Evidence-based practice is CEBMa's discipline for deciding: the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of the best available evidence. The unit tests two lists and the difference between two easily confused sources.
Four sources of evidence
CEBMa names four, not two, three or six:
- The scientific literature: findings from empirical studies published in academic journals.
- The organization: data, facts and figures gathered from the organization itself, such as HRIS turnover figures and exit-interview data.
- Practitioners: the professional experience and judgment of practitioners.
- Stakeholders: the values and concerns of people who may be affected by the decision.
Practitioners and stakeholders are the pair people mix up, because both are people rather than documents. Practitioners supply professional judgment; stakeholders supply values and concerns about the effects on them.
Six steps of the process
Asking, Acquiring, Appraising, Aggregating, Applying, Assessing — in that order.
Wrong versions substitute Analyzing, Auditing or Adjusting for Acquiring, Aggregating or Appraising, reverse Asking and Acquiring, or put Assessing first. Assessing is last because you can only evaluate the outcome of a decision after you have made it.
The "six" trap runs the other way too: if a question asks how many sources of evidence there are, the answer is four. Six is the number of steps.
The judgment pattern
An executive proposes a company-wide engagement program because a peer company adopted it. HR has internal survey data, access to published research, and unions and managers with strong views.
The keyed action is to translate the practical issue into an answerable question and weigh evidence from all four sources before recommending. That is the first step, Asking, followed by the appraisal the model requires.
Why the others fail: adopting the peer approach rests on a single external anecdote and skips appraisal entirely. Running another survey collects more organizational data while ignoring three sources already available. Defining scope and building an implementation plan moves to execution on an unexamined solution.
Carry this: four sources, six steps, and never let one anecdote stand in for evidence.