Ask the experts

This episode was recorded live with three evidence-based management experts, Denise Rousseau, Rob Briner and Eric Barends, answering and discussing questions sent in by teachers and students of the subject. 

During the disucssion, we touched on many aspects of evidence-based management, including:

• Starting with basic principles rather than complex frameworks makes evidence-based management accessible to busy professionals
• Problem identification is the most critical and often overlooked step in the evidence-based management process
• AI tools can support evidence-based decisions but require specific prompting and critical evaluation of outputs
• Evidence-based management works best as a team sport where colleagues help identify each other's blind spots - including biases
• Rather than trying to build a whole evidence-based culture, start with your sphere of influence and share evidence supportively
• Building evidence-based practices requires social networks of support within and outside organizations

If you have questions about evidence-based management that you'd like addressed in future episodes, please send them to us. We're planning to make "Ask the experts" a regular feature of the podcast.

Host:
Karen Plum

Guests:

• Eric Barends - Managing Director, Center of Evidence-Based Management
• Denise Rousseau, H J Heinz University Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, USA
• Rob Briner, Professor of Organisational Psychology, Queen Mary University of London; Associate Research Director at Corporate Research Forum

 Contact:

 Eric Barends, Managing Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Management 

In 2025 we updated two episodes to reflect changes in CEBMa's online Evidence-Based Management course:

• Episode 5 - acquiring evidence from the scientific literature (updated in June 2025); and
• Episode 12 - aggregating the evidence sources (updated in December 2025)