From an article in the Harvard Business Review, January 2006 by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton.

In our information-intensive world there is undoubtedly a heck of a lot of information out there. However, many businesses (even including medical professionals, as discussed in the article) don’t use it to make decisions. It is difficult to change course, and an established direction of momentum, on any big ship and doing what everyone else does, what one has always done, or what one thought was true is still much more prevalent than peering into the face of actual evidence and using it to make informed decisions.

As an example, the article says that research shows that only 15% of physicians’ decisions are evidence based. Instead their decisions are mainly based on: obsolete knowledge gained in school, long-standing but never proven traditions, patterns gleaned from experience, the methods they believe in and are most skilled in applying, and information from hordes of vendors with products and services to sell.

This same example may be extrapolated to managers of organizations; they exhibit many of the same behaviors. In fact, business managers are often in a worse off position, with regard to evidence-based decisions, than doctors are. Business managers are usually less scientifically based and trained in the first place and there are a lot more variations in businesses than there are in the human body, thus making general rules and prescriptions less useful; i.e. there is a lot more customization required for business “fixes”. When managers act on better logic and evidence their companies enjoy a competitive advantage.

Evidence-based management, although difficult to implement, is a worthwhile cause and a noble effort is not the only tool that a business should use. Evidence-based management should be implemented and should augment, not displace, the artistic functioning, and good old people to people storytelling and relating that many companies are already good at. It is not an either/or proposition but another tool to be added to the toolbox. As Einstein once wrote, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

A salient quote from the article: “Evidence-based management is conducted best not by know-it-alls but by managers who profoundly appreciate how much they do not know.”