The Regenerate Web

Looking back on my career, it seems that most of the time, I have been leading as if working my way through a wilderness frontier with no established roads. Ocasionally, I have had the experience of emerging from a forest or cresting a hill finally in sight of the goal, only to see the interstate highway with an exit convenient to my destination.

Tom Foster of Management Skills blog prompted this post with his on "Best Practices" called Perfectly Equipped, he says:

I agree with Tom in that best practices are often insufficient, in my earlier analogy, they are the highway - the interstate. How often does the interstate take you directly to your destination?

I do think that we can learn from best practices - there are ideas that have tremendous value, and others have clearly paved the way. But they may not take you exactly where you want to go. Established methodology and technique are a good teacher. They show you how others have acheived. I expect that when these practices were invented, however those inventing were not on an interstate. They were clearly off-road. When I stop to examine where best practices come from, they come from pioneers, frontiersmen who blaze a trail, then come back to lead us all accross the frontier to the promised land.

I recently read "The Journals of Lewis and Clark" edited by Bernard Devoto. This collection of the actual un-translated journal entries of these leaders was an astonishing expedition. When considering this expedition in it's day, it was more logistically complex and difficult than our first trip to the moon. This is what I mean when I talk about off-road. When you are willing to lead a team through un-charted wilderness.

What then in this analogy is the by-way? These are the smaller local roads or paths. They are endemic to every part of civilization. They may or may not be on the map, but they are known to local inhabitants. They can provide you meaningful routes around distinctly local obstacles. They provide bridges (however rickety) over rivers and canyons and safe if not particularly fast routes through the wilderness.

Best practices are best used by "true-believers". Most true believers are the result of success stories (e.g. this method worked for me on project X and I will continue to use it because it worked once). While this is perhaps unfair, it reflects methodology and best practices adoption as I have seen it.

As leaders, different practices add value differently. We look that the resources we have, and which practices would add value, and the obstacles to adoption. Sometimes the fastest way to solution is to go off-road, because every interstate leaves us far away from the goal and we have no local guide to show us the byways.

Seen from the perspective of senior management in most companies, the best practices way is the safest and fastest route. It is simply the connection from the interstate to the ultimate destination that is the unknown. It feels like risk management. What I see from the leader perspective is that when the interstate doesn't take you all the way to the goal, the sponsorship dries up. That is - it takes 20% of the energy to get 80% of the way there, and no-one has the desire to spend the other 80% to get such a short distance, so...

We never get there!

This is, I believe, exactly what Tom Foster is saying. This is the fallacy of using best practices. The compromise is already made, because we will not sponsor the wilderness expedition at the end of the safe fast journey.

As for me, I have always felt comfortable making it up as I go along. Even if, once in a while, we find that someone else already blazed a parallel trail that we could have taken. we have grown stronger and wiser for having figured it out ourselves.