Archive for the ‘Best Practice’ Category
A thin veneer of process
Some time back I published a post arguing that much of the knowledge relating to organizational practices is tacit – i.e. it is impossible to capture in writing or speech. Consequently, best practices and standards that purportedly codify “best of breed” organizational practices are necessarily incomplete: they do not (and cannot) detail how a practice should be internalised and implemented in specific situations.
For a best practice to be successful, it has to be understood and moulded in a way that makes sense in the working culture and environment of the implementing organisation. One might refer to this process as “adaptation” or “customization”, but it is much more than minor tweaking of a standard process or practice. Tacit knowledge relates to the process of learning, or getting to know. This necessarily differs from individual to individual, and can’t be picked up by reading best practice manuals. Building tacit knowledge takes time and, therefore, so does the establishment of new organizational processes. Consequently, there is a lot of individual on-the-job learning and tinkering before a newly instituted procedure becomes an organizational practice.
This highlights a gap between how practices are implemented and how they actually work. All too often, an organisation will institute a project to implement a best practice – say a quality management methodology – and declare success as soon as the project is completed. Such a declaration is premature because the new practice is yet to take root in the organisation. This common approach to best practice implementation does not allow enough time for the learning and dialogue that is so necessary for the establishment of an organizational practice. The practice remains “a thin veneer of process” that peels off all too easily.
Yet, despite the fact that it does not work, the project-oriented approach remains popular. Why is this so? I believe this happens because decision-makers view the implementation of best practices as a purely technical problem – practices are seen as procedures that can be grafted upon the organization without due regard to culture or context and environment or ethics. When culture, context and people are considered as incidental, practices are reduced to their mechanical (or bureaucratic) elements – those that can be captured in documents, workflow diagrams and forms. These elements are tangible so implementers can point to these as “proof” that the processes have been implemented.
Hence the manager who says: “We have rolled out our new project management system and all users have undergone training. The implementation of the new methodology has been completed. ”
Sorry, but it has just begun. Success – if it comes at all – will take a lot more time and effort.
So how should best practice implementations be approached?
It should be clear that a successful implementation cannot come from a cookbook approach that follows textbook or consultant “recipes.” Rather, it involves the following:
- Extensive adaptation of techniques to suit the context and environment of the organisation.
- Involvement of the people who will work with and be affected the processes. This often goes under the banner of “buy-in”, but it is more than that: these people must have a say in what adaptations are made and how they are made. But even before they do that, they must be allowed to play with the process – to tinker – so that they can improve their understanding of its intent and working.
- An understanding that the process is not cast in stone – that it must be modified as employees gain insights into how the process can be improved.
All these elements tie into the idea that practices and procedures involve tacit knowledge that sits in people’s heads. The visible, or explicit, aspects – which are often mistaken for the practice – are but a thin veneer of process.
So, in conclusion, the technical implementation of a best practice is only the beginning – it is the start of the real work of internalizing the practice through learning required to sustain and support it.
What is the make of that car? A tale about tacit knowledge
My son’s fascination with cars started early: the first word he uttered wasn’t “Mama” or “Dada”, it was “Brrrm.”
His interest grew with him; one of the first games we played together as a family was “What’s the make of that car?” – where his mum or I would challenge him to identify the make of a car that had just overtaken us when we were out driving. The first few times we’d have to tell him what a particular car was (he couldn’t read yet), but soon enough he had a pretty good database in his little head. Exchanges like the following became pretty common:
“So what’s that one Rohan?”
“Mitsubishi Magna, Dad”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, it is Mitsubishi,” he’d assert, affronted that I would dare question his ability to identify cars.
He was sometimes wrong about the model (and his mum would order me not to make an issue of it). More often than not, though, he’d be right. Neither his mum nor I are car enthusiasts, so we just assumed he figured it out from the logo and / or the letters inscribing the make on the boot.
Then one day we asked him to identify a car that was much too far away for him to be able to see letters or logos. Needless to say, he got it right…
Astounded, I asked, “Did you see the logo when the car passed us?”
“No Dad”
“How did you know then?”
“From the shapes, of course?” As though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“What shapes?” I was truly flummoxed.
“All cars have different shaped lights and bumpers and stuff.” To his credit, he refrained from saying, didn’t you know that.
“Ah, I see…”
But I didn’t really. Somehow Rohan had intuitively figured out that specific makes and models have unique tail-light, boot and bumper designs. He understood, or knew, car makes and models in a completely different way than we did – his knowledge of cars was qualitatively different from ours.
(I should make it clear that he picked up this particular skill because he enjoys learning about cars; he is, therefore, intrinsically motivated to learn about them. In most other areas his abilities are pretty much in line with kids his age)
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Of course, the cognoscenti are well aware that cars can be identified by their appearance. I wasn’t, and neither was my dear wife. Those who know cars can identify the make (and even the model) from a mere glance. Moreover, they can’t tell you exactly how they know, they just know – and more often than not they’re right.
This incident came back to me recently, as I was reading Michael Polanyi’s book, The Tacit Dimension, wherein he explains his concept of tacit knowledge (which differs considerably from what it has come to mean in mainstream knowledge management). The basic idea is that we know more than we can tell; that a significant part of our knowledge cannot be conveyed to others via speech or writing. At times we may catch a glimpse of it when the right questions are asked in the right context, but this almost always happens by accident rather than plan. We have to live with the fact that it is impossible for me to understand something you know in the same way that you do. You could explain it to me, I could even practice it under your guidance, but my understanding of it will never be the same as yours.
My point is this: we do not and cannot fully comprehend how others understand and know things, except through fortuitous occurrences. If this is true for a relatively simple matter like car makes and models, what implications does it have for more complex issues that organisations deal with everyday? For example: can we really understand a best practice in the way that folks in the originating organisation do? More generally, are our present methods of capturing and sharing insights (aka Knowledge Management) effective?
Why best practices are hard to practice (and what can be done about it)
Introduction
In a recent post entitled, Why Best Practices Are Hard to Practice, Ron Ashkenas mentions two common pitfalls that organisations encounter when implementing best practices. These are:
- Lack of adaptation: this refers to a situation in which best practices are applied without customizing them to an organisation’s specific needs.
- Lack or adoption: this to the tendency of best practice initiatives to fizzle out due to lack of adoption in the day-to-day work of an organisation.
Neither point is new: several practitioners and academics have commented on the importance adaptation and adoption in best practice implementations (see this article from 1997, for example). Despite this, organisations continue to struggle when implementing best practices, which suggests a deeper problem. In this post, I explore the possibility that problems of adaptation and adoption arise because much of the knowledge relevant to best practices is tacit – it cannot be codified or captured via symbolic systems (such as writing) or speech. This “missing” tacit knowledge makes it difficult to adapt and adopt practices in a meaningful way. All is not lost, though: best practices can be useful as long as they are viewed as templates or starting points for discussion, rather than detailed prescriptions that are to be imitated uncritically.
The importance of tacit knowledge
Michael Polanyi’s aphorism – “We can know more than we can tell’ – summarises the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge : the former refers to what we can “tell” (write down, or capture in some symbolic form) whereas the latter are the things we know but cannot explain to others via writing or speech alone.
The key point is: tacit knowledge is more relevant to best practices than its explicit counterpart.
“Why?” I hear you ask.
Short Answer: Explicit knowledge is a commodity that can be bought and sold, tacit knowledge isn’t. Hence it is the latter that gives organisations their unique characteristics and competencies.
For a longer answer, I’ll quote from a highly-cited paper by Maskell and Malmberg entitled, Localised Learning and Industrial Competitiveness:
It is a logical and interesting – though sometimes overlooked – consequence of the present development towards a knowledge-based economy, that the easier codified (tradeable) knowledge is accessed, the more significant becomes tacit knowledge for sustaining the heterogeneity of the firm’s resources. If all factors of production, all organisational blue-prints, all market-information and all production technologies were readily available in all parts of the world at (more or less) the same price, economic progress would dwindle. Resource heterogeneity is the very foundation for building firm specific competencies and thus for variations between firms in their competitiveness. Resource heterogeneity fuels the market process of selection between competing firms
Tacit knowledge thus confers a critical advantage on firms. It is precisely this knowledge that distinguishes firms from each other and sets the “best” (however one might choose to define that) apart from the rest. It is the knowledge that best practices purport to capture, but can’t.
Transferring tacit knowledge
The transfer of tacit knowledge is an iterative and incremental process: apprentices learn by practice, by refining their skills over time. Such learning requires close interaction between the teacher and the taught. Communication technology can obviate the need for some face-to-face interaction but he fact remains that proximity is important for effective transfer of tacit knowledge. In the words of Maskell and Malmberg:
The interactive character of learning processes will in itself introduce geographical space as a necessary dimension to take into account. Modern communications technology will admittedly allow more of long distance interaction than was previously possible. Still, certain types of information and knowledge exchange continue to require regular and direct face-to-face contact. Put simply, the more tacit the knowledge involved, the more important is spatial proximity between the actors taking part in the exchange. The proximity argument is twofold. First, it is related to the time geography of individuals. Everything else being equal, interactive collaboration will be less costly and more smooth, the shorter the distance between the participants. The second dimension is related to proximity in a social and cultural sense. To communicate tacit knowledge will normally require a high degree of mutual trust and understanding, which in turn is related not only to language but also to shared values and ‘culture’.
The main point to take away from their argument is that proximity is important for effective transfer of tacit knowledge. The individuals involved need to be near each other geographically (shared space, face-to-face) and culturally (shared values and norms). By implication, this is also the only way to transfer best practice knowledge.
Discussion
Best practices, by definition, aim to capture knowledge that enables successful organizations be what they are. As we have seen above, much of this knowledge is tacit: it is context and history dependent, and requires physical/cultural proximity for effective transfer. Further, it is hard to extract, codify and transfer such knowledge in a way that makes sense outside its original setting. In light of this, it is easy to understand why adapting and adopting best practices is hard: it is hard because best practices are incomplete – they omit important elements (the tacit bits that can’t be written down). Organisations have to (re)discover these in their own way. The explicit and (re-discovered) tacit elements then need to be integrated into new workplace practices that are necessarily different from standardised best practices. This makes the new practices unique to the implementing organisation.
The above suggests that best practices should be seen as starting points – or “bare bones” templates – for transforming an organisation’s work practices. I have made this point in an earlier post in which I reviewed this paper by Jonathan Wareham and Hans Cerrits. Quoting from that post:
[Wareham and Cerrits] suggest an expanded view of best practices which includes things such as:
- Using best practices as guides for learning new technologies or new ways of working.
- Using best practices to generate creative insight into how business processes work in practice.
- Using best practices as a guide for change – that is, following the high-level steps, but not necessarily the detailed prescriptions.
These are indeed sensible and reasonable statements. However, they are much weaker than the usual hyperbole-laden claims that accompany best practices.
The other important implication of the above is that successful adoption of organisational practices is possible only with the active involvement of front-line employees. “Active” is the operative word here, signifying involvement and participation. One of the best ways to get involvement is to seek and act on employee opinions about their day-to-day work practices. Best practices can serve as templates for these discussions. Participation can be facilitated through the use of collective deliberation techniques such as dialogue mapping.
Wrap-up
Best practices have long been plagued by problems of adaptation and adoption. The basic reason for this is that much of the knowledge pertaining to practices is tacit and cannot be transferred easily. Successful implementation requires that organisations use best practices as templates to build on rather than prescriptions to be followed to the letter. A good way to start this process is through participatory design discussions aimed at filling in the (tacit) gaps. These discussions should be conducted in a way that invites involvement of all relevant stakeholders, especially those who will work with and be responsible for the practices. Such an inclusive approach ensures that the practices will be adapted to suit the organisation’s needs. Further, it improves the odds of adoption because it incorporates the viewpoints of the most important stakeholders at the outset.
Paul Culmsee and I are currently working on a book that describes such an approach that goes “beyond best practices”. See this post for an excerpt from the book (and this one for a rather nice mock-up cover!)
Eight to Late 