I often wonder if “best practice” is actually a hidden drug within our organizations that everyone simply craves and are constantly taking. We are addicted to it and it is high time to get off this habit. We need to kick this best practice out of our thinking, it is just wrong.
Why do so many advisory organizations promote best practice? Simply because those in the organization constantly feel under pressure to demonstrate why they are falling behind or keeping ahead of their competitors.
They crave knowing best practices, but tell me what really is the best practice of others achieving?
If you are behind, best practice informs you and you go into a frantic mode to try and catch up. By the time you have achieved the best practice, it is simply out of date as those practicing this have most likely moved even further on.
If you are the ones attributed with a best practice it can usually create a level of complacency, while you sit back and bask in the afterglow or you rack your brains to extend this ‘leadership’ position in even better ways, determined not to relinquish this recognition.
Often the result is you can lose sight of why you were a best practice as you upgrade to the next level of automation through technology, forgetting that part of the best practice might have been the personal touch and engagements you had with your customers, dealing individually with their specific problems, as you race to automate these so you can keep ahead in practice.
You need to think differently, it is all about YOUR emerging practices based on your exploring, experimenting, and learning, not other peoples.
I argue you have to be very careful with best practice
Firstly organizations need to move well beyond their lazy reliance on best practice comparison and they need to find better ways to explore emerging practices. But that takes many into the realm of increasing uncertainties, and most people and organizations are not trained for this exploration and experimentation, yet it is the place for gaining leading practice.
It is just so easy to copy, yet how often do we fail to recognize all the contextual factors that went into making a specific set of (best) practices in one organization as those another organization simply believes it can blindly copy? Other organizations good practice is their practice, in their circumstances and in adapting the practices to suit their market conditions and I guarantee these are not yours!
Your practices are all that matter to your customer, so keep focusing there
Of course, best practice has its comparative use to gather intelligence, to gain the competitive understanding of where they are in their development. But these are their practices and to simply set about to adopt these as your way forward is just a huge, expensive mistake in many cases.
I believe if you are focusing on the good and emerging practices within your own organization as the area to focus upon, to leverage and understand. Then to measure these with what your customer expects, your market is telling you or your ability to engineer real growth or not. Those become your practices for learning and wanting to improve into those that make your organization really work effectively in its context.
Then applying, experimenting and learning from novel practices that provide growing confidence in creative thinking.
Also give some thought for next practice, those practices that prompt reinvention. They start such totally fresh thinking; they challenge existing paradigms and move you towards considering new business models.
The Cynefin Framework
One framework I strongly relate too is provided by www.cognitive-edge.com with their Cynefin framework. It places ‘practices’ in its appropriate domain.
The Cynefin framework has five major domains
The first four domains are our most relevant for seeking out the appropriate practice:
Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense – Categorise – Respond and we can apply best practice.
Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.
Complex, this is the domain, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.
Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act – Sense – Respond and we can discover novel practice.
The fifth domain
The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, in which state people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision.
In full use, the Cynefin framework has sub-domains, and the boundary between simple and chaotic is seen as a catastrophic one: complacency leads to failure and tumbles into chaos.
Dealing with different types of innovation really works in this framework
For incremental innovation, constant reoccurring stuff, the ‘simple’ domain applies and best practice pushes down on efficiencies and effectiveness, on being consistent with standard processes and clear structures. Always be conscious of the limitations of best practice.
For a more distinctive innovation, you tend to move more towards the complicated domain, where experts ‘kick-in’ to help and offer plausible outcomes based on known experiences. You need to listen to conflicting advice and watch out for entrenched thinking so it can be challenged.
If you are pushing for more radical innovation then it has a higher complexity and risk and falls into the complex domain. The range of options sometimes seems infinite where we explore more through the lens of perspectives and judgment. The outcomes are never easy to predict upfront and you need to keep looking for patterns to emerge and ‘inform’ your decisions. The use of experimentation, gamification, allowing greater interactions and a place you encourage dissent and finally be patient and allow time for reflection. This type of innovation can change the game.
Then we have the chaotic domain, where disruptive innovation tends to sit. You lack any clear ‘cause and effect’ as it is entering more of the unknowns. The key is deciding to act, not from knowing the practice but recognizing it is novel, as you search for what will work, attempt to take back control and provide clear and direct interventions to firstly stabilize, understand and learn from and then further respond to bring it back into some order that allows you to participate.
The appropriate framework of practices and approach are really valuable
This framework offers a perspective that has enormous value as it offers managers a guide in placing different thoughts with different actions. The Cynefin framework offers a typology of contexts to help you sort out a variety of situations in which you might need to make different decisions and then provide what actions to take from the recognition.
The framework looks to place the appropriate actions and decisions into the appropriate context. The framework emerged from complexity theory and innovation falls into this.
When you next think of best practice as your answer, come back and reflect on this first, to place the appropriate innovation into the right practice that meets your needs, not someone else’s. It is your own “emerging” practice you need to develop and push for
In my vie,w, “emerging” practices or next practice makes the right music.
No practice irrespective should be backward-looking, it can’t afford to be in an ever-changing world, just by copying others best practices, they are NEVER yours, or you foolishly believe that in a fast-changing, dynamic world your “static “best practice” is good enough. Practices must continually evolve.
Your practices should be investigative, exploring and experimenting, always pushing with finding practices that work for you, that fits your unique situation and relate your organization to your customer’s needs of giving them the right practice. They need to be dynamic, constantly in a fluid form adjusting to new insights and understanding.
Actually, in truth, I can’t stand it when I hear that “we pursue best practices.” It mostly means you simply copy others to catch up and why waste money to invest in any forward thinking. That keeps you nicely in the pack or at the back, the also-ran.
Just please resist that best practice ‘crutch’, it makes me feel that you are simply limping along, more as a “laggard” always wanting to catch up with others, copying and mimicking others. Those others who seem to adopt a very different level of innovating practice, one that is forward-looking and emerging and you remember you are always behind them, letting them build a forward-looking culture that you eventually ‘only envy and wish’ as you keep scratching your head working out how to keep up.
You need to think about emerging practices or next practices or the one today that has that better-updated feel of being digital of “best-of-breed”. Is it not time for you to get out in front and lead, so you are seen as “leading practice”
** This post was first published on the Hype Innovation Blog site and updated with this final view.
