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Friday, July 25, 2008

When 'Best Practices' Become 'Worst Practices'

The current thrust of organizational business and performance management initiatives is usually on archiving 'best practices' for later referral by other employees. Should organization care about best practices? How can organizations prevent the best practices from haunting them as 'dogmas of the past' and impeding their progress during 'interesting times'?

The current thrust of organizational business and performance management initiatives is usually on archiving 'best practices' for later referral by other employees. It is popular belief that archival and subsequent referral of such information would facilitate efficient problem-solving and prevent unnecessary allocation of sources to inefficient search processes. Incidentally, in due course the archived 'best practices' tend to define the 'company way'. Business solutions characterized by memorization of best practices may tend to define the assumptions that are embedded not only in information databases, but also in the organization's strategy, reward systems and resource allocation systems.

Within a changing business environment, such organizations may find themselves doing "more of the same" better and better, however, with diminishing marginal returns. Drucker has attributed a similar process for the grand failures exhibited by 'blue chip' companies of yesterday. Just like the 'boiling frog' who is unable to sense the gradual change in temperature and ultimately boils to death, the cycle of doing "more of the same" tends to result in locked-in behavior patterns resulting in organizational "death spiral."

Yesterday's core capabilities embedded in best practices could become tomorrow's core rigidities. Institutionalization of 'best practices' by embedding them in information repositories may facilitate efficient handling of routine, 'linear,' and predictable situations during stable or incrementally changing environments. However, when change is radical and discontinuous, there is a persistent need for continual renewal of the basic premises underlying best practices. Organizations in such environment needs imaginative suggestions more than they do best practices.

One possible option for getting out of the "status quo" often implied by "best practices" may be to view the following processes as necessary and relevant and occurring in a parallel state. [Most current thinking -- suggested by literature based on theory and practice -- suggests an oversimplification of what is necessary for sustained competence.]

a) Consider "programming" and "deprogramming" as parallel processes;
b) Consider "reinforcement" and "exploration" as parallel processes;
c) Consider "learning" and "unlearning" as parallel processes;
d) Consider "efficiency" and "effectiveness" as parallel processes;
e) Consider "construction" and "deconstruction" as parallel processes; etc.

The basic intent is to set up a "real time" feedback-and-feedforward loop of "actively" scanning the unstructured reality [or what Ackoff called "messes"] for emerging "patterns" that suggest the emergence of something "new," while ensuring that there is a mechanism for testing of these perceived "patterns," and implementing the resultant "lessons learned" into the extant logic of the processes. The greatest challenge is being able to do the "former" while striving for the "latter" in the above instances a) - e). In other words, it is challenging to implement "efficiency" while unraveling the underlying logic to strive for "effectiveness." Similarly it is challenging to implement "learning" while unraveling the underlying assumptions to strive for "unlearning," and so forth.

There could be various arguments that may be made to support the above logic. For instance, one may consider that any competitive advantage is transitory -- given the changing dynamics of the environment, the industry and the competition. What is "best" today may be "worst" tomorrow depending upon the shift in the references that determined its "best-ness." Hence, the need for ongoing reassessment.

Now, the question of how it can be implemented. Well, there doesn't seem to be any simple answer for this issue. Most experts, as evident from my discussions at some of the big KM conferences, still adhere to the linear logic of alternating "former" and "latter."

Due to the very nature of programmed machinery of information technologies -- they would demonstrate superior performance [in the foreseeable future] for an efficiency-seeking, optimization-oriented, convergent model. However, human minds, being endowed naturally by sense making capability, could impose structures of "patterns" upon the changing shape of "messes" and provide the necessary correction. Importantly, this correction needs to be scanned, tested and implemented in "real time" to keep in tune with the changing dynamics [discontinuities] of the external environment.

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When Best Practices… Become Worst Practices

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