Consultants introduced the idea of “best practices” back in the 1980’s and it has a certain intuitive appeal. After all, we would all like to think that there are single, straightforward “best answers” to our most elusive problems.
And if anyone could identify what those answers were, it is the consultants, right? They see dozens of organizations, work on hundreds of problems. They stand in a place that allows them to recognize recurring patterns, boil them down to their essentials and repackage them for the rest of us. Seems to make sense . . .
But in most cases, there isn’t one solution because there isn’t really one problem. Organizations, staff talent profiles, and markets are all different and the “one-best-solution” just doesn’t exist.
And that’s good news. Because what if it did? Wouldn’t the first company to find it dominate the market? Or at least wouldn’t all companies converge on the same solution? That wouldn’t be any fun.
I am not saying that the pattern recognition of consultants isn’t valuable. They can tell us dozens of things that don’t work, for instance. They can tell us stories of things that did work and help us think what we can take from those lessons. They can nudge us out of our rut-filled thinking and help us consider new pathways. What they cannot do, and never could, is give us the one best solution that will launch us to the top of our industry or drive our costs to the lowest level possible.
So instead of “best practices,” what we should be searching for are some “darn good practices” that we can make our own. One way to do that might be to engage your consultants in a different way. Let the consultants be a source of new information about what works and what doesn’t. Then use your internal teams, in partnership with the consultants, to distill the key lessons and design your own solutions to your own problems.
Professional learning communities, using structured problem-solving processes are perfect for this application. There are specific protocols to designed to pull out the lessons, shift the thinking of these groups and spur innovation. Adding the expertise and experience of consultants to a well-facilitated event could yield true breakthrough thinking, resulting in your own “best practice”.
