The Best Way to Build a Culture of Evidence-Based Government

Here’s one of the toughest nuts to crack for any results-focused public leader: How do you strengthen and sustain a culture of evidence-based decision-making? How, in other words, do you reject the status quo in much of government, where decisions are too often made based on hunches, intuition and inertia (“That’s how we’ve always done it”) and instead use data and research to inform what works?

Useful insights into that question come from agencies and jurisdictions we’ve seen firsthand that have taken important steps toward building a culture of evidence-based decision-making. They employ a two-pronged approach: The first is bottom-up, where program staff and evidence experts work together to find ways to use existing research and generate new evidence. The second is top-down, involving not only encouragement from leadership but also requirements to use evidence.

Ideally, the two prongs are simultaneous, each helping to reinforce the other. But sometimes organizations start with one prong and then add the second — say, with leadership underscoring the importance of using evidence, followed by staff efforts to help bring that vision to reality. As momentum builds around the use of evidence, leadership might take further steps, such as adding evidence requirements for the budget process.

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