Evidence-Based Management John Zanardelli, MPH, FACHE Executive Director and CEO United Methodist Services for the Aging; Adjunct Associate Professor Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh

 
Evidence based management (EBM) is appearing on the radar screen. An example is Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton’s recently published book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths and Total Nonsense.

As a management practitioner who attempts to utilize sound, scientifically derived evidence to inform my management practice, I have been asked, “So why is the use of evidence so limited in management practice.” My short answer would be “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

There are several reasons driving this disconnect between evidence and practice that I touch on below.

First, managers don’t understand what constitutes evidence in the first place. From what I observe in management training programs (mostly MBA and university executive education programs, and not a scientifically derived random sample!) a thorough grounding in the scientific method is virtually nonexistent. Unless a practitioner has an understanding of how difficult it is to prove cause and effect, particularly causal claims that are replicable in a wide variety of settings, it would be difficult to evaluate what constitutes good evidence for a management practice.

My professional training is not in management, it is in public health; more specifically health service administration, behavioral and community health sciences, epidemiology and statistics. Logic models, deductive and inductive reasoning, study design and analysis, measurement theory, threats to internal validity and external validity are all a part of my training as well as tools and techniques I use in determining public health interventions in population health problems and organizational programs. Managers, likewise, would greatly benefit from having an understanding of these concepts; they’d then appreciate cause and affect on a much deeper level. Until then, they are most likely to operate using implicit theories of cause and effect which may or may not work, or work in their specific situation.

Second, to the best of my knowledge, management is not a profession. That is, there is no common body of knowledge or accepted management credential. Managers are not licensed to practice. Virtually anyone can claim to be a manager, and as it is currently practiced, it is certainly more of an art form than a science grounded endeavor.

Third, the knowledge is not easily accessed by practitioners. There is no easy way to “search and interpret the scholarly literature.” The literature may be “easily accessible” to an academic or a doctoral student; however, for a busy practitioner it is not. With the writing style of academic publications, heavily cited and statistics laden (p statistics, Cronbach’s alpha, etc.), it is no wonder that practitioners much prefer the simplistic nostrums served up in the popular press.

With a lack of understanding of what qualifies as evidence based practice, coupled with the requirement in today’s business world for short term results, you have, in my view, a recipe for promoting the quick fixes proposed in so many of the management books published today.

Prior to the discovery of germ theory in the early 20th century in medicine, and with the later discovery and development of antibiotics, medicine was mostly an art form; practitioners had their “cherished theories,” many of which sent their patients to an early grave. Well into the 1980’s, evidence-based practice was virtually unknown in medicine as its practitioners objected to any formal efforts to promote it as “cook book” medicine.

My hope for the field of general management is that training programs will begin to prepare students for evidence based management by grounding them in a good understanding of the scientific method and critical thinking skills. Until students are aware of the shortcomings in their current approach, a more rigorous approach to management will be difficult. And, as happened in medicine, many well meaning, but ill trained managers, may send business enterprises to early graves.
 

Posted on October 9, 2006

>> Read Evidence-Based Management (Part II) by John Zanardelli

Comments on this column?  You are welcome to create a post on the EBM Blog.