In God We Trust.  Everyone else must bring data.

Evidence based management is a movement that has grown around encouraging the application of scientific principles to management decision making, to encourage decisive and strategic action, that has a better return and is more easily communcated to stakeholders and shareholders. 

But, in the best of all worlds, we would all make our management decisions based on good solid evidence? Right?

In truth, in the real worlds of business, natural resource management, logistics etc, “evidence” can be drawn from historical data, current survey data, a manager’s gut feeling, a board member’s demands and each of these may be as valid as the others, depending on circumstance.  And the IT/database revolution has meant there is more data coming in faster than ever before.

Somewhere in all those numbers, trends, and hunches, you need to make a call, justify it to yourself, sell it to your team and get moving.  So how do you make decisions that are

- fast

- defensible

- competitive

- correct?

That’s where evidence based management comes in to play.  To wade through the data, and avoid becoming reactive decsion makers, we need to

- understand what we are trying to achieve - in simple terms.  i.e. are we increasing sales, or improving overall return?  are we evaluating the impact of a development on a species population or evaluating the populations viability?

- distil our data into useful information, understanding and being honest about biases and gaps in our knowledge

- only then can we analysis and act.

We’ll talk more about the art of decision making in an upcoming post, but the point is really that by instilling the support of a robust, evidence based decision process, we can navigate the oceans of data and influence much more confidently.