American medicine reorganised itself around the phrase in the 1990s, and it spread to nursing, education, social work and policy. The argument was that established practice rests on authority and habit, and should rest on outcomes measured in trials. A whole profession accepted that its procedures had the wrong derivation.
Six Sigma
Developed at Motorola in 1986 and adopted across American manufacturing and services. Its core cycle — Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control — begins with measurement of what is actually happening. The improvement is derived from the data, and the control phase exists to hold the derived process in place until the next measurement.