Teaching Evidence-Based Management

Why teach evidence-based management?

• Season 1 • Episode 0

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In this introduction to the podcast, step into the groundbreaking realm of Evidence-Based Management (EBM) with us as we chart its evolution from the influential Evidence-Based Medicine movement. Eric Berends, Denise Rousseau, Rob Briner and Jeffrey Pfeffer dissect the persistent gap between knowledge and application that hampers both healthcare and corporate landscapes. This episode promises an enlightening journey through the complex process of making data-driven decisions in management, highlighting the untapped potential of research in guiding business practices and the critical role of educators in narrowing this divide.

Unlock the secrets to enhancing decision-making in the corporate world through the lens of reflective learning and the power of diverse experiences. Professor Denise Rousseau's experiment with change management students reveals profound insights into the educational process and the importance of a holistic problem-solving approach. We confront the puzzling resistance to adopting EBM in academia, probing into who holds the reins of responsibility for elevating managerial decision-making. This exploration is not only thought-provoking but a call to action for educators and institutions to arm future leaders with the evidence-based toolkit necessary for navigating the ever-changing business terrain.

Navigating the academic sphere presents its unique challenges and opportunities in disseminating EBM principles. Hear from our guests as they advocate for a skillful blend of technical mastery and a curious, respectful mindset among graduates aiming to employ evidence-based approaches in their careers. Discover the tactical strategies educators can implement to weave EBM into curricula, starting small and dreaming big, while also contemplating the intrinsic merit of scientific evidence in organizational contexts. As Rob Briner urges educators to ponder their contribution to this field, we invite you to join us in a conversation that's not just about imparting knowledge but transforming the very fabric of management education.

Host:
Karen Plum

Guests:

Mentions:
Center for Evidence-Based Management

CEBMa Teachers Network

CEBMa’s Online Course Modules

Karen Plum:

Hello and welcome to the Teaching Evidence-Based Management podcast. In this introductory episode, we're going right back to basics, taking a look at where and why it all started, where it took its inspiration from and how the movement got going. We'll also be looking at why this topic is the passion of some educators but not of others, and, similarly, why some universities and business schools cover the approach in their curriculum but others don't go anywhere near it. I'm Karen Plum, a student of evidence-based management myself, and to get to the bottom of these questions, I've talked to four distinguished experts in the field of evidence-based Management. They are Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management, Eric Barends; Denise Rousseau, who is Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University; Professor of Organizational Psychology at Queen Mary University of London, Rob Briner, and Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

Karen Plum:

Let's hear what they have to say. So let's start by asking what the term evidence-based means. Essentially, it's an approach that emphasises the practical application of the findings from the best available research. All good so far. Evidence-based practice started in the field of medicine in the early 90s. The term was coined by Gordon Guyatt, a young faculty member at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Let's hear Eric tell the story.

Eric Barends:

He used the term for a course they developed, and that's interesting to know that evidence-based medicine actually started out as a teaching method. The reason they developed this course was that there was so much variation between medical treatments and practices that it depended on the surgeon or even the hospital where you would go to, you know, whether the outcome was effective, and that is, of course, unacceptable. And so they looked into the way medicine was practised and they came to the conclusion that a lot of medical students or young physicians were trained by the old guys and girls in the hospital. This is how you do it, this is how we've been doing this for decades or years, and it was experiential-based, which is absolutely a great way to learn things. But what they missed out on was that there was a serious knowledge, practice or science practice gap, that there is a lot of medical research demonstrating that the things they did or the treatments that there were available were not always that effective and other ways of treating or medication was more effective. So you should also be up to date with the latest insights from research.

Eric Barends:

So Gordon Guyatt started out with the term scientific medicine, and when he used that term, all his colleagues went berserk and said how dare you? What are you suggesting? That we are not, you know scientific? That we are quacks. And he said oh, okay, sorry, okay, no, no, no, let's call it evidence-based medicine, meaning you look at the research on that specific condition or medication or issue. But not only that. You also take into account the personal preferences and values of the patient - what we call stakeholder evidence - but also your diagnostics, your lab scores, etc. How do you figure out whether that is actually reason to intervene yes or no? And that's what we call organizational data. So the whole idea was to make decisions about the treatment of patients based on multiple sources of evidence, and of course, they emphasized the scientific evidence, because that was still lacking in a lot of practices in hospitals and in medical institutions. So that's how it started.

Karen Plum:

And from there the approach spread to education, in terms of using research to determine the best ways of teaching children, and later to areas like policymaking and policing.

Karen Plum:

And about 15 to 20 years ago, the field of management, which, like many others, tended to be led by the latest trends, approaches or fads which everyone wanted to follow so they could be seen to be up to date and at the cutting edge.

Karen Plum:

Given that management is not a profession as such, with no body of knowledge that managers are required to have and no code of conduct, as there is for medicine, managers have for decades been appointed into management positions with no specific qualifications to carry out the role.

Karen Plum:

Managers are very often appointed to manage because they've excelled at a technical skill and as a way to share their knowledge and experience or to recognize their skills by way of promotion, they're given a group of people to manage and, while many have MBAs or other qualifications, they don't need one to be a manager. So, while many managers will have undertaken some training in managerial skills, oftentimes people are left to decide what approaches work best and they use their gut and their experience to guide them, and those attending business schools learn about the latest popular approaches, particularly the things that their bosses will be impressed that they're learning about and implementing in the organization. Meanwhile, there are dedicated academics doing really impactful research about the things that affect the performance of people at work and that research isn't being used, leading to the so-called knowledge practice gap - s o the gap between what is known from research and what people are doing in daily practice. Here's Eric again.

Eric Barends:

So a lot of academics were very unhappy that they did all this brilliant research - people like Denise Rousseau, Rob Briner, all the people that started the evidence-based management movement. They were very unhappy about the fact no one uses our brilliant research and the science practice gap that was referred to as the science practice gap or knowledge practice gap. The assumption was that it was specifically large in the field of management - that what leaders and managers or decision makers were doing in organizations is not aligned with what we know from research is effective.

Karen Plum:

And so, based on the evidence of medical practice, which improved significantly through the incorporation of research into practice, it was clear that a similar approach could be beneficial in the field of management, and hence evidence-based management started to emerge. But we should perhaps pause a moment to consider the role of teachers in this picture. What was being taught to existing and potential managers at the time? Did it have any roots in research? I asked Denise Rousseau.

Denise Rousseau:

Well, I think the first time that I ever raised the idea of teaching evidence-based management to a group of professors and management educators was in 2005, the Academy of Management Presidential Luncheon, and my topic that day was is there such a thing as evidence-based management? The thing that had been weighing on my mind as somebody on the Board of Governors for the Academy of Management, this association of business schools professors worldwide is, as president, I had received a lot of critical feedback in the email and the most common criticism was why should you be sending me (back in the day we sent hard copy journals to members), all these journals on research and theory? Because that doesn't help me teach. And you have to remember that the majority of business school faculty are not necessarily in heavy research-oriented schools. They're management educators with some research interest or background.

Denise Rousseau:

And my first response when they said the journals are not useful to us as educators was to feel kind of guilty and say jeez, I'm sorry we're not being useful to you.

Denise Rousseau:

And then I stopped and I said but wait a minute, why are they not finding the new research useful?

Denise Rousseau:

And then it occurred to me - maybe they're not updating what they teach based on what the research is saying. A nd checking that out, a couple of my colleagues slash friends, good friends are textbook writers and have books that are in like the 16th edition, so they're really very popular money makers. And I asked well, why is it that in the textbook you're still including theories, Hertzberg and Maslow would be two examples, that were basically refuted back in the 1970s, if not earlier, but 70s was when I learned it.

Denise Rousseau:

So that's the data I quote it and they said well, because people are still teaching it and people want to see in the books what they teach in their course. And that really gave me pause, because I think one of the real issues is the lack of updating in much of the teaching that's done, let's say, in the management, organizational behavior, HR space, as a function of new learning that comes from research. So that was, I think, my first inkling that evidence-based management as a practice was also a teaching practice and could also be something that could help other teachers who were teaching topics that are related to management, perhaps also to up their game. To be more representative of what the literature says.

Karen Plum:

The requirement to keep up to date with research findings and latest techniques is expected in medical fields. Those professionals expect to update their knowledge and skills during their career. But for managers who haven't needed to acquire a management qualification in the first place, there isn't this expectation. For those that initially trained in a technical skill, it may even be that they're more focused on updating their technical knowledge and capabilities, even though they may not use them in their managerial role, but they want to retain their accreditation in that original technical skill set or standing.

Karen Plum:

All of that said, whatever their qualifications and training for the role of management, what many people set a lot of store by is experience. I have 10 years or I have 20 years management experience, and superficially it's an easy statement to fall for. But then you have to ask yourself - what have they learned in those 10 or 20 years, and are they still doing things the same way as when they started? Do they, as Denise Rousseau says, have one year's experience repeated 10 or 20 times? How can we determine the goodness and the robustness of their experience?

Denise Rousseau:

It's quite interesting, having done a systematic review of research on expertise and experience. There are easily 80 kinds of experience that are talked about in the research literature. I n generalist experience, and specialist experience, and international experience, in marketing, supply chain experience and yet one of the issues we have is that it's very difficult for a lay person to know - does this individual I'm seeking to hire or seeking to promote, does that person have, let's say, 10 years of experience as a supply chain manager, or does he have one year of experience repeated 10 times? Which is to say we don't know how well that person learned, whether they experienced different kinds of conditions that caused them to question their assumptions and adjust their practices, which we would see in nursing and we would see in medicine and we would see in professions where people got feedback about what was working and not working in the domain in which they practice. It's very difficult for people in business to learn only by experience unless the environment supports clear feedback about what worked and what didn't. You work in a similar domain over time so you start realizing what are kind of like the bedrock steps and skills that are required to do this well, what's ancillary, and then adjusting it to different circumstances.

Denise Rousseau:

This is a routine problem. This is a non-routine problem. When I got the latter, here's what I need to do to figure out how to solve it. Unless they had exposure to the variety of circumstances and presenting conditions in an area and then gotten feedback on what kind of efficacy their decisions had, they may have experience, but it's one year over and over, unless the environment supported learning.

Karen Plum:

And, of course, one of the key things here is the evaluation of the decisions that people make, so often based on their experience. If there's no evaluation of the goodness of the decision in terms of how things turned out, then there's little opportunity for learning and for evolving or refining decision-making processes. Denise is a keen advocate of reflection, a critical aspect of getting better at something. If people review what they did, why they did it, how well it seemed to work and what they could have done differently, then there's an opportunity to learn, and not just reflecting alone, but alongside other interested parties. This in turn requires a supportive cultural environment so that the reflection and learning happen without the need to be defensive, in a psychologically safe environment, if you will.

Karen Plum:

This prompted me to wonder about whether educators typically evaluate their teaching practices separately from things like test scores and ratings. Do teachers have a sense of whether their students are changing the way they think and approach subjects and problems, if indeed problem-solving is part of what they're being taught? To try to test her own approach, Denise conducted an experiment about 10 years ago. This involved a pre and a post-test where her change management students were asked to describe how they would approach a change scenario as a pre-test, and then, after learning about a seven-stage problem-solving model, (she was teaching one stage each week), they did a post-test. So what did she find?

Denise Rousseau:

My students had very skimpy answers at time one and much more elaborated answers at time two. You'd expect that. But the difference was they could tell me the first three steps in the process. You know the role of diagnosis, checking with stakeholders, the role of creating a vision, da-da-da-da-da-da but they couldn't tell me a lot about the last four steps. Yep, not there. And it struck me when I compared pre and post, the difference was I had emphasized weeks one, two and three, over and over again into week five and six and seven. But when I got to week seven I only talked about week seven's content once.

Denise Rousseau:

So now, of course, what I do is I foreshadow, when I'm teaching week one, the whole process. Then I do the next step, backshadowing, where we were, shadowing where we're going, so that they understand the process and context. And that was a real kick in the pants for me because I've been teaching that class for like maybe 20 years. But it's invaluable to measure the difference in people's mindsets and their approach to a problem, not their technical knowledge but their ability to use it in solving a problem, to see how completely they have acquired the skills and the frame of reference for the process. I now do that in evidence-based management cos I know I have to. I cannot assume that because I taught it, they received it as I intended. Also, I want them to know that I'm modeling what I hope that they will do, that they would, you know, when they're trying to make a change, get a baseline and then evaluate hopefully more than once over time, whether the needle has moved.

Karen Plum:

Returning to our core topic of the teaching of evidence-based management, it's clear that one of the key drivers was to encourage and facilitate better management decision-making, something that you might think would be a shared aim in organizations. If it is, then that's really not obvious. And if organizations generally aren't looking to improve their decision-making, then who is promoting it? Is it something that universities and business schools promote and teach in their curricula? My guests thought that the number of schools offering or including any coverage of evidence-based management was quite small, and where they were, it was usually down to the efforts of a passionate advocate working at the organization who was keen to promote it and teach it to students. So let's hear from our experts about why universities and business schools don't seem to teach or advocate evidence-based management. First up is Rob Briner from Queen Mary University in London.

Rob Briner:

Well, there's a number of reasons. Number one is, I think, who decides what gets taught. There's accreditation bodies who kind of determine to a large extent the kind of stuff that gets taught. It's academics who decide what they're interested in and what they would like to teach, and, I guess, als o its universities in terms of what they think will sell and get bums on seats. I think from those three things, I think the accreditation bodies, I think, haven't said to business schools - you really need to have a course on this and if they did, of course every business school who wants accreditation would do that.

Rob Briner:

I think, in terms of academics, again, there's more interest, but still not a huge interest amongst academics. Why not? Because most academics in business schools are there because they have PhDs in a particular discipline, a subject that pertains to business and management. They have their own particular interests and specialism, and evidence-based management is almost - its not about an academic discipline. It's about a process to enable and help organizations to make better informed decisions. So most people, academics want to get on with their own research.

Rob Briner:

In terms of business schools selling it, I think there is an issue around what are business schools for? What's the purpose? This debate's gone on for decades and decades and decades. But in general, with some exceptions like finance and accounting and maybe operations management, business schools now are not there to give people specific skills they will need to work in organizations. They generally are there to give people a broad background in lots of academic subjects that are relevant in some ways to business and management, which I guess the hope is students learn about these and then take some of that knowledge in a sort of general sense into the workplace and it might then help them with their jobs. So they're not teaching particular kinds of skills. So they might be, there are some exceptions project management, again, might be one. S o finance and accounting might be others. Operations management might be another, but in terms of general management programmes they're not doing that so much.

Rob Briner:

So from that point of view as well, I guess business schools might and they might be wrong about this but they might feel that if we're teaching people these skills around, using data and evidence to make better informed decisions, is this something students will want or not? Whether they want to dip into different sorts of things, and also, particularly with MBAs, I suppose they might want to feel they're getting the latest thinking, the buzzwords, the fads, the fashions, the kind of stuff that sounds very appealing, possibly now something that mentions AI or something. So I think evidence-based sounds like what is that? That's a bit kind of boring. Why would I want to do that? So I think there's a real challenge with those three sources of why would a business school, given those things, want to do it? And there are some academics, of course, who are interested in it, but it's still a pretty small minority of academics who really see the value in this.

Karen Plum:

And here's Stanford University's Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Jeffrey Pfeffer:

They're in the business of, first of all, making money for the universities that they are part of - to support things that are not as commercially viable as business education. And business schools are in the business of certification, which is, of course, part of what all education is. So education is both the transmission of knowledge but also the certification of people that they've gone through a program and presumably learned something. And I think the third thing that business schools are in the business of is they're in the business of networking. So if you ask me, why do people come to Stanford Business School and why does everybody want to get in? Because we are the most selected business school in the world and they know if they get there they're going to be surrounded by talent. So why do people go to the World Economic Forum? Because you'll fly to Davos, go to Davos and you're surrounded by the world's business elite.

Karen Plum:

Essentially, this is an important way to build our networks and we can reach out to those people once we've connected. The final thought on business schools comes from Denise Rousseau.

Denise Rousseau:

My observation would be that at this point in time since we've been at evidence-based management since about 2005, that there's about 80 different schools around the world that include evidence-based management as a course, and they may also contain it as a thread through the curriculum, but the latter is few and far between. It's more likely to be a course taught by a passionate person who really wants to develop the skills of their students and to give them an opportunity to keep upskilling when they graduate, which is one of the really, I think, critical aspects of learning how to ask questions and gather evidence.

Karen Plum:

It's those passionate people who are contributing to our podcast. You'll hear why they're passionate and how their students react and use the evidence-based approach that they advocate. Before we move on, here's what Rob Briner said about the role of passionate advocates.

Rob Briner:

It's individual evidence-based management enthusiasts like me who think this is really important stuff. I want to make sure we are running some courses in this. Maybe there's a couple of exceptions, where maybe there's a Dean of the business school who sees this as valuable, but in general it's individuals who think, no, this is really important. I want to make sure we actually use this as part of our teaching.

Karen Plum:

Clearly, those that advocate evidence-based management have a number of challenges in bringing the approach to students and including it in university or business school curricula. So let's explore the key question - why teach it at all? Here's Eric.

Eric Barends:

There are two perspectives here. One is the more vocational, professional perspective and the other one is a very broad perspective that's more like daily life as a human being - t here are things that evidence-based practice can help you with. So if you start with the first one, vocational, professional, why should we educate doctors or managers from an evidence-based perspective? Then the question is well, yeah, what do you want those students to bring to the table when they leave college, when they leave business school or a master's program? I mean, do you want them to bring to the table of an organization their assumptions or their biased opinions, or do you want them to bring in evidence-based insights and an inquisitive mindset? It's about things like, questions like, what is the problem we're trying to solve? How serious and how urgent this is problem? What is its root cause? What is the evidence? How do professionals feel about this problem? Is there any organizational evidence, organizational data? Maybe there's scientific research? That's all the skills that you teach them and that's what they bring to the table. That is important because it helps you to critically evaluate the practices in the organization. What are we doing? Does it work, is it effective? And that brings a lot of benefits to the organization if you have people who can evaluate practices, but also to challenge myths in our profession.

Eric Barends:

The other thing and I think for all the pioneers and the founding fathers in evidence-based practice the medical people Gordon Guyatt, David Sackett, but also, in our field, Rob Briner and Denise Rousseau and me, if I may say so, the most important reason to teach this is that we see, if you look around, if you open newspapers, watch the news, we can see there's a sort of global insurgence of misinformation. And in our daily life nowadays we are bombarded with personal opinions and ideological beliefs that are disguised as facts or evidence-so you like. So what we need to teach people, the new generation, is how can you distinguish trustworthy evidence from less trustworthy evidence? And I think that is the ultimate reason why we teach this and I think it's pretty much aligned with what, for instance, Yuval Noah Harari writes in the 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is that our mission in higher education should be to teach students skills that help them to challenge the information that is presented to them.

Eric Barends:

It is about making the right decision, but more important its about how do you validate your knowledge. How do you know whether this information is trustworthy, based on evidence? How do you know whether this is a myth or a fact? It's teach them to get a more accurate understanding of the world. I think those are very nice, interesting words. But the interesting thing is that these are the words of Harari responding in a reaction to what we see all around us. But when you go 20, 30 years back, Gordon Guyatt made the same point. I think what we all have in common and what we should teach, is what Carl Sagan said about science - it's not a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of skeptically interrogating the world and have a good understanding of human fallibility, irrationality.

Karen Plum:

This is such an important point that the overarching desire to teach an evidence-based approach isn't just to guide the future decision-making of managers and leaders, but it's about their perspective on the world, how they interact with and use information and expertise, and how they think.

Karen Plum:

That said, for students studying different subjects, taking the evidence-based approach to other teachers who are simply trying to teach a subject and not debate it, this can be challenging and alienating. And for the students, clearly some take the evidence-based approach and ways of critical thinking and evaluation really enthusiastically, but others simply want to know what they need to learn and remember to get them through their exams and complete their courses. It's complex and our experts have different opinions and experiences in terms of the value of taking an evidence-based approach and what types of students really benefit from it. Opinions vary as to whether the undergraduate level is the best place to start so that students take their ways of thinking into their future organizations, whereas in the experience of others, those students struggle to effect change because they're entering organizations and systems that don't incentivize or recognise those skills and abilities. Here's Rob.

Rob Briner:

There's obviously a view that says we need to get people at the start their careers and get them in and get them into organizations who want to do this, want to challenge, use evidence, use data, make better quality decisions and let's get them into organizations and it will change things.

Rob Briner:

I think my view is - it doesn't. It's just not enough. B ecause if you go into systems and organizations where the incentives are not about that, then you can go with all these great intentions and skills and abilities and even argue the benefits of doing it to the organization. But if the incentives of the organization are about other things, then it's going to be very, very difficult and fairly quickly my guess is you'll find out that being too evidence-based or even at all evidence-based is quite career limiting. A s in you are rewarded for getting things done, for doing stuff, how quickly you can do it, your political nous, your ability to spot gaps and see opportunities for you to shine career-wise, all the rest of it. Because fundamentally - you may have a different experience - when I look around organizations and I ask people why they're doing stuff, it is unusual that they are able to link it - the thing they're doing - to a specific and well-identified business problem or opportunity, and that they can link the particular thing they're doing, I suppose, to other things as something that's likely to have an outcome.

Karen Plum:

In terms of whether organizations are truly interested in making better decisions, Rob remains to be convinced, with the exception of specific industries where there's a safety focus, where they're already driven by data and evidence and where the consequences of making mistakes or poor decisions are very serious. In terms of decision-making in most organizations, it's a sobering thought to consider how many managers have received any training about decision-making. I'll leave you to ponder on that one. The conclusion that an evidence-based approach can be career limiting is also one to think about. There's a degree to which the way the questioning or critical thinking is conducted, can be a make or break moment for a graduate to adopt with senior, experienced colleagues. Denise and I discussed the need for teachers to prepare their students to adopt a respectful, gentle approach to questioning so as not to paint a target on their own backs. None of this is easy, but here's what she said.

Denise Rousseau:

Humility and a learning orientation are I think two critical requirements of being an evidence-based practitioner. It's not stats knowledge, it's not a deep background in science, but t o be able to question, to be curious about the answer, but also to have the technical skills to evaluate - does that make sense? Is that really representative? Is that good? Is the evidence-base good? Its to have a technical base you can rely on, but an attitude of learning and respect to others, because people aren't trying to - they're not trying to make bad decisions. I do think most of us run around this world doing our best. The issue you learn in evidence-based practice is we don't have a very good idea of what our best could be and we're trying to enlarge that space to help people aspire to both better quality information but more learning to be effective at what they do for their organization and the people who they have an influence on.

Karen Plum:

I can see that, to Rob's point, it might not be easy for a fresh graduate, or even someone with much more organizational experience, to adopt an approach which won't put other people's backs up. We can gain a lot if we contribute to the decision-making process by introducing some critical thinking, but without being labelled as an arrogant troublemaker. The final part of this introduction focuses on how those with a genuine desire to teach evidence-based management, either because they don't currently but want to, or because they're teaching it and finding it tough, how they can tackle some of the barriers and challenges. So what would our experts advise? Let's start with Eric, who explained that often the passionate evidence-based advocate has to fight a lonely battle to get the subject accepted. So offering them the use of CEBMa's online course can help them gather some experience and results.

Eric Barends:

So what we often do is, in the past, we set up a trial for the lecturer and say, okay, this is a free trial and see whether it resonates with your students, collect the responses and discuss this in a broader thing. Now we urge them to set up a wider trial. To go to the Dean or your faculty members say hey, I have this unique opportunity here that we can do a trial with this online course called evidence-based practice or whatsoever. And, for instance, the business school in Cologne in Germany, in Cologne, they opened it up for all students and they send an email or newsletter to all their students. Hey, we have this opportunity. We want to try things out. You have now the opportunity to do this. Sign up if you're interested.

Eric Barends:

And about 80 or more than 100 students signed up for that and then, part of the trial is asking so do you think this is important? Should we teach this? Should we put this in the curriculum? And almost you know, a lot of students say hell, yes, this is wow, this is something I can use. This is - why it's not in our curriculum? A lot of stuff you taught now finally makes sense. You have taught us research methodology and this and this and data analytics and it was all kind of abstract, and now it comes together. This makes sense. This is really helpful for me. Thank you very much. And then it turns around and say, okay, well, maybe we should integrate this somehow in our curriculum.

Karen Plum:

Incidentally, in talking with other teachers of evidence-based management, it becomes clear that they learned a lot themselves from just taking the online course and, alongside what they teach, it's helped them with their own research and their ways of teaching and thinking, so that could be another starting point. Denise also agrees that starting small is a good strategy.

Denise Rousseau:

I believe in starting small. It's proof of concept. Is teach it as an elective. Evaluate what are students learning? What do they find useful and gather that information. I feel that from the work that I've done, what I have observed, that as an elective it starts to become more integral and if then perhaps it becomes a core course, that's great. If it stays an elective, the issue is going to be when you leave that institution or you retire, will somebody else take it up? And what's been helpful to me to see is that as our universities develop many different kinds of programs in order to survive in a competitive market, that evidence-based management becomes core in the more professionally oriented programs and as something that people are there to acquire those skills. So I think in those environments it's much easier to institutionalize it. I don't worry that we're going to be shut down in the medical management program or in the management of public policy and NGO space, because they need it and they know it.

Karen Plum:

And the final thoughts come from Rob Briner, who suggests asking yourself some fundamental questions about your role as an educator.

Rob Briner:

I think the first question any academic faculty member in the business management school needs to think about is do they believe that the whole academic study of business and management in terms of scientific evidence, do they think it is of any value to organizations? And many might say maybe, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But if you think yes, then the next question is what, if anything, can you or do you want to do, to help make sure that value is realized? And at that point people might say well, I'd like to, but you know, it's my career, I need to publish papers and need to get on. So maybe a little interest, but not so much.

Rob Briner:

Others might say you know, I think this is important enough. I'm prepared to devote some time and energy to helping organizations and students realize the value, practical value, in what we all do in business schools. A nd going along with that -scientific evidence, Is it of value to the world - and then going along with that is, do you think, in terms of your own teaching and students who come in, how would you like to them to do things differently at the end?

Rob Briner:

Now some people might say I don't want them do anything differently. I want them to understand the world differently or to have some insight or to understand these theories, and I want them to get some perspective. That's fine, and that means probably for them, teaching evidence-based management is irrelevant. If, however, they say I'd like people to come out of this and be different in terms of their ability to think critically, their ability to apply evidence, their ability to think about the quality and relevance of data and evidence, to think around practical problems, great. So people have those two things. I think the research done and produced by business schools is potentially of value and they personally, as an educator, want to give people skills and knowledge which will be valuable and useful and actually change the way they do things, then I think those two things together - individuals who feel that - probably evidence-based management as something to teach will make a lot of sense, because it achieves both those things.

Karen Plum:

So if you're looking for ideas on how to promote evidence-based management in your university or business school, I hope we've started to inspire you. My thanks to our guests Denise Rousseau, Rob Briner, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Eric Barends for their contributions and thoughts. This episode is just the beginning and the series will provide more ideas, experiences and learnings from those that are already teaching the approach to students of different levels, from undergraduates to experienced managers. The Center for Evidence-Based Management website has more resources and a network of teachers which is available to share knowledge and experience. Head to the website cebma. org and look at the resources page or check out the links in our show notes. And that's it for now. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. Goodbye.

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Karen Plum

Host