Beyond Management Fads and Best Practices

Before the emergence of germ theory in the nineteenth century, medicine was dominated by tradition, authority, intuition, and folklore. Physicians prescribed treatments that had little scientific basis. Bloodletting, for example, remained a common medical practice for centuries despite causing more harm than good in many cases. Then came the work of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and other pioneers who established that many diseases were caused by microorganisms. Medicine began to move from opinion to evidence, from authority to experimentation, and from tradition to science. The result was one of the greatest advances in human history.

Curiously, many management decisions today are still made in ways that would have been familiar to pre-germ-theory medicine. Organisations routinely adopt management fads, copy competitors, and embrace so-called best practices without asking a fundamental question: what is the evidence? Another odd behaviour is how disconnected management practice is from the scientific evidence. This research-practice gap is fuelled by managers who jettison the science of management as being ‘theory’ and by academia, which fails to communicate its ‘science’ into actionable language.

This concern gave rise to the field of Evidence-Based Management (EBM), championed by scholars such as Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert Sutton, and Denise Rousseau. Their argument is both simple and profound: managers should make decisions using the best available evidence rather than relying solely on conventional wisdom, management fashions, personal preference, or anecdotal success stories.

One of the most dangerous phrases in management is “best practice”. It sounds sensible and authoritative. The problem is that context matters. A practice that works exceptionally well in one organisation may fail completely in another. What worked at Toyota may not work in a Nigerian bank. What worked at Google may not work in a government agency. The real question is not whether a practice worked somewhere else, but whether there is evidence that it will work here, given our strategy, culture, capabilities, and operating environment.

Pfeffer and Sutton argued that managers often make decisions based on deeply flawed sources of information. These include unexamined experience, management fads, ideology, benchmarking, and the tendency to imitate successful organisations without understanding the factors that contributed to their success. Evidence-based management seeks to replace these habits with a more disciplined approach that combines scientific research, organisational data, professional expertise, and stakeholder perspectives.

The implications are significant across virtually every area of organisational life. Consider strategy development. Many organisations build strategies based on assumptions about customers, competitors, and markets. Evidence-based strategy requires leaders to test those assumptions using customer research, market intelligence, operational data, and scenario analysis. Strategy becomes less about declaring what will happen and more about developing informed hypotheses that can be tested and refined.

The same applies to talent management. In a previous article, I discussed the importance of hiring the right people. Yet many recruitment decisions are still driven by intuition and personal chemistry. Decades of research by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter demonstrate that structured interviews, competency-based assessments, and work-sample tests are significantly better predictors of job performance than unstructured interviews. Evidence-based recruitment reduces bias and increases the likelihood of making sound hiring decisions.

Learning and development provides another example. Organisations often respond to performance problems by sending employees on training programmes. However, as we explored in an earlier article, training does not automatically lead to performance improvement. Evidence-based learning starts by identifying the specific behaviours that need to change, understanding the factors that influence those behaviours, and measuring whether change occurs. It focuses on outcomes rather than activities.

Customer service and customer experience can also benefit from an evidence-based approach. Organisations often assume they understand their customers because they interact with them regularly. Yet customer perceptions are frequently very different from management assumptions. Voice-of-customer data, customer journey analysis, complaint trends, and satisfaction metrics provide evidence that can guide better decisions and service improvements.

Operations management offers perhaps the clearest illustration of evidence-based thinking in action. Lean management, Six Sigma, and continuous improvement methodologies emphasise data, root-cause analysis, experimentation, and measurement. Rather than relying on assumptions, operational decisions are informed by evidence gathered from processes, customers, and performance outcomes.

Importantly, evidence-based management does not mean abandoning experience, judgement, or intuition. Experienced managers often possess valuable insights developed through years of practice. However, evidence-based management encourages leaders to test those insights against data, research, and observable results. It recognises that intuition is valuable, but not infallible.

The practical implications are straightforward. Leaders should routinely ask: What evidence supports this decision? What assumptions are we making? What data do we have? What does the research say? How will we know if we are right? These simple questions can dramatically improve the quality of decision-making.

The goal of evidence-based management is not to eliminate judgement but to strengthen it. Just as germ theory transformed medicine by replacing superstition with science, evidence-based management offers organisations a pathway beyond management fads and best practices toward more reliable and sustainable results. In an increasingly complex world, the organisations that succeed will not necessarily be those with the strongest opinions but those with the strongest evidence.

Omagbitse Barrow is the chief executive of Efiko Management Consulting, and he supports organisations and leaders to translate their strategy to results.