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| | The Human Resources: Recruiting, Hiring, and Staffing Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | Best Practices can " retard " an organisation | Views: 805 | | Nov 10, 2007 11:52 am | | Best Practices can " retard " an organisation | # | 
kishor Jagirdar | | The current thrust of organisational business and performance management initiatives focuson archiving ebest practices' so other employees can access them later.Archival and the subsequent referralof information are believed to facilitate efficient problem solving and prevent unnecessary allocation of resources to inefficient search processes.
Incidentally,in due course, the archived ebest practices'tend to define the ecompany way'.
Business solutions characterised bymemorisation of best practices mightdefine the assumptions that are embedded not only in information databases, but also in the organisation's strategy, reward systems and resource allocation systems.
Within a changing business environment, such organisations may be doing emore of the same' better, but with diminishing marginal returns. 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 behaviour patterns causing an organisational death spiral.Yesterday's core capabilities embedded in best practices, could become tomorrow's core rigidities.
Institutionalisation of best practices by embedding them in information repositories might facilitate efficient handling of routine, linear or predictable situations during stable or incrementally changing environments. However, when change is radical and discontinuous, there is a persistent need for continual renewalof the basic premises underlying best practices. Organisations in such environments need imaginative suggestions more than they do best practices.
One possible option for getting out of the status quo often implied by best practices might be to view the following processes as necessary and relevant and occurring in a parallel state. (Most current thinking - based on theory and practice- suggests an oversimplification of what is necessary for sustained competence.)
Consider these as parallel processes:
programming and deprogramming
reinforcement and exploration
learning and unlearning
efficiency and effectiveness
construction and deconstruction.
The basic intent is to set up a erealtime' feedback-and-feed forward loop of actively scanning the unstructured reality (or what Ackoff called emesses') for emerging patterns that suggest the emergence of something new.
Meanwhile, one must ensure there is a mechanism for testing 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 in the above list,while striving for the latter. In other words, it is challenging to implement efficiency while unravelling theunderlying logic to strive for effectiveness. Similarly, it is challenging to implement learning while unravelling the underlying assumptions to strive for unlearning, and so forth
There are various arguments that could be made to support the above logic. For instance, one might consider that any competitive advantage is transitory - given the changing dynamics of the environment, the industry and the competition. What is ebest' today may be eworst' tomorrow, depending on the shift in the references that determined its ebest-ness', hence the need for ongoing re-assessment.
Many organisations strive to establish best practices parameters and measure every activity as dictated by the metrics .Often they dont realise that the metrics which are intented as tools gradually become a habit then the organisation very slowly becomes its slave.At some point of time in the future the very basis of its implementaion is sidelined and barring some core and fundamental values of the metrics a major chunk of it gets eroded with the constant state of flux in recruitment and attrition .
Another interesting factor is that often organisation strive to reach a certain parameter of quality certification with lot of enthusiasm and after certification it usually is the downslide with the TAG of being certified obtained unless there is a regular " health check " which ensures that all the bench mark are strictly adhered to and monitored
Now, the question of how it can be implemented must be asked. What is evident from my discussions at some of the big knowledge management conferences is that most experts 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, optimisation oriented, convergent model. However, human minds, being endowed naturally by sense-making capability, could impose structures of patterns on the changing shape of emesses' and provide the necessary correction. Importantly, this correction needs to be scanned, tested and implemented in ereal time' to keep in tune with the changing dynamics (discontinuities) of the external environment
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