Evidence-Based Management (EBM): Turning Data into Strategic Agility

Too many organisations talk about being agile, but they’re still flying blind. Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a strategy to fix that. It’s not a framework, a methodology, or a tool. It’s a way to stop pretending we’re improving and start proving it.

EBM gives us a structure for inspecting how well we’re delivering value and where to invest next. It’s built around four key areas:

1. Current Value – Are we delivering value now, or are we just burning cash? Customer satisfaction, revenue per employee, and product usage give us the truth.
2. Time to Market – How fast can we learn, deliver, and respond to change? Cycle time, release frequency, and time spent stabilising releases tell us whether we’re built for speed or for bureaucracy.
3. Ability to Innovate – Can we create new value, or are we buried under technical debt and bloated backlogs? Look at innovation rate, feature usage, and how much of the product is actually used.
4. Unrealised Value – What’s the opportunity cost of staying the same? If we had fewer constraints, where could we win?

These aren’t vanity metrics. They’re signals that help leaders make real decisions about where to focus, where to invest, and what to stop doing. You don’t need a prescription. You need clarity, direction, and feedback.

EBM enables an empirical approach to strategic improvement. It’s not about tracking everything. It’s about measuring the right things, at the right time, to drive better outcomes. If you’re not using data to improve how you deliver value, then you’re not doing agility. You’re doing theatre.

If you want to move beyond output metrics and start managing for outcomes, EBM gives you the scaffolding to do that—without pretending there’s a silver bullet. It’s messy. It’s iterative. But it works.