The good folks at Hyperion are giving out a free article from the Harvard Business Review concerning evidence-based management. Evidence-based management is creating a culture of decision making that is data-driven rather than gut or instinct driven. I think this movement is going to be big for the next few years. Then I think that people are going to take it too far and then I think that instinct-based management will come back… but I digress…

One of the most interesting concepts the authors talk about is the psychology behind the resistance to using data in decision making. They contend that people resist evidence-based decision making because:

1. Anecdotal evidence feels richer than do numbers on a report or print out.
2. People pass on old habits without examining whether new best practices have emerged.
3. People want to use their expertise — they want to feel important.
4. Marketing/advertising create a fog around what is, in fact, best practice.
5. Ideology/dogma exist in companies and are powerful agents resisting change.
6. Facts and evidence are great levellers of hierarchy.

Fascinating stuff.

My favourite feature of evidence-based management is that, if used properly, it can be tightly integrated with goal-setting and goal-achievement. A company can decide what metrics define its progress. Initiatives can be judged based on their impact on these metrics. In an ideal implementation, management can always have a sense of how they’re performing by looking at the metrics.

That said, those reasons why people are likely to be resistant to this movement shouldn’t be discounted. I don’t have much interest in building a big, cold business on data autopilot. I want people to feel that their expertise and past experience count — for the simple reason that they’ll likely be happier if they know that their feelings, not just their data, are valued.

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