Why chase best practices?

Corporate bosses often tell their managers to look for best practices. No questions are asked because, over a period of time, it has seemingly become an article of faith. It is difficult to say how and from where this belief came. However, some management techniques like ‘benchmarking’, ‘business process re-engineering’ and ‘knowledge management’ directly or indirectly provided support to it.

For example, benchmarking suggests to shamelessly copy the best performer. Process re-engineering relies on stable repetitive relationships with information available for each decision point. More recently, knowledge management theories, too, focussed on best practices. Thus, irrespective of the origin of this thought, the reinforcement received from time to time made people think that it is the right way to go.

What does the best practice story tend to convey? It conveys that (i) there is one best way to do something; (ii) we can identify and codify the ingredients of the practice; (iii) we can easily adopt that in our work organisation; and (iv) it is desirable to go for that.

The truth though is, ‘best practice’ can only be mandated in situations characterised by having repeating relationship between cause and effect, not otherwise.

Second, what worked well for one organisation may not necessarily produce the same outcome in another.

Commitment to excel

Third — and more important — is the ability to adopt the practice. Best practice is not just the observable day-to-day practices. Beneath the surface are deep-seated commitment to excel and the conviction to deliver. These attributes are far from easy to ingrain in people in any and every organisation without a mindset to anchor them.

Consider an example from the game of cricket. Current fab four in the cricketing world, namely Virat Kohli of India, Ken Williamson of New Zealand, Steve Smith of Australia, and Joe Root of England, seem to score tonnes of runs for their respective sides, and do so in full public view. But their compatriots in their own teams and other cricketers elsewhere find it difficult to emulate them.

Why? Because, they typically fall short in creating the required mindset. What is true for an individual is also true for an organisation. Each work organisation consciously or unconsciously creates its own mindset, from where its management system and day-to-day activities stem. A mindset that operates in most organisations is: “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Second: “If there is any problem, people must have caused it”.

This creates a mentality of maintaining the status quo, and the habit of looking for the culprit, not the cause. Processes create the output, not the people working on those processes. Continuous process improvement needs to be the focus. Sadly, accountants, with their backward looking information system, tend to provide some degree of comfort to the organisation to perpetuate the status quo.

Accounting reports of the previous year cannot influence timely action as these do not tell where the organisation is currently headed. Best practice proponents seem to believe that a stable system of cause and effect will always be at work; therefore make all decisions rule based. Something like if A and B but not C are in operation, take action X. Using such cybernetic models in human decision-making — involving humans — is not only questionable but can also be disastrous. Humans tend to pattern match with their own experiences in arriving at a decision.

Secondly, personal comfort — as opposed to algorithmic best answer — is always given greater importance, creating an entrained behaviour. The challenge is to look closely at three basic assumptions inbuilt in our entrained behaviour. These are: assumptions of order, of rational choice, and of intent. It is, thus, important to build capacity to develop an organisation’s own amalgam of insights based upon empirical observations and inductive reasoning, instead of trying to copy someone else’s way of doing things.

An interesting case is that of ‘Mumbai dabbawallas ’. While the corporate world keeps struggling to attain six-sigma level of quality in their operations, the ‘ dabbawallas ’ attained it without even knowing what it is. That should sum up the entire story.

The writer is former Dean and Director-in-Charge, IIM Lucknow

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