Teaching Evidence-Based Management

Learning evidence-based management - what students say

• Season 1 • Episode 5

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Why do students choose to study evidence-based management, and what do they value about the way it's taught and the skills and experience they acquire? Here we spotlight the stories of five students who have transformed their approach to learning and working through evidence-based management. 

We explore the tangible benefits of evidence-based management for students of different life stages - discovering how critical thinking becomes a valued approach, leading to better outcomes in teamwork, recruitment, data analysis and how evidence is defined and sourced. 

The guests share the creative teaching strategies that helped them connect with the topic - making this essential skill engaging and relevant, bridging the gap between theory and real-world application. Through personal anecdotes and expert insights, they illustrate how evidence-based management not only equips students and professionals with vital life skills but also enhances communication and trust in diverse environments. 

And in a world increasingly full of misinformation and disinformation, discover how challenging what you know becomes the first step in a journey of better informed decision-making.

Host:

Karen Plum

Guests:

 
  Mentions:

Contact:

 Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management 

Karen Plum:

Hello and welcome to the Teaching Evidence-Based Management podcast. I'm Karen Plum, a student of Evidence-Based Management, and through this podcast I've been exploring the approach to teaching students with different levels of organizational experience. In all the episodes so far we've heard from the teachers, but this time we're going to hear from the students. I want to know why they chose to study evidence-based management and what benefits and skills they've gained along the way. I'm also keen to know how those skills are making a difference in their lives. Let's hear what they had to say.

Karen Plum:

We're going to hear from five students in this episode and I'll introduce you to each one as we go along. Two studied as undergraduates, two as executive students and one as a doctoral student, so we've covered quite a wide range. So why did the students study evidence-based management? Our two undergraduates, business management majors, Sharon Sanchez and Aaron Whear, studied at James Madison University with Dr David Peterson, who you heard from in our undergraduate episode. The topic is a required element of the course, which Sharon was glad she chose to complete in her junior year, as it was really valuable during her internship that summer.

Sharon Sanchez:

I'm really glad I took it as soon as I could, because I ended up having an internship that summer as a business analyst for an IT consulting company and a lot of what we do in there is doing research to gather requirements and research to see how to fulfill like a client's needs and things like that, and we ended up using a lot of databases which looked really similar to the databases we used in class, and so I couldn't help but think and I was like Dr Peterson was so right, like he knew that we were definitely going to use this eventually. A nd so I still have my notes from all that classes on my computer, and so sometimes I would work remote and I would have both computers up and have like the tips and tricks on how to search properly and find the concise data that's accurate to what we're doing.

Sharon Sanchez:

And it genuinely helped me a lot when it came to using those databases either searching for a proposal, searching for past performances to use in my consulting projects and it also I feel like it also helped me think a lot more critically, and so I'm also in a lot of leadership positions here at JMU. I'm very involved and very busy as well, but I feel like I'm able to navigate my decisions and those leaders' positions a lot more critically, because I kind of stopped to think about it.

Karen Plum:

Aaron took the class in his final year really because in the earlier years the class clashed with football practice.

Aaron Whear:

Looking back on it, I do wish I had been able to take it sooner, because of just the skills I got from searching and this, the confidence I had around gathering evidence from scientific journals as opposed to, you know, a simple Google search, and that's definitely applied more in my graduate studies of you know, especially grad. you know graduate school is much more stringent on 10 sources, all have to be academic, all that fun stuff and it certainly has helped give me some confidence approaching the graduate level or just finding scientific evidence in general in my life. It's definitely helped me gain some confidence in that department.

Karen Plum:

So what about the executive students? Well, Justin McCarthy is a VP at a small manufacturing company. With 20 years experience under his belt, he decided to pursue an executive MBA to further his education and find ways to make himself a more effective leader. He studied with Preston Davis, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management at Coles College at Kennesaw University, who appeared in our executive students episode. In his course, the topic helped inform the planning and delivery of the students' capstone projects.

Justin McCarthy:

I would say it really came more towards the middle and the back half, the back end of the courses. We were really thinking about our capstone projects and the research required to really support the capstone projects and the delivery that we were going to have for our final clients at the end of our program. A lot of the folks in the program it's been a long time since they were asked to really go research, you know, get really crystal clear on the problem that you're trying to solve and then go research and provide evidence to the conclusion that you're coming to for your client.

Karen Plum:

Our second executive student is Luga Bugelli, who spent some time working in organizations where he was exposed to ways of working that didn't sit well with his personal values. So he decided on a change of direction and embarked on a master's in evidence-based management and effective decision-making with the University of Malta and the Center for Evidence-Based Management. He studied with Denise Rousseau, Eric Barends and Rob Briner, all of whom you've heard regularly on the podcast. For Luca, evidence-based management was the perfect antidote to the 'garbage information' he'd seen used in organizations. It left him with the conclusion that whatever we think, we're probably wrong.

Luca Bugelli:

You get this hunch that whatever you think is most probably wrong and you will have, most probably it is more wrong than right. So, whatever you think, whatever crosses your mind the thousands of thoughts every day whatever decision you take, it's probably based on wrong assumptions. And this is the first main skill that I've taken away from all this. And why am I sharing this? Because, as a human being or as a professional, whenever you're up to decide on something, it's always better to start off from the point that, hey, listen, I'm wrong and let me go out there and discover what might be correct or right or evidence-based, rather than "I'm right!

Karen Plum:

We all know that there's so much disinformation and misinformation wherever we look - it's almost like an epidemic. Luca believes we should check stuff before acting and it's something he's passionate about and driven by. More from him and the others later.

Karen Plum:

Our final guest completed a doctorate in business administration (or a DBA) and studied with Professor Denise Rousseau. Joumana Haidar is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina and Deputy Director of its World Health Organization Collaboration Center for Research Evidence. She specializes in implementation research and practice, with a focus on evidence-based implementation in global health. Keen to continue her formal education, she embarked on the DBA during COVID - quite an interesting time for the spreading of misinformation and disinformation. As a researcher in the medical profession, Joumana was already used to taking an evidence-based approach, but she was also working on an evidence-based implementation appro ach which would resonate with and benefit from the evidence-based management approach.

Joumana Haidar:

It was serendipitous that I started my DBA at the time of the pandemic and I started learning more and more about evidence. At the same time, a big project we were planning for, for almost like ten years before the pandemic, came to fruition during the pandemic. It's a Lancet Commission that we were preparing on evidence-based implementation. Again, you can think of implementation as change management, as management, as operation, so all in like implementation folded into that umbrella

Joumana Haidar:

And as we learned more and more about implementation and how important the experience o f the implementers or the practitioners is important to us - because in public health they use community-based evidence. They use the stakeholders' evidence as well as research evidence. But when you do the guidelines, medical guidelines we're focused only on research evidence. Take it out to the public health, you include other sources of evidence.

Joumana Haidar:

Now, if the focus on implementation introduce a new source of evidence, that's the practitioner or the implementer's experience. The thing is, in public health it's not like there is a function called implementation that is the job of somebody, like ma nagement, it's throughout the system so makes it really difficult.

Karen Plum:

Cl early a whole range of things drew our guests into the study and use of evidence-based management. So, next up, what did they feel they gained through their study and what is it that they value about what they learned? Let's start with the executive students. Here's Justin.

Justin McCarthy:

It worked well for me because I was already looking for tools. I was already looking to hone my craft, I was already looking for more organizational skills so that my organization could be better, right. And I would say that evidence-based management has. It's not as though I follow this checklist of these six or seven things that I go through when I do it, but I do feel as though it has afforded me the opportunity to slow down, it has afforded me the opportunity to ask better questions and create more clarity, and I think it has given me that confidence related to saying we don't have to rush through this, let's do ourselves the best, let's look at the evidence, and I do think that it's driven, what is evidence for me a little bit, in terms of having a little bit more discipline and rigor about getting our own evidence in-house in order number one.

Justin McCarthy:

And not to mention, how might we go out into the marketplace to look for more evidence that might be available out there as well? And so I don't, in full disclosure, I don't have a checklist methodology that I use today, but I do believe that it's organically informed the way in which I view the world and the way in which I coach and manage my people now in a way in which I didn't necessarily have the answers to or I didn't have the tool for, prior to experiencing it in my executive MBA.

Justin McCarthy:

It is something that has permeated both my individual self, my teaming environments, the organization, and then I'm even using it in interviews now. So when we're interviewing candidates to come into the organization, I'm asking them very pointed questions related to the way in which they do critical thinking, or how they collect evidence, or what are the things that they're using to inform what is the best available evidence that they have, that's informing the way in which they're going to come work for us, right?

Justin McCarthy:

So I like to make sure that people aren't just acting off of intuition all the time, that they're not just, you know, going off the old playbooks that they ran at some other organization that's not likely to work here. So I've tried to incorporate it and the principles of it into a lot of different areas of my life, certainly at work.

Karen Plum:

I love that the approach has permeated so many aspects of the way Justin thinks, works and operates with his colleagues and even potential colleagues. Following his studies, Luca has been involved in teaching evidence-based management and here he explains what he feels are the best aspects of the approach that can really make a difference for everyone.

Luca Bugelli:

I really believe in kind of after action reviews and postmortems, right. So postmortem, my whole evidence based experience will be to eventually teach it in kind of a formal environment. Why? Because I know that the learning kind of hierarchy or pyramid, the bottom part is to teach or attempt to teach. And this was a personal goal and I made it a point to kind of share all these skills and elements with students who are willing to, with MSc students, so management graduates and future professionals coming from various fields.

Luca Bugelli:

But the main message I wanted to kind of share and have them apply in their daily lives and jobs etc. Is again something which stuck with me, which is this idea of solutioneering, right? So whenever someone claims, claims our colleagues or whoever, that there's a problem or that immediately someone else or that same person says or claims that's the solution for it, rather than delving deeper into what really the problem entails, is its impact, etc.

Luca Bugelli:

Now, if you look at the greats, Einstein, Albert Einstein, okay, typically says like I would spend more time on the problem - if I had an hour, I would spend 59 minutes thinking about the problem and then one minute on the solution.

Karen Plum:

And yet that isn't what most of us do most of the time, is it? How rewarding and how valuable to spend your time encouraging people to find better solutions to the problem they are actually needing to solve, as opposed to the imagined problem, or the problem that has an easy fix.

Karen Plum:

For Joumana, the real transition happens when you're able to be more authoritative in what you're putting forward, because you have a blend of research knowledge and practical application, so you can provide practical examples and illustrate the research findings.

Joumana Haidar:

Something that I learned during my DBA is about bridging the gap between research and practice and I felt like, well, one thing we have to understand better what this gap looks like. Here's where the research kind of like kicking in at the same time, like why do we have it and what could bridge it, and I felt like I have a responsibility to do that as an individual. Did not think about as an individual with the DBA, but the DBA helped me to see and be part of this bridge between the two. I think it has a great value still, along with the PhDs and, other executive or traditional PhD, as we get them closer to the practice, I believe that they will be more valued.

Joumana Haidar:

We all work on problems all day long, solving problems, we don't have time, maybe, to research it themselves. There should be more research that's more practice-oriented, more like a real-life kind of problems-oriented, and DBA is becoming a part of the translation of the findings to help start with thinking, the approach to solutions, and being also part of the practice, helping to feed into the research itself. So this loop between research and practice becomes a responsibility of folks who, like the DBAers I mean other people without the DBA they do it, it's just intuitively or because of appreciation to the science they try to do things this way. The DBA helps you to more like, streamline it and to understand different aspects of it and contribute to these aspects.

Karen Plum:

And what about our undergrads? How has the topic affected them? Here's Sharon, followed by Aaron.

Sharon Sanchez:

I find that a lot of things cross over each other in our management classes especially. I can use like my HR class as an example.

Sharon Sanchez:

Something that we've had to learn a lot about is how to make like really smart decisions when it comes to hiring or firing or changing like an HR policy or something like that, and so I could see how the critical thinking that we learned in evidence-based management would be really important there, and also when it comes to teamwork, entrepreneurship class and something that we have to do is come up with an idea and then present it to class and kind of create like a mini business plan.

Sharon Sanchez:

And I've noticed that recently, after that class on a team, like I always want someone to disagree with me, because when I'm in a group and everyone's like yeah, yeah, like good idea, like that's awesome, I'm like OK, where's like the but, it's like there needs to be like a counter because we're definitely missing something - it can't just be perfect off the bat. A nd so once we have that mentality, we always go back a step and then we try to figure out where we can do better, where we can do a little bit more, or for really addressing it properly, and then keep moving forward from there.

Sharon Sanchez:

And so, I haven't worked with my team too much since we just started the semester, but so far we have like pretty good synergy because half of us took the class already, half of us haven't. So it's cool to like see each other's perspective, like before and after the class, and like how like that devil's advocate and having different perspectives on something when creating something on a team, like that.

Aaron Whear:

I think being critical of the evidence is a great way to put one specific example, I imagine the news feed is, the way cable news is presented is pretty similar, like the BBC. I've seen BBC before and when they'll come out with some story just to grab a headline and they say, oh, studies say that drinking six glasses of water a day is actually bad for you, or something to that effect.

Aaron Whear:

They cite some off the wall random study and and to me before this class, like it was always kind of oh, a study said it, it's gotta be at least somewhat true, right? And then we got into um, the all the different kinds of studies, the how you, you know how you got just a regular cross-sectional study. You've got your surveys that may or may not be reliable, going all the way to double randomized, controlled trials, and that specifically always got me thinking more critically. Consuming it made me a more critical consumer of news media is probably the most widely applied aspect of the study I got from my life was not just taking something that says "study says as absolute fact. Rather, I should probably gather a little bit more data, see if there's some more meta-analyses on it, and not just take this one study as absolute scientific fact.

Karen Plum:

Several of the students commented that the topic of evidence-based management can appear heavy and even some teachers describe it as boring at worst and not sexy at best. It's not a learn it by heart and then you're done type of thing. There's no right or wrong answer. Sharon was honest when she said it can be a bit boring sometimes, but there are ways to make it more interactive, engaging and relevant for students.

Sharon Sanchez:

Yeah, I think the best part about it was that I feel like teaching, evidence-based management can get a little bit, I want to say, like boring sometimes. But I feel, like my professor, cause it's like I feel like a lot of people have like the notion beforehand that it's like very intensive, very boring.

Sharon Sanchez:

Like you're just sitting on your computer reading texts all day, which there are some parts that are like that but there's ways to make it more interactive and more engaging, especially the learning process, and I find that using a lot of real world examples where you can see the application of it in your day-to-day lives, not just in projects, not just at work, but just like going out in public and seeing something outside and questioning it, rather than just being like, oh yeah, like that's, that's it. It's like really important, especially with students. You have to be creative in ways that you find for it to be like applicable in their daily lives, in a way that's not so formal or boring. I think it's fun to add some innovation, fun to add some like creativeness in it. So it's a little different. I'll stick with you in that way too.

Karen Plum:

And Aaron gave an example from his class.

Aaron Whear:

So the very first day of class, Dr Peterson had this example for us where the idea was to search for something that we weren't necessarily sure exactly what we were searching for, and his example was you are a construction worker, you're installing a vertical pipe that went into a wall or something to that effect and we had to find a tool that would make sure the pipe was perfectly vertical up in the air and you couldn't use a level, you couldn't use these other tools.

Aaron Whear:

And what he was trying to steer us towards and we're all you know, we're all business undergraduate students, we haven't necessarily had a whole lot of construction experience and the tool he was steering us towards was called the plumb bob, which is essentially a very simple tool that I'm sure they've used for millennia, which is just a string with a weight at the bottom and because of the forces of gravity it hangs perfectly straight down.

Aaron Whear:

But it was a very good intro to search terms and how to get evidence or how to get data on something that you're really not sure what you're looking for. And that was my first impression of the class. And then I think that after that first class I knew I really liked Dr Peterson and I knew I really was going to enjoy what he had for the rest of the semester with us.

Karen Plum:

It's clear that, for the students, the use of evidence-based management has been transformational, albeit in different ways depending on their time of life. For Justin, his approach at work has changed, and he now adopts a decision-making process that he calls 'building out loud'.

Justin McCarthy:

These new ways of thinking have been really positive, where a good example that we use is we call it building out loud. You know, if we are going to go make a decision, let's build it out loud. Let's talk about the journey, let's talk about where we're going and the decisions that we're trying to make, and why and how. And the building out loud part is that you know getting it out in the air everybody lowering their ego, asking everybody the right questions and then supporting it with well, what's the information we have that says that this is the best way for us to go forward.

Justin McCarthy:

So, as an organization, they've been wonderful to work with and really have allowed me to show up as my best version of myself, which includes learning evidence-based management and really everything that I brought with me from my executive MBA.

Karen Plum:

Joumana talked about the importance of understanding how to communicate with different stakeholder groups, which in healthcare, of course, is vital. We all learned through the pandemic that communicating with all sorts of communities about the virus and the vaccination program was complicated and required different approaches.

Joumana Haidar:

Yeah, so this relationship between practitioners and researchers become even more important in building that trust. And building that maybe for communication reasons, not only the trust, but this like a closeness to help support the findings, the communication of the findings. And how do we make sure that we educate the communities because they'll listen to their practitioners more than they listen to a researcher. They're not going to read research articles to know whether the vaccine was effective or not, but they're going to listen to their doctors, they're going to listen to their communities. How do we make this relationship even better to help to build this trust, not only between the researcher and practitioner, but the practitioner and patients or their beneficiaries in this case.

Karen Plum:

And Luca is very attuned to misinformation in our increasingly noisy world.

Luca Bugelli:

We are very prone to share nowadays, right, we can post on social media, we can organize protests or listen this drive that, hey, I'm right, something happened to me. You know, we're kind of becoming vocal for the little things and it's creating a lot of noise in this already kind of noisy world. If you're reading the news, try to read between the lines. People might think that evidence-based management is impractical or very tedious, etc. But it's more relevant nowadays in the context of all this noise. So we've got misinformation coming from the year which has had record elections right in the world. Misinformation coming from the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine and what's going on with the US presidential election, misinformation in the markets and all that.

Karen Plum:

Having spent time talking with the students, it became clear that, for those at the undergraduate level, learning some key skills on demystifying research and academia and almost giving them permission to question everything, are key aspects of what an evidence-based management approach starts to instil.

Karen Plum:

For those already working in organizations, it provides a way to differentiate their thinking and approach, encouraging them to be more bold and challenging of the simple identification of problems and solutions. I was encouraged that the experience added value not just for the students studying the practice, but that they were able to share their newfound approach with others, either through an internship or capstone project; when working alongside other students who hadn't yet taken this part of their course; with colleagues at their organization; and with collaborating partners outside their organization. Already, they are encouraging more critical thinking, making others question, work harder to reach conclusions and not accept things as gospel, despite the origins of the evidence.

Karen Plum:

If you talk to people about whether teaching undergrads about evidence-based management is worthwhile, when they haven't even entered the world of management yet, you'll find differing opinions. Having talked to teachers and now students, I can see that, although it's not for every student, where it does capture their imagination through practical, everyday examples, it can be really powerful and what they learn becomes a life skill. Perhaps it's the bridging of the knowledge practice gap that makes the real difference and is where the standout teachers are able to reach the students and help them see how the approach can be beneficial in everyday life, as well as improving the quality of organizational decision making.

Karen Plum:

That's it for this episode. I'd like to thank all of the guests, Sharon, Aaron, Justin, Luca and Joumana, as well as the teachers who put us in touch - David Peterson, Preston Davis, Eric Barends and Denise Rousseau.

Karen Plum:

If you'd like more information about teaching or studying evidence-based management, there are links and contact details in our show notes or you can look at the Resources page of the CEBMa website. Just go to cebma. org. If you'd like to get in touch, there is a Contact Us page on the website and Managing Director Eric Barends will be delighted to hear from you. Thanks for listening to this episode. See you next time. Goodbye.

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Karen Plum

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