Does Your Agency Embrace Evidence-Based Management Practices?
- We believe it is important to adopt new an cutting-edge practices.
Organizations that are more evidence-based are less likely to adopt new and cutting-edge practices.
Sometimes ‘cutting-edge’ or ‘leading-edge’ practices can turn out to be valuable and useful, but more often than not they simply represent the latest management fads and fashions that are ultimately of little value.
This question also relates to the ‘solution in search of a problem’ problem where organizations introduce new and exciting ‘cutting-edge’ practices without being clear about what the problem is they are trying to fix and so start to see the problem in relation to what it is claimed the new practice will fix.
- We make decisions by looking at what other organizations are doing, and how it's working for them.
Organizations that are more evidence-based are less likely to copy what other organizations are doing.
In general, copying what other organizations do is regarded as an unhelpful decision making-practice because organizations are very different from each other and usually require specific and tailored solutions.
- Before any decision is taken we systematically evaluate internal data to better understand the nature of the problem.
Organizations that are more evidence-based will make much use of critically evaluated internal data.
The use of internal data and making decisions is vital to evidence-based practice. This involves a process with interlinked stages including collecting the data, ensuring it is valid and reliable, analyzing and interpreting the data, communicating the data, making it accessible to managers and incorporating it into decisions.
Many organizations are good at some of these stages but it appears that few have the capacity and skills required to fully complete this process.
- We systematically evaluate the effectiveness of new policies and practices we introduce.
Organizations that are more evidence based or more likely to evaluate new policies and practices.
Evaluation of the effectiveness of new policies and practices is essential to evidence-based practice without such evidence it is impossible to know whether an why new policies and practices are working, to what extent they are working, they have unintended negative consequences.
To learn more about evidenced-based management, the paper, Evidence-Based Management: The Basic Principles, explains evidence-based management and how it helps organizations make better decisions.