Why best practices don’t work

Codified Conventional Wisdom

As a former consultant, I was and still am guilty of using and promoting the term “best practice”. Shame on me. In my defense, “best practices” are good concepts. They can showcase how an organization has completed a task, implemented a program, overcome some adversity, etc. etc. Best practices are guides that indicate something is possible or a tactic can be successful. 

The other part of the problem is that best practices are a misnomer. Often what we call best practices were at one point good or smart business moves, but we seldom do the work to determine how long they stay the “best” or whether they’re universally applicable. - Shane Snow

I’m sure that we all have the “skin crawling” sensation when we hear the term “best practice”. Why don’t they generally work well in organizations? 

3 reasons they don’t work

• No culture context - It is vital to ensure that actions taken (initiatives launched, etc.) take the nuances, mores, and beliefs of the culture into account. Best practices are often shared in a general way that has a pollyanna flavor to them. In many cases, they can be cultural-deaf. Not taking the culture into account is a sure death knell for a best practice. 

  just because “Company A” had success with a certain initiative doesn’t mean that “Company B” can plug-and-play the same process and expect the same outcome. -  Mike Myatt 

• Not created here - Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that don’t like or believe things that weren’t created by them or someone they know (or know of). We see it all the time. Resistance to accepting good, sound courses of action occurs because people in organizations (and countries and families) believe what they are doing is far superior. It could be hubris, fear of change, or any number of things. But, people tend to push back when ideas are introduced that don’t have their origins in the organization’s ‘four walls’. 

• Who’s going to do it - One of my very favorite resistances to best practices is inaction. People hear of ideas of things that have worked in other organizations, but there is a lack of impetus to take on actually implementing it. Employee engagement is a great example of a “best practice” that has turned out to not have the intended impact. There are a lot of reasons, but one that rises to the top is all the burden for its success has fallen to HR. So even though engaging people is each manager’s responsibility, HR has become the chief, cook and bottle washer (or whatever that saying is) for employee engagement. No wonder engagement is low across the world…

But there is hope yet. 

How they can be used instead

When presenting an idea to implement within an organization

- Best practices can be used as proof that taking a specific action can actually lead to a positive result. But, it HAS to be clear that the specific steps, chronology, etc. of developing and implementing it within the organization needs to be developed. Leveraging best practices as a model reduces the “it won’t work here” argument (but doesn’t eliminate it)

As a template to build a course of action

- Similar to the idea above, a best practice (or set of them) can be used as an outline for a program or process. As in, they did it this way (show pic with 3 steps This way, that way, The other way) but because of who we are we’ll have to do it like this (show with 5 steps This way, this other way, that way, that way again, the other way)

A reason not to do something

- I have used best practices as an argument NOT to take an action. Best practices are built in one organization or industry that produces great results. But, one could actually say “That won’t work because it was built in the IT industry and we don’t have that kind of culture”. It’s not to shut down innovation or trying something different. Instead, it’s to acknowledge and honor the culture of the organization because the next sentence is…But in our organization, we could adopt something like it by doing this.” Let’s be honest though. Sometimes practices in one type of organization just don’t work in others. It’s actually how some senior execs shut down best practices from Google, Facebook and others. It reminds us all to be careful of sharing best practices like that unless we have some ideas of how it could work in our industry or culture. 

This is not meant to rain on the best practice parade… entirely. It is really to help us all take the nuances of our organizations into account. It is also to warn against the desire to be “like Google” all the time. Google is awesome. But they are great at being google. And it’s not a culture for everyone. They don’t have the lock on being an outstanding workplace. What works for them may not work for all organizations…in the exact form that Google does it. So please take best practices with a grain of salt and before you spew them, make sure they honor your culture, history and way you get work done. 

Anil Saxena is Culture Integration Leader for GE Digital (all views/opinions are his and his alone. That being said GE Digital is pretty awesome).                                                       

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