Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on best-practice http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic best-practice Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb It was the best of practices, it was the worst of practices Sun, 15 Feb 2004 16:58:11 +0000 About a year ago I heard Dave Snowden speak. Something he came up with then which I have reflected upon a number of times since was that he thought Best Practice systems were a waste of time. It was much better, he said, to build Worst Practice databases. Now I don't know Dave well enough to guage whether he was being flippant but I've pondered it and I definitely see something. Here is my attempt to understand what I think: Best practice systems are an attempt to capture what works and replicate it. That's a noble aim. Worst practice systems, on the other hand, are a way of capturing what didn't work. How different are they? At a glance one appears to be the inverse of the other, but as I thought about it I began to see them in a subtly different light: <ul> <li>Best practice is about transferring skills.</li> <li>Worst practice is about informing judgements.</li> </ul> Obviously if you can transfer useful skills this is a good thing but there are some pitfalls along the way and, at the heart of it is maybe an assumption which quite often doesn't hold true: that things don't change. An analysis of Worst practice, on the other hand, acts very much more like an <a href="http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadaar.html">After Action Review</a> in provoking thinking. Having said that best practice can be valuable there are some problems to overcome in acquiring it. For a start, best practice may be very hard to agree on. Which parts of an activity contributed to it being best? And, having identified this, it then has to be rendered into terms meaningful to others. When you consider that practice often has a high emphasis on doing/skill it is clear that tranferring best practice is either on, or over the border, of transfering of tacit knowledge. Best practice is expensive! For a practice to be transferable all these challenges must be met otherwise no benefit will be accrued. By constrast (and I'm making a bit of a leap here) worst practice is probably easier to identify and codify. We're so much more used to honing in on problems. Also we can useful work with clues and vagueness in a way that best practice doesn't suggest. Unfortunately there is an even bigger problem. Best practice tells you what worked in the past. It doesn't tell you anything about what will work in the future. Accepting best practice is accepting a predictive model which assumes that today will be very like yesterday. In the face of discontinuous change best practice may, in fact, be a trap for the unwary. This seems to me to go to the heart of what Snowden's work has been about to this point. The idea that we (as people and organizations) exist in different domains of order and unorder and that what is an appropriate response in one domain may not serve in another. Understanding what domain you are in and knowing how to act appropriately is key. Hence in times of change and uncertaintly best practice is not your friend. So where does best practice fit in..? I think that best practice will remain a valuable management tool for use in "peace time." I also think there will always be a role for understanding those practices which are based upon sound principles. Otherwise get building that worst practices database today! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001888.html Thinking about knowledge patterns Mon, 14 Jun 2004 08:18:36 +0100 <blockquote> <blockquote><a href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/archives/001298.html">Back to patterns</a>. Denham Grey has written an blog entry on using patterns as part of knowledge management. To quote: Need to capture experience and expertise?, introduce new ideas into your organization?, want a template to document rationale and good practice?, wish to... [<a href="http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/">Column Two</a>] </blockquote> </blockquote> I got into software design patterns in 1995, not long after the <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201633612/ref=sr_aps_books_1_1/026-2932619-0795620">keystone</a> was laid (sadly my copy vanished into the aether, switching jobs, in '01), whilst working on some thorny problems in my undergraduate thesis. The patterns (like <a href="http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/patternStories/AbstractFactoryPattern">abstract factory</a>, <a href="http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/patternStories/BridgePattern">bridge</a>, and <a href="http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/patternStories/StrategyPattern">strategy</a>) were a revelation. I became an instant convert and, later, a preacher. What was so intriguing was that these early patterns were compelling solutions to real problems which I actually found myself facing at the time. But, as time went by, I realised that the more important aspect was the pattern language. That, through the patterns, we advanced a way of thinking about problems which elevated the level of discussion and permitted higher reasoning to take place. This strays into the realm of <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PatternLanguage">Alexander</a> and is akin to the difference between <a href="http://www.gajits.biz/detailslist.cfm?id=geomagprimarg42">regular Geomag</a> and <a href="http://www.brightminds.co.uk/proddisplay.asp?prodid=803">Geomag with panels</a>! The patterns industry took off, like all good magic bullets, with a bang. Many books were written (Amazons lists 109455 matches for 'design patterns' and they can't all be about knitting) and soon they were everywhere. I just wish I'd written my book back when I first thought of it <sigh>. There was even something of a backlash. The idea of design patterns in Knowledge Management doesn't seem to have taken off yet. There is something of the design pattern in the notion of best practices. However I think this falls short of the mark in that it doesn't lead to the creation of new language constructs. Possibly <a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&q=dave+snowden+worst+practice&btnG=Search">Snowden's worst practices</a> are closer to <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AntiPatterns">anti-patterns</a> which are another interesting idea. This sets me thinking... </sigh> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002313.html