2. 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)
Did not have an easy ‘answer’
3. Exercise
Discuss with your neighbor (1 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?
12. Teach managers/leaders
how to critically evaluate the
validity, and generalizability of
the evidence and help them
find ‘the best available’
evidence
13. 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
17. 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
25. Evidence-based decision-making
=
the use of evidence from multiple
sources to increase the likelihood of a
favourable outcome
Focus on the decision making process
Think in terms of probability
28. 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?
29. How evidence-based is your HR director?
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)
33. Discuss with your neighbor (1 min)
Why is a physician’s clinical experience,
as a rule, more trustworthy than
a manager’s professional experience?
34. 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!
42. 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
43. We are pattern seeking primates: association learning
Bias 1: pattern recognition
50. 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
51. 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
52. 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
53. 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
57. 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
58. 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
64. 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
67. Lean Management / Lean Six Sigma
Self steering / autonomous teams
Agile working / New World of Working
Value based management / health care
Talent management
Employee engagement
Group think?
68. “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
69. 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
71. 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
72.
73. 1. financial data (cash flow, solvability)
2. business outcomes (ROI, market share)
3. customer/client impact (customer satisfaction)
4. performance indicators (occupancy rate, failure
frequency)
5. HR metrics (absenteeism, employee engagement)
6. marketing intelligence (brand awareness, customer
feedback)
7. ‘soft’ data (organizational culture, trust in senior
management, leadership style, commitment)
8. data from benchmarking
Types organizational evidence
76. Can your organization correlate/regress
level of education
years of experience
productivity
customer satisfaction
failure frequency
employee satisfaction
employee turnover
absenteeism
+
78. “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
79. In the next weeks,
before you make a decision, ask yourself:
What exactly is the problem?
What is the evidence available?
Was any attempt made to explicitly
evaluate its trustworthiness?