3. Our mission for today:
By the end of this workshop you will be more concerned
about the way you typically make decisions as a
manager/leader/consultant, so you firmly resolve that,
within the next year, you will increase the ‘evidence-
base’ of your decisions by at least 25%.
You can do this, of course, by signing up for the
executive course ‘Evidence-based decision-making’ at
Bath University School of Management.
4. 20 min EBDsc: What is it and why do you need it?
20 min Professional experience & judgment
10 min Organizational data
20 min Scientific evidence: mini case
Agenda
5. Exercise
Think about a decision you have been involved in
making. This decision should be one which:
Was reasonably important for your organization
Involved spending significant resources
Involved several or more people
Was made over a period of time (ie. weeks or
months)
6. Exercise
Discuss with your neighbor (2 min)
What exactly was the problem (or opportunity)?
How many alternative decision options were considered?
How much evidence was used, and from which sources
(scientific, organizational, experience, crystal ball?)
Was any attempt made to explicitly evaluate its quality or
trustworthiness?
15. Teach managers/leaders
how to critically evaluate the
validity, and generalizability of
the evidence and help them
find ‘the best available’
evidence
16. Evidence based decision
Professional
experience and
judgment
Organizational data,
facts and figures
Stakeholders’ values
and concerns
Scientific
research
outcomes
Ask
Acquire
Appraise
Aggregate
Apply
Assess
diagnosis intervention
20. 1. Ask: translate a practical issue into an answerable question
2. Acquire: systematically search for and retrieve the evidence
3. Appraise: critically judge the trustworthiness of the evidence
4. Apply: incorporate the evidence into the decision-making process
5. Assess: evaluate the outcome of the decision taken
5 steps of EBmed
28. Evidence-based decision-making
=
the use of critically appraised
evidence from multiple sources to
increase the likelihood of a
favourable outcome
Focus on the decision making process
Think in terms of probability
29. “Where the evidence is strong, we should act on it.
Where the evidence is suggestive, we should consider it.
Where the evidence is weak, we should build the knowledge
to support better decisions in the future.”
Jeffrey Zients, acting director of the
Office of Management and Budget and
President Obama’s Economic Advisor
32. 1. Incompetent people benefit more from feedback than
highly competent people.
2. Task conflict improves work group performance while
relational conflict harms it.
3. Encouraging employees to participate in decision
making is more effective for improving organizational
performance than setting performance goals.
True or false?
33. How evidence-based are we?
959 (US) + 626 (Dutch) HR professionals
35 statements, based on an extensive body of evidence
true / false / uncertain
HR Professionals' beliefs about effective human resource practices: correspondence
between research and practice, (Rynes et al, 2002, Sanders et al 2008)
37. Discuss with your neighbor
Why is a physician’s clinical experience,
as a rule, more trustworthy than
a manager’s professional experience?
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38. Developing expertise
1. A sufficiently regular, predictable environment
2. Opportunities to learn regularities through prolonged
practice and feedback
The management domain is not highly
favorable to expertise!
46. 1. Pattern recognition
2. Confirmation-bias
3. Groupthink
Cognitive errors that mess up decision making
47. We are predisposed to see order, pattern and causal
relations in the world.
Patternicity: The tendency to find meaningful patterns in
both meaningful and meaningless noise.
Error 1: pattern recognition
48. We are pattern seeking primates: association learning
Bias 1: pattern recognition
55. A Type I error or a false positive, is
believing a pattern is real when it is not
(finding a non existent pattern)
A Type II error or a false negative, is
not believing a pattern is real when it is
(not recognizing a real pattern)
Dr. Michael Shermer
(Director of the Skeptics Society)
Error 1: pattern recognition
56. A Type I error or a false positive: believe that the
rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is
just the wind (low cost)
Error 1: pattern recognition
57. A Type II error or a false negative: believe that the
rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a
dangerous predator (high cost)
Error 1: pattern recognition
58. A Type I error or a false positive: believe that the
rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is
just the wind (low cost)
A Type II error or a false negative: believe that the
rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a
dangerous predator (high cost)
Error 1: pattern recognition
64. We are predisposed to selectively
search for or interpret information in
ways that confirms our existing beliefs,
expectations and assumptions, and
ignore information to the contrary.
In other words, we “see what we want to
see”
2. Confirmation bias
65. Example
You may believe that astrology actually
works. As a result of confirmation bias
you’ll remember only those instances
when when the prediction in the astrology
column came true and forget the majority
of the cases when the prediction was very
wrong. As a result you will continue to
believe astrology has some base in reality
2. Confirmation bias
72. Groupthink:
Groupthink is a psychological
phenomenon that occurs within a
group of people, in which the desire
for harmony or conformity in the
group results in an incorrect or
irrational decision
Error 3: Groupthink
75. Lean Management / Lean Six Sigma
Self steering / autonomous teams
Agile working / New World of Working
Talent management
Employee engagement
Groupthink?
76. “I’ve been studying judgment for 45 years, and I’m no better
than when I started. I make extreme predictions. I’m over-
confident. I fall for every one of the biases.”
Bounded rationality
78. 20 min EBDsc: What is it and why do you need it?
20 min Professional experience & judgment
10 min Organizational data
20 min Scientific evidence: mini case
Agenda
79. Evidence based decision
Professional
experience and
judgment
Organizational data,
facts and figures
Stakeholders’ values
and concerns
Scientific
research
outcomes
Ask
Acquire
Appraise
Aggregate
Apply
Assess
diagnosis intervention
85. People operate with beliefs
& biases. To the extent you
can reduce both and replace
them with data, you gain a
clear competitive advantage
Laszlo Bock (CHRO Google)
Organizational data
91. Can your organization correlate/regress
level of education
years of experience
productivity?
customer satisfaction?
failure frequency?
employee satisfaction?
employee turnover?
absenteeism?
+
92. In the next weeks,
before you make a decision, ask yourself:
What exactly is the problem?
What is the evidence available?
Where does it come from (multiple sources?)
How trustworthy is it?
93.
94. Identify the many other factors, rather than evidence, that shape
managerial decisions such as cognitive biases, politics, power,
management fads and the ideas of management gurus
Distinguish between the four different types of evidence used in
evidence-based management
Identify differences between your own and your organisation’s decision-
making and an evidence-based management approach to decision-
making
Understand practical ways in which your and your organisation’s decision-
making can become more evidence-based and the potential benefits and
costs that may result.
Learn how to critically evaluate the trustworthiness of evidence (including
assumed best practices, organisational data, findings from research etc.)
At the end of the course you will be able to