Best Practices
Introduction
Think about resource-poor countries that are economically thriving. Look for the reasons behind their success and excellence. What made a country like Switzerland the world’s leader in chocolate production? What made a country like the Netherlands the best at producing cheeses, despite having only a small number of cows and scarce land? The secret lies in learning and continuous improvement — and this is what the term “best practices” is all about, a term that appears constantly in the business world. So what does it mean? On what basis is a given practice classified as a best practice? Why should we care about adopting best practices? Where can we find them? And does adopting them guarantee certain success? These are the questions probably running through many readers’ minds — questions I’ll address in this article, God willing.
Definition of Best Practices
Best practices are the methodologies, frameworks, or work procedures that experience and research have proven to be optimal for achieving specific desired outcomes. Usually a methodology’s reputation grows once its success in several places has been demonstrated, then it gets adopted by others on the back of that reputation. The “proof” we’re talking about isn’t based on professional opinion but on scientific evidence through performance indicators measured before, during, and after an organization’s adoption of a particular practice. Over time and with repeated experimentation, the practice may become the only accepted way to perform a given task in the eyes of organizations. Competitive analysis is also done — you look at the best service providers or product manufacturers, then track and adopt their methods, considering that their success depends primarily on their adoption of best practices. If you can’t access them, information about them is sometimes gathered through unauthorized means far removed from professional ethics — for the purpose of imitating them. This is called industrial espionage.
Look at the following keywords and try to connect them to the previous definition:
PMP, PRINCE2, ITIL, Agile, Lean, Six Sigma, TOGAF, Kaizen
Perhaps the best example of best practices is the famous guides issued by the international ISO organization — which is why many companies and sectors are proud to obtain certification of one of its standards, signaling their professionalism and dedication. As another example of best practices becoming available for tasks unimaginable just a while ago: best practices for naming files on your computer.
Why should we care about adopting best practices?
The most important reason employers adopt best practices is the desire to avoid reinventing the wheel and to benefit from others’ experiences and mistakes instead of going through them again themselves. After that comes the desire to make the optimal use of the company’s resources.
As an example of the importance: sharing best practices in the charitable sector was one of the top stated priorities in the European Union’s Vision 2020. It would not be placed on the priority ladder if it weren’t important from their perspective.
Where can we find them?
Say you’re the owner of a company in some field and you want your company to adopt best practices in its industry — for the sake of competing and gaining greater market share, and above all to ensure resources are used optimally. The question that arises: where can best practices be found? Going back to the definition, we can infer that diversity of experience and the accumulation of expertise and knowledge in any practical field equips a person with the kind of expertise that helps them identify best practices in their field. So they exist in the form of tacit knowledge held in the minds of experts and specialists — undocumented.
Another form: documented knowledge held by some companies that have spent decades providing certain services or manufacturing certain products. Some companies consider this knowledge intellectual capital and surround it with extreme secrecy for fear it will leak, sometimes protecting it through utility patents. Other companies — like consulting firms — exploit their possession of this knowledge for profit by providing consulting services that share part of their accumulated expertise, which they built over time by documenting the tacit knowledge of the experts and consultants working with them, and refining it through observing the results of its application with their clients. Here we return to the proverb: “advice that was free in the desert is sold by consulting firms by the camelload.”
There are non-profit bodies that provide this kind of practice for free, including international relief agencies such as UNESCO. You’ll also find many guides containing guiding principles or advisory standards issued by professional unions or government regulators with the goal of organizing work and ensuring a certain level of quality.
Some online players have also begun leveraging their expertise to author guides and frameworks related to leveraging their platforms for marketing, recruiting, public relations, etc. Look at the best-practice guide recently published by Twitter, focused on guiding marketers in companies to make the best use of Twitter — and one similar to it from Facebook on page management best practices.
Last but not least, qualitative marketing research is used to formulate best-practice guides by recruiting seasoned experts in particular fields and holding focus groups with them to debate, select, and codify best practices for a specific industry, or to develop solutions for a specific social issue through creating systems and laws to help eliminate it. This approach has been in common use for a long time — one example that comes to mind is the school of jurisprudence in Kufa established by Abu Hanifa al-Nu’man, founded to debate religious-legal questions and issue rulings on them.
Does adopting best practices guarantee certain success?
This is an important question. The organization’s culture and the maturity level of its people are critical factors in successfully adopting best practices. This means owning such practices as documents, guides, work procedures, or policies does not necessarily mean successful application. That calls for measuring the maturity level of the organization, understanding its culture, and gauging employees’ flexibility in accepting change as well as their skills and ability to activate change — before committing investment in a consulting firm or a seasoned expert to obtain the best practices. Just because you can access them doesn’t necessarily mean you can adopt and apply them successfully. Sometimes the cultural divide is at the level of the broader society, and many Arab companies in the 1990s experienced miserable failure when adopting management theories from “Planet Japan,” as some like to call it.
In closing: a bit of critique
There are always two schools of thought on any topic. Just as there is a school that promotes adopting best practices and talks about their importance, there is also a school that critiques the first and challenges its claims. The second school believes that applying best practices makes your organization’s performance average — because these practices are recycled by consulting firms and tested on their clients, meaning any competitor of yours can bring in the same consulting firm and apply the same practices, causing all competitors to perform similarly. Total reliance on them and absolute faith that the only source of improving business is calling on best practices from consulting firms also kills the spirit of creativity in your organization and reinforces a principle of dependency.
This view has a strong point. If you look at leading companies around the world, you’ll find they rely heavily on creativity — some have allocated a daily share of the employee’s time to creativity and thinking about problems and opportunities to innovate solutions, products, and services. You’ll also notice these leading companies have become the ones leveraging their own experience to formulate best practices and capitalize on them commercially. A hybrid school between the two camps can be adopted: the benefit of discussing best practices cannot be entirely denied, and likewise sidelining creativity in total reliance on consultants and experts cannot have its destructive impact on employees denied. Perhaps the best solution is the middle path between the two.
For those who want to read more, consult the following books:
- The Search for Excellence
- A Passion for Excellence
Note
“The views expressed in this article are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organization I work for.”
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