In this week’s post, we invite our readers to join us in a discussion on the following topic:
The term “best practices” has been defined as “standard, published operating methods found to produce the best performance and results in a given industry or organization.” Concurrently, innovation has been described as the “introduction of a new idea into the marketplace in the form of a new product or service, or an improvement in organization or process.” Firms are urged to both innovate and use best practices to stay competitive. Are process innovations and utilizing “best practices” mutually exclusive?
We’d love to hear your thoughts!
I believe that process innovations and utilizing best practices mutually exclusive. In being competitive, there should be innovations for business. The innovation will keep the customers interested in the business at all times. The best practices will help the business into having success and going towards improvement.
Quite an interesting question Julia,
I’ll try to be not too boring
Best practices (in processes at least) derives from experience, in those areas where there are so many variables that’s it’s not feasible to scientifically calculate an optimum process.
In some other cases, a scientifically exact optimum process is calculable, and in such cases best pratices are not called for.
For instance, take chemical engineering and sofware engineering.
In Chemical engineering, there is no need for ‘best practices’, because the process parameters can be calculated rigorously exactly to achieve the desired outcomes (Be it a batch or a continuous process) (parameters such as length and girth of piping, temperatures, pHs, contact durations, contact surfaces, use of catalysts, volumes etc.) .
In Software engineering however, there are so many ways in principle capable of achieving the same outcome (code doing a certain job) that best practices are called for: i.e., rules that in the past have statistically proven to yield the best outcome, in terms of generating the fewest errors, taking the shortest time to develop, leading to easiest code testing, optimizing use of development teams, etc.
Tinker with these best practices at your peril – they’re normally at the top of a bell or Laffer curve and any change might easily get you down the slope.
However, innovation in process design is definitely requisite when – and I believe only when – something other, extraneous to the process itself, happens to change. Something that can or must be incorporated into the new process. For instance, new libraries of objects in software engineering, or a new more powerful testing paradigm or collaborative tool.
A pre-set, exactly calculated process can also change for instance when new chemical compounds are found to do the same job better than the old compounds, in which case processes have to be re-written. In that case however the innovation lies in the use of the new chemical, not in the new process.
Hence, I would think that the best way to innovate and/or improve a process consists in first looking outside the process itself.
I hope this helps?
This really is a good question and I’ll give a brief response building somewhat on the previous comments.
My short answer is yes, but….
Innovation should rank above best practices at any company. It’s through innovation that best practices are achieved, a rather obvious observation, but easily overlooked. Innovation should be a constant part of the culture that is emphasized regularly, over and over. As ideas are generated and tested, the best should be kept and written into the culture, policies, procedures and so on. But too often they stay there forever. Best practices need to be subject to innovation constantly so they remain the best. Best from five years ago might still be best, but it might not, probably not, and we better revisit our great ideas as we look to innovate in other areas.
This requires attention. It’s hard work and annoying to some people who would rather figure out the best practice and leave it there. It means we never rest. It’s not hard to see examples in the business community of those who discipline themselves to merging the two concepts and those who don’t. The former are the leaders, the innovators if you will, who rise to the top. The latter may get by, but will struggle in hard times (like a recession economy). And this applies to all of us, whether CEOs or consultants, as we have responding here so far.
An excellent question……my view and I’ll keep it brief.
Best practice is for organisations that believe what they are doing is below par and so have to attain/achieve the industry standard.
Innovation requires breaking away from best practice and once this innovation is found to add value and others follow suit it becomes the new best practice.
I believe best practice is for “followers” and innovation is for “leaders”
I tend to think that innovation precedes best practices. For example, a company can have innovators who have a more free flowing method to develop new technologies and products. Best practices can be implemented for taking that base innovation to the next step – for example testing.
I worked at a company that I think did things this way for the most part. The innovators were out there – working on all kinds of new concepts. When they became a feasible concept, then the next team took over and used more established process to make it real.
I have worked with more companies that only use a best practices model and no, innovation is nowhere to be found. One company I worked with bought innovative companies but managed to suck most of the innovation out of them once they applied their corporate process.
Julia, again great question. Here is my 1 and 3/4 cents worth of answer:
The problem with ‘best practices’ is that business adopt these, as Chris suggests, either to avoid unproductive/costly/unnecessary work. Best practices, CMM, CMMI, CQI, Six Sigma and other methods like these are more easily adopted by business than innovation, for expectation of positive impact on the return.
Innovation, on the other hand, as Bob suggests, is messy, requires fresh thinking/unorthodox approaches/failure–and more often than not, iterative processing to be successful. –and there is no guarantee on the short-term return. While we know of companies which embrace innovation in certain functional areas, and there is certainly a ‘buzz’ about ‘structured innovation’ (as best practice), the companies that truly embrace a culture of innovation across the enterprise are few. Bottom line: the two concepts are practically mutually exclusive.
Hi Julia
you have sparked off an interesting disucssion here. great job!
allow me to have a take from a different perspective.
when we talk about best practices, are we talking about best methods or best processes?
when we try to introduce a best practice as a method lock, stock and barrel into an organisation, we are simply asking for trouble. this is a no-brainer. what is good for one company can be very bad for another as their DNA can be very different.
when we try to introduce best practices as a process, there is room for innovation. Now we can see how the innovation and best practice can co-exist
Hello Julia: Great question! You just put words to another way the eternal dilemma between the forces for change and the forces for continuity expresses itself. My comment is that this dilemma is unsolvable. It is probably the most important dilemma to manage in companies, in communities and organizations.You have to manage it strategically, in each project and in everyday work.
For individuals it has existential depth: every person has to manage it successfully in their life. If not, you will probably end with a severe psychiatric condition.
I have taken the liberty to quote and comment your entry in my blog eugeniomolini.wordpress.com and to put a link to this site. My blog is in spanish. I hope you have access to a good translator in the Internet.
Hi Julia,
The answer from Chris focuses on best practice. I have always disliked the term ‘best practice’ and use ‘good practice’ which ensures that the right things are done. Some users of ‘best’ really mean ‘good’ – as in ‘best practice recruitment’. For me ‘best’ can only really apply to activities that have become standardised like commodities. Which is where Chris’s answer takes you.
Now if you have a standardised industry wide process, one that is considered to be the ‘best’ way to do things – then there is little room for innovation in that process. EXCEPT – by changing the rules (keeping within ‘good’ to ensure it is legal, moral etc). Which is much the same as creating a new market / product / service/ even a brand!. For example look at how insurance used to be sold, and how it is done now.
So, there is a much greater need for radical innovation when the industry is awash (stagnating) with best practices – a need to break the mould, identify and challenge the assumptions inherent in the industry – in order to gain competitive advantage. It is these actions that generate the Change pressures that all else then have to follow. Over time the ‘new’ is refined until it becomes the norm / best practice.
Summing up then – where ‘best practices’ exist – radical innovation is required to avoid stagnation.
We have to look at both theoretical application and real world application. In both scenarios, the initial answer is absolutely not. In fact, “best practices” are a direct product (in most cases) of innovation applied to “standard, published operating methods”.
In the real world application arena, the tendency however, is, after the adoption of a “best practice”, to standardize that best practice, thereby discouraging innovation.
Some organizational structures, as you know, inherently discourage innovation as applied to organizational processes. Bureaucratic forms of organization are notoriously known for this scenario.
The cost to businesses in lost benefits due to improvements in process application is enormous in those businesses that have not learned how to create an environment which, not only supports and encourages innovation, but imbeds that encouragement within its culture.
Best practices and innovation exist in a state of dynamic tension. Best practices are by their very definition, inherently stable and designed for optimum and consistent output. Innovation would seem to be at counter-purposes to that definition given that it is intended to willfully introduce change into a stable system.
But each actually provide a framework for the other.
Best practices provide a foundation from which to innovate. Only if you have the surety of stable processes and systems can you conceivably determine effective measures of your innovation’s performance. Innovation, in and of itself becomes a discover tool for seeking new best practices.
For example, an artist when asked to create something, anything, without the benefit of constraint, will often struggle mightily to come up with something. But if told to use only one colour on a particular surface may completely astonish us because they transcend the boundary we described in a unique way. The limits that best practices impose may, in fact, foster increased innovation.
Thanks for the great question.
I agree with Alison. I believe it boils down to integrity. If a company has integrity, innovation and best practices go hand in hand…there isn’t even a question on it.
Problem is, today’s society, wants integrity but too often, greed overcomes it, and integrity is lost.
For a company to have integrity, they have to have the leadership…people that have a core belief in integrity. It starts with people and then those beliefs can be instilled in the resto of the company.
Have a GREAT day.
It depends on how they co-exist. First some definitions for this thread:
1 – best practice = the best known way of doing an activity
2 – innovation = improving the process either through continuous or radical/breakthrough improvement
Think of a standard as the best-known way of doing an activity. If an organization has identified this, they surely would want everyone to follow the standard. This standard is followed until it is improved. Then it is re-standardized. In the real world, a company like Toyota will have employees follow the standard during normal work, and then have them experiment and improve the process during off hours or for a limited amount of time per week. Once an improvement is made, it is standardized again.
All standards (i.e. best known ways of doing an activity) can be continuously improved in this manner. At some point, however, improving a standard may have a negative effect on linked activities. This is when you try to continuously improve the linked activities as a system.
Improving linked activities in a system may be difficult because improving one may worsen another. That is when its time for breakthrough thinking. Thus, if you have a collection of standards from a set of linked activities, doing breakthrough innovation might require a whole new set of standards once you are done.
The Goal of Best Practices and Innovation is the same a quality process and end product to staisfy the customer needs.
Innovation can and surely does coexists with Best Practices. Almost all the best practices has a process of continious improvement(ITIL, PMI), what we have to look at is how does an organization alligns its Innovation Process in the continous improvement cycle of the Best Practices.
Other way round , if I talk of Apple .. Innovation Management out there is their Best Practices
With the changing US and world economy, this time could be a prelude to more difficult times ahead. If so, how are we responding? Limiting personal and business attitudes and practices that we can drag with us in good economic times will be our downfall.
This year has begun revealing many misguided, limiting, and irresponsible attitudes and practices. These are now so in our faces that they profoundly reveal the necessity for change.
To effectively address the multi-dimensional, complex issues we as a humanity face, we clearly cannot use the same thinking and methods that assisted up to create this socio-economic and ecological conundrum. We must awaken from our complacency. We are wise to use both best practices and innovation. From best practices, we are wise to use only the tried-and-true, most supportive ones. And we must cultivate ingenuity and innovation, and choose wise action before the accelerating pace reaches “too late”.
And we don’t ever know it’s too late until it’s too late…
Julia,
Great question but I got no idea. A lot of practices described as Best Practices are just Common Practices. Someone here described PMI: PMI in my book are describing the ways projects are currently managed. So describing the failing ways not ways to improve.
Some of the Best Practices I promote are (at least in my book) common sense and should, when used, improve things hugely. It is just a shame that they are hardly used. The standard reaction:
Yes, great idea! But that is not how we work here.
From that point of view I can only agree with Marianne’s last lines.
I do believe both can co-exist and they do in many environments with one caveat- I don’t believe in ‘best practices’, I believe in winning practices that work in context. In other words, the environment has a lot to do with whether something works well – the system, process, tools, culture, etc. all collude to create a context for winning practices. Almost all practices require constant updating especially in such fast moving times. You have to constantly check in and pause for a moment or two to consider whether it is time to update, change or eliminate. Innovation does not have to be a huge change. Like Toyota, which implements thousands of small improvements on an ongoing basis, innovation also happens when you refine, tweak, update to achieve something new that has value to at least one of your stakeholders. When something works especially well for us, we tend to stick with it even if everything else changes around it. This is when winning practices begin to hurt us rather than help us. Look at what is working in your organization and constantly double check to update your mental models about what might need to be refined about it.
Julia, your thoughtful question has generated a broad discussion with far-reaching impact on business management. I would like to expand this discussion further and would like to invite comments @JayPizarro on twitter. Lets see where the public conversation leads to!
Jay, I tihnk they already have it going on twitter
A list of best practices provides a good indicator of areas that need examining and possible change within the organization. Wholesale adoption of best practices without considering cultural, political, technical, and resource constraints may cause more harm than good. Innovation is a mutually exclusive phenomenon often associated with the organization’s ability to predict the future by interacting in a systemic way with the environment outside the organization. Best practices are developed in retrospect, and are more aligned with the past than the future. If the organiztion fixates on best practices and succeeds, it will already be behind.
Interesting question Julia. My perspectives emanates partially from some research I was involved in regarding self-managed work teams. As part of that effort, I established a “learning network” of organizations that were in various stages of implementing the self-managed work team concept.
My take-away from that long ago experience was people and companies were asking the wrong quetions. They were asking “what are you doing, what works?” What they should have been asking is “how did you go about learning what you needed to know to adapt the work team concept to your situation”. In other words, comanies were focused on copying what others that were successful were doing.
I came to the conclusion that the best way for a company to “get ahead” of the competition was to have the competition exactly adopt what the sucessful company was doing, without going through all the steps that made what the sucessful company was doing sucessful.
However, I do believe that studying best practices to ascertain the output that other companies are getting and Innovation are not at odds and actually complementary. To find out industry leaders are 50%-100% better than you on some key indicator is useful information. How to close the gap and get ahead is a problem to be addressed through innovation. If you just do what the other company is doing (and your are not likely to be able to reproduce it sucessfully unless you are just like the benchmarked company, the very best you can hope for is to draw even, and that is highly unlikely given their learning advantage and postion on the learning curve.
Best practices is not just about processes, its also about people. Mr. Ligget and Dr. Gottlieb touched on it when they mentioned culture. For there to be best practices and Innovation the people of the organization need some sense of safety that what ever is expressed with not be held against them, they will not be embarrased, critized or punished. Innovation requres the same organizational temperment. Often innovation comes from the outliers, not a continuation of the same thinking. Best practices should encourage, and I hate this term, “out of the box thinking”. One comment mentioned learning. Organizational learning comes from discovery, asking different questions and changing the converstion. That cannot happen when individuals are fearful there comments or ideas will be laughed at or ignored. Asking questions is not enough, its asking the right questions. “What questions are we not asking that we should be?” The answers to that question require the best from people and encourages innovation in its scope. While they may be different in concept, organizational success cannot occur without the contribution of each, innovation and best practices.
Interesting question Julia. My perspectives emanates partially from some research I was involved in regarding self-managed work teams. As part of that effort, I established a “learning network” of organizations that were in various stages of implementing the self-managed work team concept.
My take-away from that long ago experience was people and companies were asking the wrong quetions. They were asking “what are you doing, what works?” What they should have been asking is “how did you go about learning what you needed to know to adapt the work team concept to your situation”. In other words, comanies were focused on copying what others that were successful were doing.
I came to the conclusion that the best way for a company to “get ahead” of the competition was to have the competition exactly adopt what the sucessful company was doing, without going through all the steps that made what the sucessful company was doing sucessful.
However, I do believe that studying best practices to ascertain the output that other companies are getting and Innovation are not at odds and actually complementary. To find out industry leaders are 50%-100% better than you on some key indicator is useful information. How to close the gap and get ahead is a problem to be addressed through innovation. If you just do what the other company is doing (and your are not likely to be able to reproduce it sucessfully unless you are just like the benchmarked company, the very best you can hope for is to draw even, and that is highly unlikely given their learning advantage and postion on the learning curve.