E116 – Evidence Based Management (w/ Rob Briner)

podcast with James and James. hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and

here we are again with another episode of The World of Work podcast. We've got a pretty fun one for you today. We've got a great guest and a great guest and a great topic, Jane, what are we bringing to the table this afternoon?

Well, today we are talking to someone that we've been keen to have on the show for a while, and that is Rob breena. And he is a professor of organizational psychology, but he is also a passionate advocate for evidence based management, brilliant. Let's get into the conversation.

Okay, so we are in the main body of today's podcast, and we're really excited about today's conversation. We're speaking to Rob Briner, and we're going to be speaking about evidence based management and evidence based HR, and the role that evidence plays in our in our working practice in these fields before we get into that though, Rob, would you be able to introduce yourself and explain a little bit about yourself and your background? Please?

Sure. Yes. So I'm a professor of Organizational Psychology at Queen Mary University of London, and before that, I worked at Bath and Birkbeck, and I've been an academic my whole career, and or perhaps, but 10 years ago, I also helped launch something called the Center for evidence based management, which kind of aims to do for management related professions, what other centers of evidence based practice, such as in medicine and policing, have done for those professions? So have this kind of dual thing, part of being an academic, but also very much of trying to train and teach and develop and promote the idea of evidence based practice. Okay, that's

interesting, and it's great to combine that sort of theory and academic background as well as the practical application of this topic. Um, before we get too deep into it, though, could we start at the beginning and just explore what evidence based practice or evidence based management is? So when we speak about it, what is it? What are the steps involved in it?

Yeah, sure. So I think, I think before just talking about the steps are, what the process is, I think it's important to sort of backtrack a little bit and think about what, what is the purpose of being evidence based? What are we to actually trying to do? And I think essentially, it's worth considering that it's simply, and it sounds simple, and it is simple in the sense it's about trying to make more informed decisions. So everybody uses data and information, kind of all the time when they make decisions, but often they don't do particularly well. There's all kinds Rob Briner and things and biases and stuff that gets in the way of doing that effectively. And evidence based practice is just one, I guess, of many techniques has evolved to try and help people do it a little bit more effectively, simply because there are these kinds Rob Briner. So it kind of started in medicine maybe 30 or so years ago. But as I say, the idea of using better quality information and data in decision making is not new at all.

Yeah, that's helpful and and I guess you alluded there to some of the reasons that maybe we don't do this in these fields of a sort of HR and management space. But for what you describe, you know, looking at evidence and taking a decision based on that to make better decisions, seems, intuitively the right thing to do. So what are some of the challenges that we have? Why do you think we're maybe not doing more of this at the moment in HR and management?

Yeah, well, maybe, if I just describe, I think some of the differences between what we normally do and evidence based practice. So I think there's three main differences. The first main difference is the approach to use of evidence, information, data. And so by that, I mean this is kind of from the definition the approach to evidence is conscientious, explicit, judicious. So conscientious means you really try, of course, explicit means you write it down or encode it in some way judicious. And this is really important. It's about making a judgment about the quality of the information you've got. So the idea in evidence based practice is you do not use all the information data available to you. You only use the best available on the basis that a lot of the information around us is actually quite poor quality and it's actually not particularly useful, or gets away with good decisions. So the first difference, then, is this conscientious, explicit, judicious. The second difference between evidence based practice and what we normally do, I think, is the idea of using multiple sources of evidence. So for us in HR and management and related fields, there kind of be four sources of evidence. The first is your own expertise as a practitioner, your professional expertise. The second is organizational data. So what's going on in the organization itself? The third is the scientific literature and evidence relevant to the decision you're looking at. And the fourth is stakeholder perceptions and concerns. So that might be obviously employees, maybe managers, maybe wider society. So it's multiple sources. The second main difference. So typically, everybody uses evidence, but they may, for example, just rely on one source like their own experience, or they might rely on a couple of sources like their own experience and maybe bit of organizational data. So crucial to this is looking across multiple sources. Why? Well, one reason is, is to kind of cross check, to triangulate. Am I getting the same picture? But more importantly, I think in a way, it's to contextualize. So even if we have some quite good information from one source, it doesn't mean it's going to apply in our situational context. So that's the second difference multiple sources. The third main difference between evidence based practice and what we normally do is taking a structured or stepped approach. And that means kind of two things. One it means always starting off saying, What is the problem or opportunity? And only when we fairly clear there is a well understood problem, opportunity do we think about a solution or intervention. So it's stepped in that sense, it's also stepped in terms of asking a question, acquiring evidence, critically praising its quality, and so forth. So there is a kind of technology, if you like sort of set of steps, guidelines for how, behind how to do it. But most importantly is these differences. Is how you approach using evidence. It's using multiple sources, and it's also taking a structural, stepped approach, and generally speaking, back to your question, now, why don't we do it? I think I mean, I'm generalizing. People don't like doing that. People like making more spontaneous kind of social decisions, impulsive. They like trust in their gut. And actually that's fine for most things, so for many things in our daily life, that kind of approach, that kind of automatic way of processing, heuristics, all that kind of thing. It's fantastic for most things, but it's actually terrible for making, if you like, important, complex decisions where taking into account information is important, because, for example, cognitive biases come into play confirmation. Confirmation bias. We seek information and evidence that supports what we want to do anyway, what we thought was first was the case. So that's one barrier, I think. And a Rob Briner for us in management and HR, of course, is management fans, the new shiny, attractive thing that everybody wants to do. And we tend to sort of, if you like, park our thinking and our critical analysis and just go with the fad instead. So there's all these kind Rob Briner. There's many others too, and something like evidence based practice is kind of trying to help us. You can never completely overcome these barriers, but you can kind of manage them a little bit better, get over some of them a little

bit. Yeah, that's really helpful. And it's, it's that was a broad, ranging answer, but covered a lot of a lot of questions in here with your more practical hat on when you're out working and looking to introduce changes and speaking to organizations, what sort of adoption. Do you think there is, at the minute of this more evidence based approach to HR?

This is a question I get asked a lot, and I have to say my the way I answer this is, I'm quite ambivalent. I'm embarrassed, skeptical, concerned, because, yes, okay, if I look at it, because I've been interested for 20 years, I can't look around me and go, Oh, yeah, like lots of people are doing this now. I don't see that. Yeah. I don't see I see more interest, for sure. I see people talking about it more, for sure. I think some people trying to do it a little bit more. But I don't see huge amounts of activity where there is clearly more activities actually in university settings. So there's more universities, more business schools offering these courses. In the UK, for example, CIPD, as you probably know, is explicitly adopted evidence based practice as one of its kind of part of its new professional standards. So the tangible changes like that. But your question, as many people often say, Well, can you show as an organization that's doing this? The answer is yes. I can probably think of someone doing a bit, but a lot of these kinds Rob Briner that we discussed already get in the way. And I think evidence based practice is hard, but it's not hard in the sense of it's kind of so intellectually demanding. It's hard for other kinds of reasons, such as cognitive bias, biases such as politics. And I think one of the main things is, I hear this again and again and again from people, and I'm generalizing, but often managers, practitioners, we, and including myself, in this, we are not incentivized to the evidence base. We're incentivized to do stuff.

Yeah, so when you were speaking there, a few things came into mind, you know, when you spoke about some of the other industries where evidence based has really taken off, you talked about medicine, and into my mind popped things like reforms to the aviation industry and a lot of the more scientific areas where there's a really clear, measurable outcome that will improve as a result of taking an evidence based approach. And you can do those boring things like, look at the cost of your intervention versus, you know, lives saved, or things like that. Do you see those abilities to measure the cost of what we're doing and see the benefits of it within an organizational setting? Is that something that,

yeah, it's partly about measurements, but also it is just. There's two examples you gave a medicine aviation. I mean, firstly, people are like in medicine, many, many, many medical practise would actually wonder how evidence based medicine really? Yes. I mean, as in, it's better, but there's still a long way to go in the recent COVID 19 pandemic, and issues around things like face masks and all that has actually exposed a lot of fault lines in evidence based practice, as it's typically, I guess, used in medicine. But I think the main difference between those two is not so much they have measurable outcomes. I think it's more because the cost of making a mistake is very high, and the benefits of making a good, well informed decision is also very strong. So the problem is, I think in other organizations, people don't see the consequences as being very important. So one thing we often say is, if you're going to try and adopt an evidence based approach, don't do it for every single decision. Think about those that you think are really important, where the stakes are high, and just just do it with those because I think there's something about an outcome being important that does motivate people towards taking more structured approach to decision making. So for example, if you think about people, the things that are very important to us as individuals, if we really want to make sure we make a well informed decision, people do spontaneously adopt something like evidence based practice. Now, if you don't mind, spit indulgent, I want to give you an example. Yeah, this is a free pre pandemic, pre lockdown, example. So for me, eating out and food, and this is example I'm currently giving at the moment, which makes no sense for most of the yes, yeah, it's a sort of dream, isn't it? I mean, or maybe a memory. But if you're really interested in eating out and having good food and that kind of stuff, and you know, you can afford it, etc, etc. Then, if I'm trying to choose, say, what restaurant to go to, or if anybody is and they're really, really interested in food, they'll start to adopt what is an effect, an evidence based practice approach. Say they go to a city, a city they've never been to before. They don't know very much. Now, you're both based in Edinburgh. I love Edinburgh. I happen to know the restaurants in Edinburgh, or some of them, but supposing I didn't, how would I find that? Well, I look at different kinds of sources of evidence. I might look at Google reviews, I might look at TripAdvisor. I might look across multiple sources of evidence, but they'll also be aware each source of evidence potentially had limitations and biases. I might also talk to friends. I might talk to colleagues. I try and go to a structured approach to choose a restaurant when I'm going to get a good dinner next week. I'd actually go through that process. So what it seems to, and that's just a personal example, but it seems to be going back to medicine aviation, where the stakes are high, whether it's personally or to do more collectively, to do with people's lives and people dying. And I think people will take this approach, and they will kind of adopt, I think, where the people can't see that the outcomes are important in some way, then they won't. And this is a real issue, I think, in HR and other fields. But one of the challenges is many of the things we do are not evaluated, or they're not evaluated properly, which means that it doesn't matter what we do. If you're a training manager and you've got a training budget, you know, most training is never evaluated. Does it matter what you put on? No, of course, it doesn't. Nobody cares as long as they like it, as long as they like it, as long as they enjoy it, as long as people say, yeah, they got something out of it, which, of course, is not much of a measure of trading effectiveness, as you know. But if they do that, they'll keep their job, they'll keep their budget, they'll be fine. So I think that's the key thing when it comes in all this. I always feel it's really important not to blame, in any sense, individuals for not doing it. Yeah? Because I don't think it's down to individuals. It's down to groups and teams and maybe leadership and other kinds of things. And say, we think it's important we we deal with things that are important to this organization, stuff that's more likely to work. Yeah? And again, it's a really interesting thing. Those incentives are about just doing stuff then, then it's really difficult. I mean, I'll give you, get a tiny, micro example from me. Yeah, please. One of my roles is as an educator, as a teacher. Now, you do not have to be a kind of world leading expert, and I'm certainly not on how people learn, but in general, standing up and lecturing, typically, it's not regarded as a very effective way for people to learn. Yeah, look across our education institutions around the world, not schools. Actually, schools are better. In this regard for universities, the lecture is still the standard way that we deliver education. I mean, it is nuts. It's bonkers. But if I try to change that as an individual, it's really difficult. And I have tried to look at this. If you say to students, let's not have lectures. Let's do something else. Most of them, in the end, they might try and do it, but then they'll say, Can you please just give us a lecture? How am I? How am I evaluated? In my lecture, I'm evaluated using student evaluations of teaching. Students evaluation teaching are biased. They're pretty clear evidence for that, and they typically measure how much people like the lecturer, yeah and yeah. And indeed, the link between student evaluations of teaching and student learning is at best zero, and it may even be negative, like with some training and learning, if people enjoy a course more, possibly they're the courses on which they've learned. Least. So that's just a tiny example from my own professional practice. If I wanted to be an evidence based educator, I think I would find it really tough. And it's not because I don't know how to do it or I think it's because of the system and structure homes. I think back to my point, you can't blame individuals. It's the it's the context, the situation and work thing people in, and again and again, when we train managers, hear managers say, I'm not paid to be evidence based. I'm paid to do stuff. That's what's going to get me promoted, that's what's going to get me rewarded. I will do the stuff I'm asked to do, and that's what's going to do it, asking questions, questioning things, not for everyone, but for many of us, it's not really something you're supposed to you suppose you get on with your stuff? Yeah,

well, rocking the boat is always a dangerous thing to do within our own life, isn't it? And, and when you were speaking there, I thought of something else, you know, when I was at university, our medical department brought in problem based learning. It's a different way to take an approach. And that feels, again, like innovation in that space. Yes, exactly, yeah. And as you're speaking more and more, it feels like, while what you're talking about is evidence based practice in the workplace, it feels like a theme that I've been sort of cogidating on a little bit now, is that the sort of weight of our collective history and expectation is almost what we're trying to change. A different way of thinking about and looking at what we're doing almost feels necessary Rob Briner these changes into the cozier and softer domains of our lives where we don't have that imperative for disruption.

if you were gonna say something, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think, I think what we do is, again, this is not, I don't like this way of putting it, but I can't think a better way of putting it. I think when, when we make decisions as professionals, we're making them also humans. Some of that human, humanness is very important and essential and desirable, and that's what we should be doing. However, some of what makes us human is also the stuff that means we ignore evidence. We don't it's hard to think critically. It's easier just to do stuff, and that also gets in the way of it. So I think it's this idea we we take our everyday decision making about what we want for dinner, what kind of whatever pair of trials we're going to buy, which is everyday decision making. We take it because of these more complicated situations where the outcomes are more important, and it's quite hard to to not do that, which again, is why evidence based practice, in part, has evolved to try and help us, sort of draw us back into the decision using information, rather than drawing us back to what we as humans would like to do, which is to make quick, easy, fun, sort of intuitive decisions.

It's very much about system one, system two, type of thing when, when we're speaking about this, it almost strikes me that maybe the the sort of, the evidence basis piece almost needs to be segregated from for doing it almost feels like it would be really hard to be both a doer of something and the evidence assessor of what you're doing, because, because then you're constantly in that more focused evidence based cognitively draining space. What do you think about

that? Yeah. I mean, certainly in some professions, that is the case that some of the people that might generate evidence are different from maybe those that made decisions about it and vice versa. And I think there is, and obviously there's a lot of biases that can come in, if you're the people that both sort of generate the data and then use the data. So I think, I think there is something in that. And also think it's important somehow the doers and sort of thinkers, I think, yes, it may be that in particular teams or groups or situations, there are people who are very good at, you know, making things happen or rolling things out. People like to say in HR, and other people roll things out. There's people great at implementing stuff. And there's other people actually very good at saying, Well, what is the issue? What is the problem, what is opportunity? And now it's not different skills, what? But I think some people, I would guess, have a preference for critical thinking analysis, some people have a preference for other kinds of stuff. And I think if that is the case, then I think it makes, does make sense to me. For example, in a team, an HR team, is to actually almost say, Yeah, you're the people that really like thinking things through, where the people that don't smoke, or we like going out there and doing stuff, then maybe that is a division of labor that sort of makes some sense. And again, it actually reminds me one of the things about about evidence based practices is really important. It's a collective thing. You know, you can't do this on your own. Doesn't make any sense to it, and you have to do it with other people. I

think, oh, there's so much in there that I'm so torn about, because there's things that I massively recognized from organizations, both that I've been in and worked alongside around this resistance to doing what I would call sort of difficult and sort of boring work, yeah, some senses of really doing the analysis. But at the same time, I also wonder how much so a lot of the experience I've had when trying to look for interventions within organizations is that there might be information out there that shows evidence of things being successful, but the context have been so different from the teams or the organization working in it's hard to make judgments about how applicable it might be, and I wonder if that's really held us up, because humans are so much more complicated than airplanes or the physical body in some senses. Yeah, and

that's exactly why I think, going back to earlier point, multiple sources are so important. So you're right, you may get there may be quite good information, data, evidence about an intervention. Maybe it's from the scientific journals. Maybe it's from other kinds of sorts of sources that says this intervention seems to be effective, to do this thing. You then look at it as an individual practitioner or an organization, and say, given our context, given our situation, we have good reason to believe perhaps this is not going to work for us. But in fact, if we do it here, it may be actually run completely counter and maybe quite counterproductive to what we're trying to do. So I think that nuance is very, very important. And I think one of the ways in which evidence based practice, I think it's sort of given the wrong impression people get the wrong impression is that people think it's about things like randomized control trials or experiments or meta analyzes and just having these huge bodies of scientific evidence, which you give to people and say, there you go. Get on with it. It isn't about that. It's part of it, but it's only part of it. And I think exactly to say Jane, I think this combination of saying, okay, there is this evidence here, is it going to work for us? Is a key, key part of that. Because in the end, people, I know people do, people resent and depreciate being told what to do when they can see it doesn't actually make sense for them, might not work for them. So this is, again, it's where this multiple sources of evidence comes in, is so important. Yeah,

it's such an interesting, good point, and I've watched it in my own background. So I work in the nonprofit sector, and I've watched a fetishization, if you like, of big data, as you've got access to the way people work, but I've also seen how that's helped us think about things. And I guess I want to sort of ask you the question of, for those practitioners who maybe haven't adopted things in this way. Do you think that the one of the challenges that they don't have access to enough different sources of data and and if so, what can people outside of HR do about it? What can the academic or the practitioner or the education or the learning community do about that? Yeah,

and that's an absolute major, major challenge, and certainly in other fields which are trying to develop evidence based practice for their professions, that has been one of the central thing. So even if you train people, people get it, people want to do it. They know how to do it. You're right. Not being able to get hold of the information is a major, major issue, and it depends where we start. If you start within an organization, I would say, going through the evidence based practice process that sort of briefly described form, medium to large size, large size decisions is an important starting point, because by going through that process, you become more aware of the data and information evidence you don't have. Now, it can be frustrating, but still going by going through that process, you'll still like to make a more informed decision, but you'd also be aware of what you don't know. So knowing what you don't know is obviously incredibly important. It just means that the next time you may be more prepared to find it. It also means you may put systems and processes in place to make sure the information data you need is actually there at the right time in a form that's usable to help decision makers. And this is this is absolutely key things whether it's academic, scientific evidence, whether it's organizational data, whether it's stakeholders, or even whether it's professional expertise, having it ready analyze in a form you can actually use is very, very important. And that's a kind of it's a sort of commitment to using data. And I think within HR, you know data analytics, that you mentioned, Big Data having huge management information systems. You know, in the end, these, I'm not convinced these, have actually helped decision making very much, because they're not, they're not providing information in the form of the source to decision makers when they need it, to help them make better decisions. So creating lots of data is, in itself, not very helpful. Being able to use it is what's important. Yeah,

that makes complete sense to me. I want I've got, I don't know where to start. I've got a couple of questions here. I guess one of them is, what do you think and the role is, or the How much do you think? One of the challenges is that people look for practice without necessarily having defined the problem they're trying to solve in really clear, sort of, maybe not measurable, but really clear terms. And is that something you see? And is that, is that part of evidence based practice, or is that something that kind of comes before

it, that is part of it? So I think the evidence based practice process would be both for say, what is the problem or opportunity, and if there is one, then saying, so what can we do about it? And I think, I think people find it very hard to stick on that analysis for the reasons we've spoken about. And an example is from the my own training, and the training during the center with managers. We might say, spend a day with a group of managers, and we say in the morning, we're just going to think about problems. We just can think about analyze problems or opportunities in your organization with a think about the data, the evidence. Look across those four sources I mentioned to say how much evidence we got, what kind of evidence? How good is the quality? What is it telling us about the most important. Problems or opportunities. And you won't be surprised to know within about 10 minutes, people are thinking about solutions and interventions. And we have to say, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to do that this afternoon. Okay, can you we please focus on this? What is a problem? What is opportunity? And I think, to me, this is one kind of, one piece of advice, if you I mean, obviously it's a bit superficial, saying here's one piece. But if there is one, I would say the key thing is spend more time identifying what the problem opportunities. So even if you can't, maybe spend a lot of time thinking about the evidence for the intervention, just spend more time the problem opportunity. Because I think without that in any context, we all end up just doing stuff now. We just do lots of activity with no clear purpose, and also by not thinking about what the problem opportunities we don't learn about our organizations or the context we're in, or our craft as a professional, we just keep doing stuff. And I think that, to me, is one of the main the main barriers, is this kind of urge to do stuff and to not think about, what do we what are we trying to do? What is a problem? What is opportunity? How do we know it's a problem, opportunity? So I think, yes, I agree. I think starting with that and trying to keep focused on that is very, very important.

Okay, I want to, I've just got one more question before I hand back over to James, and that is, I'd love to know just drawing on your own sort of experience of trying to sort of trying to, sort of encourage people to adopt evidence based practice. One of the things that fascinates me is this idea that I came across in some of the material about isomorphic pressures and the ideas that organizations kind of and I think you even use the word contagion, or something like that, the organizations pick up ideas of what's happening in other organizations, and it becomes a trend or a fad, or they do? They facilitate? Yeah, I'd love to know, right? I mean, all the time, middle and senior HR and management professionals who are trying to fight against CEOs and senior leaders who've seen something in an organization they think is doing well, and said, Oh, let's, let's do it that way, because we like it. And I just wonder what your advice is of how, how do they challenge upwards, politically, politically, sensitively, and try and make the case for this more. Let's define the problem before we start going off and copying Spotify, for example, yes,

exactly, exactly. So similar. Yes, I've had many of those stories as well. Sometimes I mean, I mean, I'm not so shocked now, but maybe years I was naively, quite shocked by this, the idea the CEO gets hold of a book just let's think of one at random, you know, Daniel Goldman, emotional intelligence, just as an example, and they suddenly decide that what the whole organization needs is emotional intelligence, because they've read this book. And there's lots of other examples learning organization going back a bit. You know, whatever could be mindfulness. Now, whatever it happens to be, they read a book, and they think, yeah, that's it. And I think one of the interesting things that and the challenges specifically for us in HR and this kind of field, is that, of course, CEOs, know, everyone is human, and humans all think, and to some extent they do. They know how the humans work. So if we were in it or facilities management, you don't get popular management books about things like, you know, it in businesses and people get, we might, I guess you might have things like blockchain, that's, that's maybe an exception. But in general, CEO, don't grab a hold of book about how you, you know, construct an office and tell people that's what they have to do. But they are quite happy to do that. In the case of HR, it seems to me sometimes and how to stop them from doing it. I think it's really difficult. I mean, one thing is, it's it's almost too late by the time CEO, if a CEO believes you gave an example of Spotify, if they believe that, if they can look at what Spotify do, copy what they do, and be successful, it's just way too late. They should not be in that position. But it's too late. I mean, you also sort of say, well, what how are we selecting our CEOs? How are we promoting them? Back to my point, what are we rewarding people for? If we're rewarding people just for doing stuff, sure that CEO is just going to do stuff and they will copy stuff other people do because they think it's cool, or they believe that that's what's going to work. I think one way I deal with that is I kind of try and use analogies. So one analogy I quite like to use. I don't know if it works. I try it again. Now, is to is you've probably seen these articles, you know, blog posts on clickbait about, I know the six habits of, yeah, the six habits of Silicon Valley billionaires, right? We

love these, right? You've got to get up at four in the morning and have an ice bath with three Exactly.

If you looked at James and I's instant messaging, you would see probably 90% of it is us ranting about these things. Yeah,

exactly. And it's the idea that if we as humble, non Silicon Valley, non tech people, if we look at what these people do in copies, we get up and have our ice button four o'clock. We do an hour of meditation. We do have a smoothie. The idea is, if we do this, we too, become billionaires. I think it's exactly the same. When we look at Spotify, whoever it happens to be, and we look at some of their practices, there's an issue that a we don't know Spotify is successful because of that practice. We just don't know. They probably don't know either. Similarly, and even if it is just because it works for them, doesn't mean it's going to work for us. Back to your point. Saying about different contexts. So I think illustrating to people, it's almost, this is an example of actually, cognitive bias. It's a kind of fallacy that we see something successful, we pick out something that successful thing is doing. We believe that that is why they're successful. And we believe, by copying it, we will be successful too. And there's so many flaws in that. But again, if people can't see that it's, I guess, you know, particularly if it's very senior decision makers, it's quite troubling. And I don't really know what you can do about it, apart from to offer these sort of illustrations. It's quite, it's quite sort of, yeah, it's difficult. And I think maybe buy them books about management fads. I don't know. COVID biases, you know? I mean, one quite light disease for people to actually learn about cognitive biases. And just as one time example, and this is something we know, we teach and I train a lot, we talk about this just to make people a little bit more aware of them get not because you need to overcome them, but in my experience, which is very limited, but I've found that even quite senior decision makers have never, for example, received any kind of training or development around cognitive biases? Yeah. So they're being paid, often quite all the amounts of money. They're very responsible, and one of the main things they're supposed to do is make good decisions. And the tool, or one of the tools they used to do that, obviously, is their brain cognitive processes. But they've never had any training about even a little bit about how it works. So the idea of telling someone in that position, by the way, you could be very biased, yeah, it not only sounds a bit insulting, yeah, but they're going to be thinking, Yeah, but how dare I? I'm very seen. I've been here for years. Look at me. I'm very successful. He's telling me, I can't think straight. Sure, he can't think straight. None of us can think straight sometimes or, you know, but that's not what they're used to. So even something as simple as that, and often the case of business school education, I'd even say just basically organization, induction into any organization, I think something just around cognitive biases, to least say to people, look just because you see something or you think you see something, or you think you you know you perceive something, doesn't mean you are, you need to check it out. You need to back to multiple sources. You need to get another source of evidence to check out that that is indeed what it seems to be.

So. So a lot of the stuff you've talked about there feeds into my own sort of interpretations of certain things. And this is again me, you know, bring all my biases and, you know, evidence based. But one of the things that I kind of, I kind of sense is I believe that a lot of people who are successful in organizations and successful within the types of social structures we create around work are at times, successful because of their certainty. And their certainty is coupled with lack of self doubt. And if you lack self doubt and if you have certainty, why would you ever question what you're doing so almost what we're asking people to do hinders the superpower of it lets them succeed in the first place, in the workplace. What do you think about

that? Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's a bit it reminds us parallel here with things like, you know, I don't if you know, I've got the books called, there's a book about the power of introverts, okay, called silent, or come what it's called. But it's basically the idea that, again, back to reward. What are people rewarded for? They're rewarded for various things, including sometimes what might be personality characteristics. Now, confidence is not exactly personality. It's pretty close, but extroversion certainly is. And it's the idea that not every culture, not every organization, not every time, not every period in history, but in general, people are more extrovert. Tend to get more rewards. They speak more in meetings. They're seen as more confident. They're seen as more confident than people who are quiet. Similarly, people who who are less confident, of course, actually usually know more than the people who are more confident. But big feeling uncertain is seen as weak. It's seen as well. Don't you know? Don't you understand? And this comes back to this again, one of the things we do when we do when we train and try and teach evidence based practice, we try and completely kind of remove the idea of certainty and truth and proof. Yes, not because we're being all kind of post modern about it, just because we're saying, Look, truth is is a spiritual thing. Proof, you only get an algebra and we're not after proof and truth. We're trying to make better informed decisions. So we should get away from certainty. We should start with uncertainty and evidence based practice. It's a process for trying to reduce uncertainty. That sounds like a really subtle distinction, but back to your point, it isn't because we're not we should not seek certainty. We should not start from certainty. We should start from doubt. Yeah, and try and reduce that doubt a bit, yeah. So I think that's a very important difference, and to

get comfortable living without that 100% certainty. And I guess, I guess that's a challenge in itself. So getting slightly met on this, you know, you've done your research, you've got your evidence based about the way that we work, and you are, to some extent, bringing in an intervention into the workplace, trying to change the way that we're working. And at the minute, you're you're working at a range of levels. I guess one of my questions is the intervention that we're talking about here, in terms of a way that people think and training, and things like cognitive biases and uncertainty and all those things, where do you think that's best suited to sit within our I guess, like our social education structures? You know. Is this something that should exist in MBAs? Is it something that we should start with as children? I mean, where? Yeah, well,

interesting. I mean, so interestingly I believe. And again, I don't know certainly too much about but I believe now that, in general, kids, children in school now, get a lot more of this. So you know, friends of mine have kids of certain ages. They taught about critical thinking. They're taught about fake news. They're taught the taught and explicit evidence based practice about how to think about why something might be biased. They talked about comparing across multiple sources. They're actually trained much more in gathering a lot of school activity. Now it's about doing projects, gathering evidence, gathering information, thinking about its quality, and so on. So I think it is perhaps starting already, but, but not depends what general how old you are, but certainly when I was at school, that wasn't something we did particularly. So I think it's a bit more awareness of that. But where would it start? I think I mean, again, it depends where I would say schools be good players. Talk about cognitive biases. Certainly talk about things, the idea of fake news, validating things, not believing what you see or hear, giving people techniques for thinking through, how you gather evidence and data, how you start to critically evaluate its quality, and just the idea that a lot of information is not trustworthy or it has limited trustworthy. So how can we decide whether something is more or less trustworthy? How do we actually do that? And these, I think these are totally teachable, learnable skills, which aren't very common. So I think yes, but back to put MBAs, I think is a good place to do it. And I would actually even say anybody who has any aspirations to be a manager ever, whether it's a student studying biology, whether it's an MBA program, or whether it's someone in an organization, I think basic courses in things like decision making, I think it should be just almost required, if that's the score going to use. Going back to my point about people not being trained in this, it is really curious that seeing that people feel decision making something so natural, something we do so automatically that none of us can do any better. So what's the point in having any training in it? Whereas what you think about is extraordinary in any other kind of human activity, it would be seen as quite normal that you you train to get better at doing that thing you're supposed to be doing. I mean, it would be seen as absolutely routine. But there's something weird which I don't quite understand about decision making, that almost it's it's untouchable. We shouldn't play with it. We shouldn't train people. You can't train people. And people find it sometimes quite odd the idea that we can be trained in decision making, we can be trained around COVID bias, they find it odd that. Why would we do that? How could we do that? But if we said we're training around somebody with accounting or something to do with how you, you know, run an IT system, they'd be perfectly happy about it. So there's something strange going on here, so which I can't quite put my finger on. It's always

I was gonna say I'm actually an accountant by my first training, and I've reversed over to this. So please carry on. I'm interested. Yeah, yeah.

We wouldn't be we wouldn't be shocked. Yeah, we would say an accountant has to train. And if we said, I know, the accountant should just kind of Intuit,

oh, yes, I know, I know, I'm just going to sense your numbers, right, exactly. You think, no, no,

there's a set of techniques here. But there's something so odd. We don't feel there are techniques around making better course decisions. It's really odd, and I think maybe it comes back. I mean, I'm now going off on tangents, but I think comes maybe back to politics, political systems. The idea that having to go through a structured process is almost like it goes against our choice, our free will, you know. And

it's not our storytelling, right? I mean, where does that fit with our narratives and the destiny and the stories that we grew up with? Yes, and yes, we could speak for hours about all this

stuff, I think, I think that is absolutely true. But I'd also, I'd just like to draw a different parallel, if I might, for a minute, because it's something I see in our sector. So for a long time, we talked about sport and physical talent, and talent was this unpinable, downable thing that was always retro fitted for success, right? So people couldn't understand, or granulate what the ingredients of success were in an athlete. They saw a physical disposition. They didn't really understand mental predisposition. And so they would be like, well, he was just really talented. And also, I think there's a whole thing around, you know, some of the historical religious overtones of, like, you know, God given talent and all that sort of stuff, yes. And I see that exactly the same leader, the same language used around quality leaders. So people who have retroactive, retrofitted a successful organization with a leader who is well liked and seems to have made good decisions, and they go, Well, he's just a natural born leader in he and you hear exactly the same language, even in children. Good point, yeah, and I find it fascinating, because you exactly as you say, it's what we have, is we have people who move up through organizations they are quite naturally talented, or more likely, have picked up skills and ingredients along the way that has helped them make good decisions and at some point, normally, in any other, uh. Area of expertise, they would then say, Oh, now I'd like to move to a professional level of this, and I'm going to invest time and money and energy and learning how to do that. But you are absolutely right. We don't do that about decision making, which is, I think, possibly the most terrifying thought I've had in this podcast.

And also, we don't, and also just just your point about people getting on being successful again, this is very, I mean, a lot of by the way, I lost. What I'm saying is anecdotal, but so I just have to make that clear. But another anecdote is, the I've heard multiple times is the idea that often people who are seen as very successful leaders, they start, you know, we all know the story that they kind of, they come to an organization, new broom, they make loads of changes that they kind of make sure they're seen to be doing things. They bring about a lot of change, and then they're already thinking about their next job, the next role. They move on to that. And then when they've left the organization, what they actually leave behind, sometimes is a kind of trail of destruction behind them. Yet somehow they're regarded as these amazing decision makers who are doing amazing things, and they do the same the next organization, the next organization. And I think there's a sense in which we value, if you like people doing lots of stuff and bringing people with them, and we will like that this idea of, you know, obviously our ideas of leadership are changing quite a lot now, but this idea, this heroic leader figure, and actually, we don't care if they leave a trailer structure, because they're just so cool, because they made all this stuff happen. And then they go to the good then they're attracted to another organization. Then they do the same thing there, again and again and again and

again. It is, right? I mean, that's, yeah, yeah. So much we're, we're social beings at the core, and we value and we care. I don't really care about your data. I care if you've got personal magnetism. And yes. And I

think, what? Again, everyone wants to sort of COVID eyes, everything. But I think there is a sort of slight, obviously COVID story or pandemic management story, if you think about political leaders around the world now, those who going back to your point about uncertainty, those who are willing to express uncertainty, who say, we don't really know what's going we're not too sure. They're not too confident. They share their lack of certainty in decision making, you know, and it appears that those leaders, again, this is very anecdotally, but appear, to some sense, have been quite successful, whereas the kind of typical heroic management approach doesn't really work with something like it doesn't, possibly doesn't work anyway, but certainly doesn't work with something like management of a pandemic, because you need people prepared to look at data, to think about uncertainty, to think about risk, all that kind of stuff, rather than just how they can look good or how they can seem great or take magnificent steps and decisions in some way will make them look great, historically. So I think you see this kind of split, and I'm one thing, I hope, in terms of people, perhaps I'll think a bit differently about leaders. Are those back to your point about confidence, maybe, maybe being a bit less confident, being a little more quiet, maybe a bit more thoughtful, will be, will be, perhaps, qualities that are seen as good things in leaders, not kind of weak things in leaders.

I'm going to squeeze in one last question from me, and I'm going to hand over to James one last question for him. This might be a bit meta, so apologies, but one of the things that really struck me when I was listening to some of the things that you were talking about elsewhere was this, this, this management fads, and how people use the the techniques of marketing, persuasive marketing, to sell management fads and interventions so that people gloss over and don't really look at the evidence. And I do wonder sometimes if the reason that we struggle to make the case for things like evidence based practice, the sort of more routine, slightly boring, really hard work to do things properly, is because we don't play their game, if you like, and use those tools of persuasive marketing. And I just, I just, I just wondered, morally, where you stand on that? Because I battle, I have constantly with myself about how we do things.

Well, as you can imagine, this is a conversation I've had a few times. And the idea is, could you turn evidence based management, evidence based practice, into a kind of fad? Use the same language, use the same ideas. And obviously some people say, Well, you should, because it's so important, if you can get people to do this, then it's going to be, you know, that's more important than actually, yeah, get your hands a bit dirty, exaggerated. So there's an ethical thing you're right about saying, Do you want to tell people thing which is wrong about evidence based practice to sell it? I would say, I personally, I don't particularly, but I could see there's an argument for that. However, the second, the main issue is evidence based practice is is not a fad. Is actually quite hard to sell it like that. So because it's not going to solve all your problems, it's not going to be a panacea. It won't fix everything. It won't make you feel like you're on top of everything. It won't make make you great. It won't it'll just help you make a better informed decision. So one of the challenges that sounds quite dull, and it's really hard to make, I think it is just intrinsically hard to make that exciting, because it isn't exciting, it's important, but it's not exciting, or it might be for a few people, generally, it's not as important. I think it's quite hard to say in the same way. But I completely get the point you make, Jane, that that we if you. Take evidence based practice, evidence based manual, you put it against, I know, harnessing your organizational culture, whatever it is, or whatever the current fads are, it looks pretty like, what is this? Why would I be interested evidence based prep? I can't understand it. What is it? It looks weird compared to these other things. So that is but that is a challenge. How do you package and if you like market will sell this idea. I think it is difficult and and my sense is there's something wrong with a term. I think evidence based is not a great term, but I think we're a bit sort of stuck with it. And I think, also, I don't know, I think people think it's just about being nerdy, which isn't. People think it's just about science, which isn't. And there's lots and lots of misconceptions, which, personally, I find I quite, I find quite difficult to tackle because they keep going back and back and back and back and keep having to say the same things, to sort of say, No, it's not about that. It's not about that. So I don't know why, but it's something about it. Yeah,

no. And I think there's, there's two things in that that I just want to follow up on. One is, I It's kind of a plea to everyone who does endorse it, not to do that, because I think the problem is that if you do do that, if you get it wrong, or if people realize very quickly that it's not a fad, but it's also not easy, in a panacea, then it puts them off life and then use them. And I think the other thing is that it strikes me that we are still largely, particularly the organizations that are not enormous and have infinite resources. We're very reductionist about what works and what doesn't. And I think it's easier to just say there's this one thing, and if you're not, if you're not bound by telling the absolute honest truth, but also not, well, there's no truth but the honest reflection of what the product is or the fad, then it's much easier to be reductionist about the single message that you share, and not mention the externalities. Yeah, it's like, it's like the labels of the warnings on the on the medical drugs, right? We don't read them until we get sick. They would go, Oh, I didn't realize this could happen to me. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah,

James, yeah. You know what? I'm actually going to draw us to a close. I've thoroughly enjoyed that, but I just think, in the interest of time, I'm going to start to wrap us up. So just as we're finishing up, Rob, I'd just like to ask, how can people learn more about you and the work that you're doing at the minute? Yeah, well, if

you'll tell more about evidence based practice, evidence based management. There's lots of resources on the center for evidence based management website, and that's WWW dot sebma, C, E, B, M, a.org, there's lots of stuff there. And you can also get in touch with me if you want to through that. And I guess you do show notes, and I can give you some things to link, link to that. So I think the best thing is to start, then just start reading some of the there's quite a few simple kind of introductions, and just start to give you a feel for it. So that's the best, the best thing to do. And if you do are interested, I said the best thing to do, just try it. I mean, just, just wait for medium to big size decision. Just have a go. Just have a go, even if you haven't got much time, just try it. So I think there's, to me, there's a big issue of just, just people not even starting to do because it looks too daunting, and I don't think it has to be. I think having a go is quite important.

Yeah, I love that message. Give it a go. Okay. Well, as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed it. So just time to say thank you for me. Yeah, thank you very much. It's a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. Applause.

Rob, okay, so you are back in the room with us. That was our conversation with Rob Briner, all about evidence based practice and evidence based management and HR and bringing about evidence based thinking into the world of work. Jane, that was a fun conversation. Was there anything that came up that you'd like to reflect on, or that got you thinking, I

think there's quite a lot. And I it's not necessarily about evidence based practice itself, which I feel like in some senses, is like very straightforward. And I think after, I'm not sure if we got it on the podcast, but afterwards, Rob referred to it as kind of a meta intervention, rather than intervention. I think that's a really good way of thinking about it, but I guess I do have a question. It provokes so many questions about the way we do things, and the big one that always crops up for me is, why is it that in something that would be deemed to be very scientific, e like it or legal or accounting. Do we have much more respect and time for gathering data before deciding on interventions than when we're thinking about people practices? And I realize that's a slight sideway, but I. I it's just struck me and it I cannot get rid of it, because I think the cost of doing it wrong is every bit as hard for an organization to bear as if they get, you know the wrong I don't know CRM system or the wrong operating system for their for their staff, but yet somehow we seem to be much more comfortable with trying stuff without actually being confident if it's going to work

or not. Yeah, it's interesting. It's something we explored a little bit, but there's definitely more to be explored in that space. Like you. I think I left that conversation with a whole host of ideas and interesting reflections and things that I'm going to sort of chew through over the coming weeks, which is great. My sort of takeaway is probably the importance of exploring how we think and developing that sort of metacognition and awareness of our own processes and without all our biases. And I think it's great to hear that that type of learning is being embedded into the different stages of education and younger students and things like that. So I think that's brilliant. That's something I never had when I was younger. So I think learning about that and exploring those factors is a great starting point for, you know, departing into this world of being more, I guess, intentional and mindful and evidence based in what we're doing. So that was big takeaway from

me. Okay, can I have one more? Because it's, I feel really strongly about this. Yeah, go for it. Decision based training, just making, decision making. Training, I think I hadn't even thought about it, but he's so right, we treat it like a talent rather than a skill. Yeah? And that's really annoying, I think, quite dangerous. Yeah,

yeah. Well, brilliant. I thought that was an excellent conversation. So let's call it a day there. So it's goodbye for me and it's