PART FOUR IN A SERIES – Important Points about Best Practices

As we said previously: Best Practices are solutions that have worked in the past and represent old knowledge. Best Practices have a context for success.

If you are looking to best practices, you had better understand the Psychological Inertia of your situation so you understand (before time, effort, and resources are expended) if their context for success will work within your context for success.

Also, you had better understand what secondary problems will be introduced into your ‘system’ by this change.

The good news is because best practices are solutions that have worked for others, they are an easier sell – they have a track record

Using best practices may allow you to make up time. If all goes well, you can get up to speed quickly and run at the head of the pack. But you won’t be number one unless you add additional value yourself. If you simply adopt other people’s best work, the best results you can hope for is the same as they achieved.

By the time something has been categorized and recognized as a Best Practice, it has very nearly lost its premium as a cutting edge advantage

If you adopted all of the best practices from multiple sources, would you be the best? No, you would most likely be confused and chaotic rather than best in class.

The second most important point about best practices: Best Practices are a subset of Innovation. Understanding best practices is one of the initial steps you perform during the innovation process.

Many of the tools and steps of making good use of best practices are also the first steps towards innovation.

If you want to effectively utilize the resources you spent on collecting the best practices from history or currently, you will most likely, have to take an inventive approach to fit a best practice to the needs of your organization and people. This would be the best practice of using best practices.