less mimetic and more valuable. This is my working hypothesis of the moment.

We’re getting to the point in class where we’ll discuss systematic observation of our own working environment, or “desktop investigation.” To me, this is the powerful flipside of EBM: where there is insufficient evidence that seems to generalize to your situation, or you’re concerned about the “side effects” of conventional remedies, you can seek some clarity from your own investigations.

Teaching EBM has also inspired me to think about evidence-based teaching. I’m eager to collect data on in-class events and to try and link it to outcomes. I wonder how this may challenge some of the cherished beliefs I’ve come to hold about management education. Then again, it seems the least I can do.

Posted on November 15, 2006

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