What’s the deal with ‘evidence-based practice’? Aren’t we all evidence based?

Part of the challenge is that it can be hard to find practitioner-focused evidence. A lot of academic research is aimed at other academics (rather than people managers) and adopts a language that many HR professionals find hard to understand. Also, the research often follows fads and fashions, so we don't necessarily get the evidence base in the right areas of people management.

Yes I completely agree Charles. A lot of academic research is not practitioner-focused, and for good reasons. Similarly the language is not helpful - often not even to other academics! And fads and fashions are just as evident in academic research.

On the other hand, academic research is just one source of evidence and like any source of evidence it needs to be judged for it's relevance and trustworthiness. And it's also about using the best available evidence. So even if the evidence isn't great it's still worth checking out.

As you probably know, more and more academics are becoming concerned about scientific (mal)practices. There's a great summary here by John Antonakis where he discusses what he calls the five diseases of academic publishing:

retractionwatch.com/.../

Perhaps we should ask the HR community what 10 pieces of evidence would be most useful for them and then pass this on to the research community?

Now you've got me thinking...

There's a great quote from Daniel Kahneman that I think goes some way to answering that question. He suggests evidenced based solutions will always struggle to land within the complexity of big business:

"Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality--but it is not what people and organisations want."

There's a difficult reality that follows for me - how much compromise (if any) should there be between progress and rigour/credibility? We can say none: we stick to the gold standard of RCT's and communicate with plainly presented objectivity. But we should recognise that the competition from non-evidence-based solutions is highly sophisticated and evolved to be 'sellable':

Take the '10 questions' approach - the strength of non-EBHR is to answer them with everything we know people lean towards - certainty (this is the one answer that works), norms + loss aversion (everyone else is doing it, you're falling behind), messenger (this guru says it's right) etc etc. Understanding why it isn't easy to get traction with EBHR is partly about understanding why the alternative is so compelling...

The question then evolves to 'how should we compete'? How can we be heard?' I imagine the following debate to be similar to a respected academic writing a best-selling psychology book... where's the line?

Thanks James - insightful points and I agree, it's not enough to trash woolly thinking; we need to understand why people look to quick and overconfident solutions. This is a great Ted talk from Stuart Firestein on 'the pursuit of ignorance', which speaks to one way we might seek to change our mindsets: www.ted.com/.../stuart_firestein_the_pursuit_of_ignorance

At a more practical level, I think it will be important to understand how EBHR can be made appealing and do-able (e.g. what are the tools or resources needed?). This is something for which the views of practitioners will be invaluable.

Like you r point on popular science books. In my mind, it's pretty clear that, while there are defined methods one can follow in evidence-based practice, it's also a continuum. We can stretch ourselves to be MORE discerning of evidence, especially when it comes to major decisions or conclusions. Don't know if you saw it, but Kahneman himself gave a mea culpa on parts of his bestseller Thinking Fast & Slow, admitting “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”. Fantastic lesson in honesty & humility. retractionwatch.com/.../

Feels like this is on a trajectory already Rob.
I like the idea of seeking out the 10 most difficult problems or questions - maybe CIPD could survey members to determine.

Another idea for helping EBP support HR, would be for the world of academia to lend their support and services directly to HR practitioners 'in the field' through knowledge transfer partnerships.

Thanks Jonny, I haven't seen the Ted Talk - one for the commute home. I had seen Kahneman's mea culpa (#mancrush). What a guy ;)

I reckon you're spot on - appealing and do-able are great words (as are desirable and feasible from the Rubicon Model). I also reckon the tendency of evidence based peeps is to lean towards the latter (i.e tools and resources), and the tendency of less credible solutions is to lean towards the former (for obvious reasons).

So, 'appealing'... how far do you go? Likening 'test, learn and adapt' methodology to the agility of startup cultures that big corporates so admire? Tie up with publications like HBR? Go full on with branding academic research like this from Francesa Gino... hbr.org/.../let-your-workers-rebel.

I know this will make many academics squirm, but I also supsect that practioners subscribing to the continuum approach may sympathise. I saw a criticism of an IOPsych approach as 'old wine in new bottles' recently, and thought, 'if the old wine is good and the new bottles sell more of it, what's the problem?'

So maybe the 10 questions will work, but maybe that offers an alternative answer. What are the solutions that EBHR are most confident about? Which will be easiest to land in a big organisation? How can we repackage those in the sweet spot to be attractive to a practioner audience?

Another Kahneman fanboi, here. Great to see James raise (and Jonny acknowledge) his important contribution to this field, especially in commercial HR.

I recently sat down with Jacques Quinio of Manpower Group who's an evangelist for EBHR and has some great insights on how organizations can make practical use of big data, but I challenged him a bit on how much harder it is for SMEs to acquire people data on the scales necessary to make really evidence-based decisions. Both in terms of the quantity of data we have available and the time we have within which decisions have to be taken, we don't have that luxury. HR practitioners in SMEs, with small teams, most of whose time is occupied with transactional pratice, have to straddle the line between data-led and instinct-led decision-making and Kahneman is our guru for this.

Our instincts are fallible, but time spent considering the available evidence will inform and improve our instinctive decision-making.

I'd take issue with Jonny's assertion that "it gives little more than a 50% chance of success". Not on the 50% figure (I'll take that), but on the idea that HR decision are fail/success binary options. We aren't financial market traders for whom the buy/sell decision is a straightforward win/lose binary state. Our decisions are far more nuanced. Do we hire X or hire Y? If we make the "wrong" decision, we still end up with a qualified, capable employee (most of the time) but just one who might not have been as good as the alternative.

That's not to say that HR is incapable of making business-breaking decisions, but they are usually at the tail-end of a series of failures made at executive level (q.v. bhs).

As a parting thought, if we assume that EBHR is the pathway to the most effective decision making, to what extent will it therefore be possible for even the most nuanced and sophisticated HR decisions to be automated, given sufficient data of the appropriate quality?

Robey said:

"...if we assume that EBHR is the pathway to the most effective decision making, to what extent will it therefore be possible for even the most nuanced and sophisticated HR decisions to be automated, given sufficient data of the appropriate quality?"

That is a question, Robey.

I recall having this exchange about 'empathy' with Peter Cheese and (deleted blog).

So as we often argue when training and teaching is that EBP is definitely not about certainly but rather trying to reduce uncertainty. The more we find about something the more we realize (usually) that our we know less than we thought.

I don't think there's any need for a compromise between progress and rigor - EBP is about using the best available evidence and being clear about the quality of that evidence. So you can still do stuff without much if any good quality evidence - but the point is you know that's what you're doing.

And more generally, in relation to 'progress', clearly the more better quality evidence you have better-informed your analysis and action is likely to be and the more progress you'll make. What feels like progress may sometimes turn out to be going backwards.

I think academics should do more - the problem is we are completely disincentivized to do this. All that counts is publishing new papers and new research.

And as for knowledge transfer partnerships these are often about conducting new research and new data collection - which is not what EBP is about. Rather, in relation to the scientific evidence part of EBP, we always start with systematic reviews of the existing evidence-base not new research.

Thanks for clarifying that Rob, that's interesting.

Feels like a gap does exist there though, pre-EBP, to be the catalyst for establishing more and good quality evidence.

Thanks for clarifying that Rob, that's interesting.

Feels like a gap does exist there though, pre-EBP, to be the catalyst for establishing more and good quality evidence.