Businesses, like just about everything else, are always looking for the best way to do things. Businesses also like predictability. They like to know what the response or result will be to any specific action that may be taken. It is because of these drives and desires that when something is dubbed a “Best Practice” all businesses seem to flock towards it. While on the surface this has all the appearances of a good thing, in reality I think it has a tendency to hold businesses back.

I think the idea of “Best Practices” is a business construct created by consultants to position themselves as invaluable to the progress and evolution of business. In other words, it was created so someone could get paid for it. This would be similar to a music critic who tried to position Justin Bieber as invaluable to the progress and evolution of music. I guess you truly have to be a “Belieber” to buy into either of them. I also do not know of any music critic that would propose such a thing, and still be allowed to retain their music critic membership card, or music critic certification, or music critic secret decoder ring or whatever it is that allows them to be accepted as some sort of music critic. Even so, there are people who are actually “Beliebers”, and there are also businesses that buy into the idea of best practices.

Personally I am a Jazz and Alternative Rock kind of guy. I guess this musical preference may also indicate why I am more attracted to the more original and less formulaic ways of doing things.

I am concerned that when someone claims that they have developed a “Best Practice” that they are inferentially removing the possibility that there may be some other different or better way of doing things. After all, what can be better than a best practice? An even better than best practice? A new and improved best practice? This also brings up the question to me of: who gets to declare something a “Best Practice”? How do they know that their “best practice” is better than anything else, including those methods that may not have even been tried yet? My view is that they don’t.

I seem to have gotten off into musical allegories here, so I guess I will try and continue in that vein. Just because John Phillip Souza may have developed what some music critics now consider to be the very best practice when it comes to the genre of music that is known as “Marches” does not mean that he has developed a best practice for music, or marching bands for that matter. In fact as I sit here the idea of people who march to the beat of a different drummer continues to work its way into my consciousness. To take this idea even a step further, I think I remember watching a college football game on television last year where at half time the band actually played a heavy metal song by the band Metallica, instead of a Souza march. As I recall it got quite an ovation from the crowd.

I think any business that aspires to something other than their own optimal performance is limiting themselves. The idea here is that optimal performance is a moving target. As times, competition and conditions change, so will the optimal performance target. I think this will be the case, as in a different case, for each individual business. It is the differences and the different approaches to their optimal practices that generate differentiation, and competitive advantages for businesses in the market.

Best practice has a tendency to be thought of as a process, or a way of doing things. The idea being that if you do things in the best way possible, you should end up with the best possible result. Herein lays the issue with best practices for me.

Any process that is deemed to be best without first comparing and adapting it to both the existing business environment and the known and desired goals will probably not work. For me the definition of a best practice is the process that will get the business from where it currently is to the goals that it has set for itself the fastest, least expensively and the most efficient way possible. Notice how the best practice is dependent on both the starting point and the desired end state.

There are many purveyors of the best practice solution who would posit that this is not the case. They would say that the proper system is to change the business to adapt to a known process. This sounds suspiciously to me that a consultant (or the equivalent) has generated some sort of process that if rigorously followed should generate a positive result. Instead of going through the effort of adapting the “Best Practice” to the current or new business environment, it is positioned that the environment must be changed or adapted to the process.

Wait a minute. How is that again?

That to me would be the equivalent of deciding on a time signature (beat) and a chord progression in music and then stating that all successful songs will need to follow that guideline. Classical music, waltzes, polkas, pop, rock, jazz, bluegrass, etc, etc, will not all fit into this best practice guideline. It is the creativity and ingenuity of the musician who takes their knowledge of music and generates a new song that determines how successful they will be. If there truly was a best practice in music that was to be followed, all songs would sound monotonously similar.

Just as it is with the creativity and ingenuity of business leader who takes their knowledge of the components of the business and combines them in a new way that creates a new more efficient business model or (gulp) practice.

Too many times it seems that businesses want to look at their practices and processes in isolation of the goals and objectives. As a would-be musician I practice in order to maintain my current (low) level of musical proficiency, and to hopefully improve. My goal is to play as well in the Jazz band as I do when I practice. I find that each time I perform with the Jazz band, by the very nature of having others in the band who I interact with during the performance, each performance is different from how I practice.

Sometimes it is better, and sometimes I wish I was better. It is the difference between having proficiency and trying to apply a best practice. It is the performance that counts, not the practice.

Driving an adherence to the idea of implementing an existing and defined best practice will stifle the creative ability of leaders to try and evolve and create new models for the business. The constraint of trying to change and to fit the business to the defined process limits the ability of the leader to define a new way or new direction, and the business’s ability to adapt to the changes in its environment. They will be locked into trying to recreate something that may have worked in the past practice, but may not fit with the current members of the business and the performance that they are being asked to give.

In music you look for people who have capability and proficiency, and can combine their talents with others to make the music. In business I don’t think that adherence to a best practice can be a substitute for capability and proficiency, and it may in fact hinder a business’s ability to change and adapt, especially when the music changes.