Hildy Gottlieb, President of the Community-Driven Institute, recently made some potent observations in a blog post entitled When Best Practice is Bad Practice. In it, she bemoans the overuse of the phrase ‘Best Practice’, especially by her consulting colleagues, and cites a number of the problems with the whole idea of Best Practices:

1)  A Best Practice is typically imposed on an organization by a manager or a process-hawker selling a particularly methodology or enterprise solution.  It promotes the idea, as Hildy says, that ‘the answers are outside us’  when, in fact, this is totally untrue.  The answers are always within.  Our inspiration and motivation for working through them may come from somewhere else, but the important questions and the talent for answering them are within each of us, waiting to be discovered.

2)  It’s something people can fight over.  Let’s face it, managers and boards will fight over and chew on what is ‘Best’ until, by the time it actually gets implemented, there’s no meat on its bones.   After a pride of management lions has finished feeding on it, a Best Practice can resemble a zebra carcass of mediocrity.

3)  Sometimes it’s worse than mediocre, it can actually be something BAD masquerading as Best.  This, according to Hildy, happens when managers use Best Practices to either absolve themselves from accountability or, at the other extreme, micromanage.   And when managers use Best Practices to characterize players, who may be equally passionate about the mission but have different approaches to it, as problems or troublemakers instead of allies, Truly Awful Practices often ensue.

The GameChangers analysis of Hildy’s post:

Best Practices are often a weapon of choice in the management game.  Because by definition there can only be one Best, managers are inspired to compete with one another for supremacy, usually at the expense of teams waiting for decisions and direction.

The idea that there is ANY ONE WAY to do things Right or Best is a huge issue for relationships between managers and teams, and to tell you the truth, for people generally.  When a husband tells a wife that Best Practice is Football, the wife opines that it’s Soccer and junior thinks it’s Skateboarding, we are going to have issues, and we are all going to be unhappy. This kind of squabbling and scrapping scenario is we often experience at the top management or board level of an organization–a battle for whose narrative will hold sway, forget how effective the narrative will be, that’s secondary to winning the battle to have your Practice declared Best.

The quest to own ‘Best’ is at its most toxic when managers are either pro bono (”If you don’t want my opinion, why did you ask?”) or justifying the difference between what they get paid and what their teams get paid (”I’m a genius and you’re not, okay?”).

Several of the commentors to Hildy’s post suggest Inspiration as a possible alternative to the Best Practice scenario.  This can be a slippery slope too, because Inspiring Others can be a less-then-tangible practice.  Ephemeral, it comes and goes.  The most inspiring (emotionally uplifting) point of view can also be the most unachievable day to day.  We have a good friend who’s an inspirational character, so inspiring that Hollywood made a movie about him.  I wouldn’t want him coaching my team, though, because he only knows one way to approach a problem, and that’s with a kind of stubbornly sunny, over-the-top cheerleading optimism that is unique to him. Most people don’t have his game, and most don’t want to. He’s great to have on the team, but day in and day out, he is far from its most valuable player.

Overuse of the phrase Best Practice is a symptom of an organizational illness, a telling twitch in the body politic.  The illness itself, the battle by managers and brands for control of the narrative, is what we call Scripting. The opposite of Scripting is Improvisation.  The ability to improvise is the most important practice in the day to day life of a productive team.  There are huge benefits to improvisation that cannot possibly be realized by a group bound up in a dialogue about Best Practices:

The ability to listen connects managers and teams, and creates a collaborative environment.

The ability to adapt means that we are open to more than one way to achieve an objective.  It recognizes that we will encounter problems that we could not have anticipated.

Improvisation recognizes that the ability to solve problems is much more important than deciding ahead of time how the problem is going to be solved.  It does not expect us to fit square pegs into round holes.  Rather, it gives us the ability to create dodecahedronal pegs when we encounter dodecahedronal holes.

Improvisation is not a Best Practice.  It is a Good Practice.  With discipline and patience some Good Practices will actually turn out to be Best.  Minute to minute, day to day, expand your capacity for doing Good, and let history determine what is Best.   As Steve Jobs says, “You can only connect the dots looking backwards.”  You can only construct the narrative of the battle after the battle has been fought.   To ensure that dots are connected and battles won, move forward always.  And be prepared to improvise.