Streamline Training & Documentation: In the Grip of Conventional Wisdom?

Thursday, May 11, 2006

In the Grip of Conventional Wisdom?

Sometimes, what many people see as good old common sense, others view as misguided conventional wisdom in need of debunking. How to decide?

In the medical field, efforts to capture and analyze data on outcomes are steadily expanding. The aim is to get away from using treatments and therapies that have the weight of precedent behind them, but that, upon examination, prove inferior or even contraindicated. Similar efforts are underway to try to expand data-based knowledge of how to achieve good educational outcomes.

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Bill James, baseball managers can turn to sophisticated statistical analysis to decide how to maximize their odds of winning. For example, conventional wisdom favors going for a sacrifice fly with a man on first and no more than one out. Careful study of the stats says the batter should try to hit safely.

There's at least one website dedicated to steely-eyed investigation of urban legends. The siteowners systematically examine the facts related to each claim. Some of the claims turn out to be true (you can get free directory assistance by dialing 1-800-FREE-411), but many are false (Bill Gates will not give you a cash reward for forwarding an e-mail message to all your friends and acquaintances).

What these examples have in common is that people are questioning assumptions and submitting them to critical analysis, not just taking them for granted.

Questioning assumptions, and looking for evidence that enables distinguishing true beliefs from false, is the focus of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management, Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer's and Robert I. Sutton's most recent book, published in March. Pfeffer and Sutton are also the authors of The Knowing-Doing Gap, one of the suggested readings listed at right.

Among the popular management practices Pfeffer and Sutton question in Hard Facts:

Casual benchmarking — "The logic behind what works at top performers, why it works, and what will work elsewhere is barely unraveled, resulting in mindless imitation." Thoughtful analysis is essential for productive benchmarking.

Doing what (seems to have) worked in the past — "The problems come when the new situation is different from the past and when what we 'learned' was right in the past may have been wrong, or incomplete, in the first place." You need to investigate whether the practice you're considering was actually a factor contributing to past success, and whether the current situation is a close match to the past situation.

Following deeply held yet unexamined ideologies — "Beliefs rooted in ideology or in cultural values are quite 'sticky' — they resist disconfirming evidence and persist in affecting judgments and choice, regardless of whether or not they are true." You need to ask yourself whether you're gathering and considering relevant evidence, rather than simply acting on the basis of intuition.

A helpful mnemonic advises that decision-makers need to act on evidence that is accessible, accurate, actionable, and applicable.

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Labels: Critical thinking

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