On March 22nd 2019, Rob Briner, Professor of Organizational Psychology in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London, joined the Humanistic Professionals for a lunch and learn on evidence based management.

Key take-aways were:

1. It is important to cross validate your sources of information
2. Question why you want to do the things you do. What are you really trying to accomplish. Define your project and ideal outcome before you look for a solution
3. You don’t always have to make a business case for humanistic management. Sometimes it’s enough to do something because it is the morally right thing to do. Just use evidence to make sure what you are doing works.

Here is the video of the discussion below:

Other topics discussed included how to improve management education to include critical thinking and evidence based decision making as well as why metric based decision making is rarely evidence based and how it is important to use values and ethics first to ensure that evidence is not used to oppress people.

During the conversation Prof. Briner mentioned three resources.

1. The Center for Evidence Based Management website: https://www.cebma.org/
2. The Science for Work website: https://scienceforwork.com/
3. Free booklet (in pdf) on Evidence Based Management: https://www.cebma.org/wp-content/uploads/Evidence-Based-Practice-The-Basic-Principles-vs-Dec-2015.pdf