Show me the evidence
Essentially, evidence-based management is a sceptical approach that, according to Pfeffer and Sutton from their excellent book: Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense: profiting from evidence-based management (2006) follows a few simple guidelines including:
Treat old ideas like old ideas, and
Be suspicious of breakthrough ideas, and studies because they, almost, never happen.
There is much to still learn and discover about how organisations function, but there is also plenty of well-researched evidence around for what works in the business world. The so-called ‘gurus’ who claim that business is difficult to figure out because it is all about people and we are complex, unpredictable things that don’t follow predictable rational rules are giving up too easily. Trying to understand human and organisational behaviour is why we have psychology for instance.
So, claiming that business is too hard to fathom is weak. Worse than this though is using the complexity argument to justify unproven, flaky nonsense (see earlier posts on business psychics). A good example in the field of personal development would be “The Secret” with its claim of applying the “universal law of attraction” to achieve your desires- the idea being that if you simply visualise something it will be attracted to you – whether it is a physical object, maybe a car or yacht, or an abstract concept such as love or success.
Try as I might, I can find no evidence for this – the best I have come up with is gravity and magnetism.
People are often attracted to mysticism in it’s various forms because it offers easy answers to difficult problems. The business world, particularly in the current fragile economic climate, deserves better. So, rather than deciding that because we don’t have all the answers yet we should ignore management science and just make stuff up, let’s build on what we have found to date, do more research, reflect on experience and…show me the evidence!
