Business coaching, manipulating memory for market research, and female VCs.

1. Systematic review: Does business coaching make a difference? In PLOSOne, Grover and Furnham present findings of their systematic review of coaching impacts within organizations. They found glimmers of hope for positive results from coaching, but also spotted numerous holes in research designs and data quality. Over the years, outcome measures have included job satisfaction, […]

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Mistakes we make, Evidence Index, and Lebron vs Steph.

1. Mistakes we make when sharing insights. We’ve all done this: Hurried to share valuable, new information and neglected to frame it meaningfully, thus slowing the impact and possibly alienating our audience. Michael Shrage describes a perfect example, taken from The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, a fantastic book about analytics innovation. The […]

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Getting to evidence-based policy: Explainista, Randomista, or Mapista?
flower black-eyed susan

Three Ways of Getting to Evidence-Based Policy. In the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Bernadette Wright (@MeaningflEvdenc) does a nice job of describing three ideologies for gathering evidence to inform policy. Randomista: Views randomized experiments and quasi-experimental research designs as the only reliable evidence for choosing programs. Explainista: Believes useful evidence needs to provide trustworthy data […]

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Masters of self-deception, rapid systematic reviews, and Gauss v. Legendre.
photo of stadium seats

1. Human fallibility → Debiasing techniques → Better science Don’t miss Regina Nuzzo’s fantastic analysis in Nature: How scientists trick themselves, and how they can stop. @ReginaNuzzo explains why people are masters of self-deception, and how cognitive biases interfere with rigorous findings. Making things worse are a flawed science publishing process and “performance enhancing” statistical […]

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Analytics of presentations, Game of Thrones graph theory, and decision quality.

1. Edges, dragons, and imps. Network analysis reveals that Tyrion is the true protagonist of Game of Thrones. Fans already knew, but it’s cool that the graph confirms it. This Math Horizons article is a nice introduction to graph theory: edges, betweeness, and other concepts.   2. Teach your team to make high-quality decisions. Few of […]

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‘Evidence-based’ is a thing. It was a very good year.
evidence-based social innovation

2015 was kind to the ‘evidence-based’ movement. Leaders in important sectors – ranging from healthcare to education policy – are adopting standardized, rigorous methods for data gathering, analytics, and decision making. Evaluation of interventions will never be the same. With so much data available, it’s a non-stop effort to pinpoint which sources possess the validity, […]

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