I announced a few weeks in a post that, with some great help from Daphne Chang and Paul Reist at the Stanford Business School Library, and from Management Science & Engineering PhD student Ralph Maurer, Jeff Pfeffer and I had launched www.evidence-basedmanagement.com. We have continued to work on the site, and the greatest improvement has been the work that Daphne and Paul have done in identifying an astounding range of evidence-based movements, and providing links to key information. Check out their list of other evidence-based movements, which include evidence-based conservation, evidence-based crime prevention, evidence-based government (imagine that!), evidence-based medicine (the most completely developed), evidence-based social work, and evidence-based software engineering.
Certainly, the meaning of an evidence-based approach means different things in different places. But the common theme I see across all these movements — and why the term evidence-based is so value and is spreading — is that people across all these areas want the best decisions made and implemented because money and lives are at stake, and rather than taking steps that are based on what has always been done, what sustains the power structure, or provides the largest financial payoff to the most persuasive salespeople, I believe these movements represent a desire and commitment to do the right thing. Sure, ideology and greed will always bias the decisions that people make and implement, but pressing people to face and follow the best facts is a new, noble, and sometimes effective hurdle. Indeed, there are signs people with best evidence do and can win — and to see how it is done, if you haven’t already, check out Al Gore’s brilliant and simple arguments about global warming in An Inconvenient Truth.
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