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SHORTCOMINGS OF EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE

Writer's picture: greenebarrettgreenebarrett

As anyone who has been reading our work in the past knows, we’re strong believers in making sure that there’s ample use of evidence when states and localities decide to take one policy or programmatic turn or another.

 

Despite our faith in the value of evidence-based practices, it’s become clear to us that this is a case where, as Greek fable writer Aesop put it “Too much of a good thing can be bad.” He was referring, by the way, to flies who got attracted to a honey jar, where they got stuck in the sticky stuff and died.   

 

Back to our concerns about evidence-based practices (which aren’t nearly as extreme as the plight of those flies): When entities rely too much on evidence-based practices before they embark on a new program or policy, there’s a hazard that they may be finding their proofs of concept from dissimilar places. (This is one of the issues we discussed when we wrote about the hazards of the phrase “best practices,” a while ago.)

 



As the Center for Law and Social Policy argued a few years ago, “In generalizing knowledge, EBPs fail to consider the cultural relevance of practices, thereby failing to provide certain communities, especially communities of color, with solutions that respond to and understand their individual lived experiences and cultural contexts. An effective practice in one community may not be effective in all communities.”

 

Additionally, simply finding evidence from another jurisdiction that something works well, doesn’t mean that it’s easy to replicate with fidelity, while also providing the flexibility and ability to innovate for those who want to improve upon established practices.

 

By definition, when places want to make true innovations, there isn’t evidence from elsewhere that a new idea works. This makes us think about a conversation we had with a close friend who was then in television programming. We were having fun coming up with ideas for tv shows that we think would be successful, but he shot them down, one a time on the premise that this kind of program had never been done, so no one was likely to do it now.

 

The same thing we suspect (but can’t prove) is that when executive or legislative branches require that their agencies show proof from elsewhere that a new idea works – and they can’t, because it’s never been tried before, true progress can come to a grinding halt.

 

We’ll take this a step further and argue that risk-taking is an essential element for progress, and the safety belt of evidence can be overused to provide cover so that it doesn’t appear something new will fail.

 

What’s more, for smaller communities, the amount of time and money that’s required to unearth evidence from elsewhere, can provoke a lack of initiative as agency heads watch every budgetary dollar they get.

 

A few more challenges on this front are sited in a paper titled “What are the limitations of evidence-based practice?” by the Center for Evidence Based Management, from which we’ve drawn the following excerpts:

 

  • “Sometimes the best available evidence is not available. This is particularly the case with regard to novel management techniques or the implementation of new technologies.”


  • “Another limitation is that the current management environment changes more rapidly than in the past, which limits the relevance and applicability of scientific and experiential evidence that was generated in an organizational context that was different that today’s.”

     

  • “Some managers see evidence-based practice as a tool to reduce staff expenses: use the best available evidence to determine the best model or technique, hire young, inexpensive practitioners and equip them with an evidence-based protocol to guide their decisions. This would not only be a misuse of evidence-based practice but also suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of its principles”

 

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