Is This Practice Best?
Best practices. What are they? If you've ever been passionate about making your team/organization run smoothly, like a well-lubricated clock, you must have hunted for best practices that other organizations/teams have successfully used to resolve the bottlenecks which look exactly the same as the ones that cause this itchy sensation in your brain…
Let’s refer to a definition of best practice:
“A best practice is a method or a technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark…. Best practice is considered by some as a business buzzword, used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things that multiple organizations can use.”
Take a yet closer look. Does anything strike your eye as odd here? To me, there’s a mismatch at the level of formal logic. This definition includes hypothetical “multiple organizations” and mentions “a standard way of doing things” but has nothing to say about the most essential foundation for trying any practice. Be it a best practice, or a custom practice that works very well for your particular organization, in your particular business and production environment, and in that part of the world where you happen to be located —practices by themselves are not worth much unless someone — like… a leader? — hasn’t carefully and strategically applied them as seen fit for the unique needs and context of their organizations.
How could we logically assume, that if we copy-paste a best practice from company A to company B, where company A is Google, or Facebook, or Yahoo, and company B is any software development organization, then this practice would work 100% as actually “best” for company B?
I’ve written about best practices before, and on how one has to be careful about committing to them. For instance, while reviewing “Remote” book, I highlighted the fact that if an organization is serious about remote work, they would want to have thoughtfully designed the info-space and flows for async exchanges. In line with the analogy used in the review, farmers somehow know that if they mimic a best practice, it has to be used for a certain kind of soil, under certain climate conditions, or for a certain yearly amount of rainfall and sunshine. Also, this best practice would vary depending on what do they grow: potatoes, corn, wheat, etc. No farmer would be as crazy as to use the same fertilizers, or the same cultivation techniques for various plants. However, with organizations, although they are far more diverse than plants, and differ by many more things than climate, sunshine, or rainfall, it looks like the common trend is to ignore the subtle differences, put up the banner high and march along chanting: “This Super Mega company is using such and such as a best practice. If they are doing this, and someone has called this “best practice”, we don’t need to waste time looking and thinking. Let’s just replicate what they do”. As a side note, I must add that “waste time” here might portend negligence, or lack of experience, or being too tired of looking and thinking, and simply wanting to try just anything that seems to work. Or, which isn’t that obvious, a quest for best practices might mean that this company has grown fat on their belly and they now have some buffer to play with new things, if this playing seems to compensate for what would otherwise look as a shortage of organizational breakthroughs.
Back in the day, in what would appear to be a very anti-mainstream move, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo — whose job was to manage the crisis, and I wrote about that earlier — cut an end to the looseness of remote work that threatened to strangle the drive and focus at Yahoo. They showered her with digital rotten tomatoes. However, I applaud Ms. Mayer’s insight as she chose to act based on her own gut feeling and her own pragmatic analysis of Yahoo’s pulse beat. She wasn’t preoccupied with whether or not she as a CEO had to waste her time on curtsies just to re-affirm to the employees that the company trusts them. Probably, she knew that those who could be trusted would understand this act, and those who could not — they’d quit. However, even with trusted employees — and that’s what appears to be the case with Yahoo — there are times when to stand firm and to be united in reaching a crucial goal, the organizational leaders will want to cut down on the looseness and just bring people together, because the shared energy of the team has to be concentrated in one physical space. Not scattered in residential houses, or weakened by hanging out at home in sweat pants. Have you ever heard of a company that made a breakthrough at a challenging time as they worked remotely? I haven’t. Many stories of crucial organizational advancements have it that people, the teammates, prefer to stay close together, exercising their concentrated will and resolve to accomplish the Task at hand. The remote way of working is rather a way to go smoothly with the flow, once the breakthrough is accomplished. Or, a company might use remote work as a “we do this, too” way of providing a popular perk to the employees.
I used the example of remote work as it appears to be the most common “best practice” case to show how unique contexts require unique practices. If someone considers copy-pasting a best practice to their organization, they might want to do a research checking in which context the company they’re copying the best practice from has used it, which culture does this company have, and how close or similar the culture in the recipient org is to the culture of the practice donor org. And, as with remote work, how well-attuned for the remote work the communication/knowledge sharing processes are. Trust is good, but it’s not enough sometimes, as the case with Yahoo shows.
…so, which other best practices can be questioned? :)
Related:
A Manifesto for Big Picture Pragmatism
To Glass Cliff Walkers With Love
It’s Teamwork. Rescue Me, Quotation.
The Dietitians of Info-Sharing
Further reading:
Marissa Mayer: Do Something You Feel Unprepared To Do
Ex-Yahoos Confess: Marissa Mayer Is Right To Ban Working From Home
Marissa Mayer defends her famous ban on remote work: ‘I hope that’s not my legacy’
This story is based on an earlier article.
