Professor Rob Briner, Queen Mary, University of London: Evidence-based practice is easy to understand so why is it so difficult to do?
Evidence-based practice is one approach to helping practitioners make better-informed decisions. A range of professions including medicine, policy-making and policing have attempted over the past few decades to practice in a more evidence-based way. More recently, organizational practitioners such as leaders and managers, human resource managers and organizational psychologists have also begun to discuss how evidence-based practice could similarly be adopted in their professions to improve their effectiveness. The basic principles of evidence-based practice are not particularly difficult to understand: By using the best available evidence from multiple sources in a structured and critical way we are more likely to identify the most important problems or opportunities and find the most effective solutions or interventions. Although it is relatively easy to understand it seems, in practice, to be very difficult to do. Developing a better understanding of the individual, professional, organizational and institutional barriers to evidence-based practice and making better-informed decisions is key to improving the implementation and take-up of evidence-based practice. But what are the main obstacles? What are the (dis)incentives for adopting evidence-based practice? How, realistically, can these barriers be overcome?
