More on Evidence-Based Management

In chapter nine of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management, Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer lay out nine steps that can help you start and sustain and evidence-based approach to business.

1. "Treat your organization as an unfinished prototype."  Try many small experiments and learn from what happens.  As you learn, adjust your actions accordingly.  I see this as managing the way Dr. Gregory House does medicine (on the Fox series "House").  Often he and his team must take some action or see their patient die, but they usually have only incomplete information.  So they try something, stand-by to deal with any problems, and feed the results back into their thinking.  ("One more symptom to consider.")
2. "No brag, just facts."  Confront the facts - both positive and negative, known and unknown.  Hold each other accountable for working from facts, rather than fads, assumptions or ideologies.
3. "Master the obvious and mundane."  It may be obvious and boring, but little, proven actions can have large impacts.  Don't just do the big, sexy things that are in current vogue.
4. "See yourself and your organization as outsiders do."  Find - and listen to - an outsider you can trust.
5. "Power, prestige, and performance make you stubborn, stupid, and resistant to valid evidence."  Assume you will fall prey to this problem.  Watch for it.  Listen, ask for advice and help.  Use that trusted outsider to help you see when "... the emperor has no clothes."
6. "Evidence-based management is not just for senior executives."  Teach all your folks how to manage on facts, and hold them accountable for using the principles.  Beware though;  if you don't visibly live by facts, your folks won't either.
7. "Like everything else, you still need to sell it."  Evidence-based management goes against the grain of what we all hear every day, so you will have to explain and sell it to the folks you work with.
8. "If all else fails, slow the spread of bad practices."  Sometimes, those above you will demand that you take action that is inconsistent with the facts.  If you cannot convince them otherwise, you might want to try what Sutton and Pfeffer call "Evidence-based Misbehavior."  Consider ignoring the order entirely, delaying action, or implementing the order only incompletely.
9. "The best diagnostic question:  what happens when people fail?"  The ideal answer is "forgive and remember," which comes from the evidence-based medicine movement.  The idea is that if you don't forgive, people won't fess up to mistakes and it will be impossible to learn from them.  And if you forgive and forget, you will be doomed to repeat failures over and over again.

For more insights straight from one of the authors, check out Bob Sutton's weblog.