Building an evidence-based culture
Leader: Max Blumberg
Monday June 7
8am PT / 11am ET / 3pm GMT

Since the rise of “business analytics” there has been a lot of talk about “data-based culture”. But because not everyone is data-oriented, this creates a schism between “data people” and “the rest” leading to unrealistic demands for data and expectations of what can be achieved with data analysis, ignoring well-established non-data-based decision-making techniques, and using data in contexts where it should not be used.

Instead of emphasising a data-based culture, perhaps the time has come to instead emphasise an evidence-based culture. By an evidence-based culture, we mean one where organizational decision-making is informed by insights from social science research combined with pragmatic management experience.

In contrast, non-evidence-based cultures rely solely on leaders’ experience and mental models, leading to bias and errors in judgement; poor decision-making; subpar shareholder returns and capital flight; and substandard workforce productivity and satisfaction.

This session will explore how to begin to build an evidence-based culture:

• How does an evidence-based culture differ from a data-based culture
• How can we measure the level of evidence used in decision-making?
• How can a non-evidence-based culture be transformed into one which is evidence-based?