Best Practices are Flawed Because We Are Human

 I love the association community, but I don't like our obsession with "best practices." Having said that, I have to admit that I get some benefit from the obsession. Volunteer Boards I think get a lot of comfort out of the idea--that we, the somewhat-trusted staff, have access to this pool of "best practices" in association management that the volunteers could never know about coming from a different industry. "The staff knows the best practices," the Board members tell each other, "so let them do their job. Let's not reinvent the wheel." I admit it: it makes my job easier. 

But I have also written about the dangers of best practices, as have many, many smart people. There are compelling arguments why best practices don't work, given the uniqueness of organizational cultures, the inability to track true cause and effect in organizations, and the power of coming up with your OWN solutions. The most recent argument comes from a blog post by Holly Green: best practices are flawed because we are human beings.

Best practices are developed by experts. Why is this a problem? Holly says:

Because experts are human, and as humans we don't believe what we see. Instead, we see what we already believe. We constantly seek to prove what we think is right, and as a result we miss critical data and limit our success by getting locked into ideas and assumptions that may no longer be true.

Best practices will never go away entirely, but we need to wake up to how they are robbing our organizations of the capacity to be successful. Pay attention to where your reliance on experts blocks your system's ability to learn. Be honest with yourself about the cost of choosing the comfortable, less contentious path in your Board conversations (these are association best practices; trust us). Challenge your own expertise, constantly. 

Comments

[Maddie Grant]

Rock on. I think this topic ties in directly with the "beyond relevance" conversation. Best practices are basically, at best, the "written" equivalent of "relevance" - and at worst, they are irrelevant as soon as they are written down, since times (and communications, and work, and ideas) are moving so fast these days. If there was a 'wikipedia' for best practices, somewhere continuously updated by everyone, that would be one thing, but (despite best efforts) there just isn't. Why search Associapedia when you can Google for better results?

[Cathi Eifert, CAE]

I have always looked at Best Practices as a starting point - never as a bible on how to do things. I look at them as a way someone else does it from their experience - not something written in stone that guarantees success. Every association is different, every board (every year of every board!) is different - you have to use your experience, your gut to see what will work for you and your challenge. Keep an open mind, share what works for you and then go out and do your thing :)

[Art Stewart, MPM]

I think the discussion of best practices here is in fact guard-railing what the term implies. I've been working in technology for 20 years, where many best practices have been an essential enabler for groundbreaking innovation. Sometimes what is tried and true is quite right, as long as it is organic. Lasting "best practices", in my view, are never stagnant - they are evolutionary by nature. ISO, for example, could not have developed the paradigm-shifting standards they have over the years without some adherence to precedence and proven systems of validation. The real question is what happens to best practices when applied in a given industry. NASA could make a very good argument for the role best practices have played in their achievements. Culture (leadership, assimilation, etc.) can get in the way of a lot of things; unfortunately association culture may be the culprit, not the practices.

[Michelle]

Yes! Even the best of practices are iterative at any moment in time, waiting to be co-created by who is applying them, not followed "statically."

[Jamie]

Awesome comments everyone! Art, I think you're onto something with the culture comment, but I would suggest that both the culture and the practices share some of the blame here. As is implied in the other comments, yes, sometimes you do things exactly as they have been done in the past, or how they were done by another association. Unlike the folks at Enron, I'm not a big fan of co-created accounting practices. But I think the list of things that can be relied on in that way is shrinking. It might even be shrinking at places like NASA, though obviously I don't know. But it has definitely been shrinking for associations, and more than we seem to realize in my opinion, hence this post.