Why Best Practices Never Are
How to Prepare for the Knowledge Marathon
With over 1000 patents, The great American inventor, Thomas A. Edison, also discovered early in his career, "Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration."
Knowledge Managers, and especially "Best Practice" leaders, need to eagerly embrace this concept.
Edison would probably agree that knowledge management (KM) is a marathon, not a 100-yard dash. Yet contemporary KM othodoxy strives to get everyone to sprint 26 miles versus building the endurance needed to compete. KM endurance is manifest in communities, trust webs and in effective use of innovative technologies that connect people-to-people for joint intellectual effort.
Successful organizations endeavor to improve core capabilities and enhance innovation. They attempt to harness their capabilities and innovation using databases of "Best Practices." These efforts often fail.
Core capabilities and dazzling innovation arises from precognition and prescience. They are factors of intelligence: the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge. These rare elements determine the competitiveness of an organization. It's the final burst that gets them across finish line of the marathon.
Because core capabilities exist in cognition, in alpha/beta waveforms, they cannot be codified or documented. This is a maddening dilemma for knowledge managers and knowledge product suppliers alike. They originate in people-to-people interaction zones, transparent collaboration environments and social learning settings.
The most successful organizations strive to nurture and sustain Engelbart's 'Capability Infrastructure:" the second and third-order organizational methods and techniques that augment and drive the basic operations of the organization.
The problem with "Best Practices" is self-evident in the name. "Best" is the superlative of good, and means it must surpass ALL in excellence, achievement, quality and competitiveness. If this was so, then it would be a core capability or enhanced innovation, and you can't point, shoot and scroll core capabilities or innovation. Thus, best practices never are.
Best Practices are really "Good Policies and Procedures" and deserve significant attention and investment by knowledge managers. These compound networked documents, policies, systems and procedures provide fractional heuristics, idioms, parables, metaphors, illustrations, relationships, dialogue and allegories about the organization's core capabilities. They augment and enhance the capabilities, innovation and net intelligence of the organization. Good policies and procedures are essential to competitiveness and leading the pack in the knowledge marathon.
"Best Practices" are far better thought of as "Next Practices."
Another turn-of-the-century rumination by Mr. Edison, tells us, "Always keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original, only in its adaptation to the problem you're working on."
It is critical that organizations nurture, cultivate and diffuse good policies and procedures so others may adapt and apply them in totally new ways. These "novel ideas" fuel innovation and enhance core capabilities.
Good policies and practices play a major role in highly innovative organizations. They are well suited to extending foundation capabilities, enabling innovation and improving endurance capacity. Good policies and practices assure a comfortable lead in the knowledge marathon.
Executives and managers fret over the lack of adoption, adaptation and sharing of great ideas in their organizations. "Best Practices" make matters much worse. Western culture teaches individualism and self-sufficiency. It also teaches humility and self-deprecation. This dual-edged cultural sword makes adoption and sharing of superlatives utterly impossible. In reality, best practices never are.
By nature the innovation ecosystem must be future-focused and rely mostly on the interaction of people in the context of next practices. Intermodal electronic collaboration environments that sustain this interaction are needed and available today.
Some argue that a rich, networked environment of good policies and procedures evolves an organizational memory that hinders radical and discontinuous change and innovation, which is so necessary for survival.
Others feel that without a robust organizing foundation of good policies and procedures, even rudimentary innovation is impossible.
The challenge for knowledge managers, workers and line-of-buisness executives is to facilitate good corporate memory by learning-to-forget while simultaneously building and extending all good policies and procedures. If well executed, these processes build the stamina and set the pace that is elemental to competing in the knowledge marathon. It's where next practices emerge.
Near the close of his prolific, illustrious career, the Menlo Park, NJ resident and inventor of the incandescent lamp quipped, "We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything."
Knowledge managers and "Best Practice" leaders take heed. Like the mythical Narcissus who was unable to stop admiring his own image, never consider your good policies and procedures as surpassing all others and you will understand why best practices never are.
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