Best Practices, Practices, Just Great

The question is too often posed as you have done, Heath -- as an issue of transplanting best practices with tailoring rather than one of creating your own best practices grown from your own needs and values. The value of other organizations' best practices is not in knowing what to do in your own, but as examples of what could be done -- examples useful primarily for mind-bending and mind-opening regarding possibilities of performance. The value of others' best practices are embedded in their relationship to their constraints, which are not your constraints, and how they have defined their desired strategic constraints, which should not be yours, if you want to do anything more than simply play catch up.

That said, if you still feel compelled to try to copy someone else's solution, there are two tools in the tailor's kit -- two questions -- "Why should we NOT do what they do?" and "Why can't we do more than they do?"

The first question is about reservations, concerns, and possible undesirable side-effects, the answers to which will add to the borrowed practice for a solution that better fits your own environment, and at the same time address resistance from those stakeholders who harbor those concerns.

The second question is about making the "best" better for your environment, pushing challenge and ambition into the mix to take your application of the practice beyond what has been done elsewhere. The route for doing that is not so much in the bench-marking of competitors or users of practices, but rather "bench-marketing" -- studying the limiting "best practices" of your customers and markets for targeted application of new practices of your own to help them do more by using you.

I recently found a terrific article on BaldrigePlus that discusses benchmarking best-practices from other companies and even other industries. This quote speaks for itself:

"Why would a leading medical center want to study Marriott's hotel guest registration process? Avis Rental Car's staffing system? Why would an airline spend time comparing notes with -- of all things -- an Indianapolis 500 pit crew? These organizations are using benchmarking to break out of their industry paradigms to reach new, world-class levels of performance. The medical center's patients judged their hospital experience not only on the quality of care, but also on how much time, hassle, and paperwork was involved in the admissions process. So, the
medical center asked, "Who does 'admitting' better than we do?"

The airline needed faster maintenance turnaround than anyone in the airline industry currently provided. Who better than a race car pit crew to shed a whole new way of looking at the process? This is "benchmarking outside-the-box." Learning from processes in other industries to improve your own.

At the American Productivity & Quality Center's International Benchmarking Clearinghouse, we constantly see evidence of the power of out-of-the-box benchmarking," says Carla O'Dell."

Best practices are always to be laughed at but if you find a best practice that fills you with wonder, it simply means that you are at the least second best, or at the worst a pale shadow or paranoid clone of someone elses authentic intelligence.

If you can laugh at other peoples best practices it simply means one of two things, that either you are miles ahead of your competition and you realize the stupidity that is a consistent hallmark of intellectual people or alternatively it could also be that you are an abject failure looking for a cheap way to reconnect with life in order to converse with other losers. If you cannot bring yourself to laugh or be interested in a best practice, it merely indicates that you are a lazy thinker who prefers a lifetime of stolen mediocrity, while sipping a Pina Colada and enjoying a comfortable and joyful existence in splendid isolation (in which case you are simply being an intelligent human being rather than a best practice merchant).

M.
zorromark@consultant.com
(Mark Twain wasn't Mark Twain, Mark Zorro isn't Mark Zorro)
http://www.markzorro.blogspot.com