Category: Best Practices

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What vs How: Which is more important and why we don’t act accordingly.

Little boy playing violin. What vs how can make a big difference in learning and development

If you really want to know who a person is, would you rather know what they’ve accomplished, or how they’ve performed? What vs how? Results vs behaviors?

You may already have an answer in mind, but how sure are you?

Two stories from my childhood may shed a bit of light on the controversial issue of knowing what vs how.

Childhood Example #1 : “Sour notes”

When I was in third grade I picked up my Dad’s violin and began playing a few simple songs. Noting that I could make the ole fiddle produce recognizable tunes, and desperate to find something I was good at (neither academia nor sports were my thing in grade school), my folks signed me into violin lessons.

By my fourth year of lessons it was time to demonstrate my virtuosity to the rest of the school. For this grand debut, my instructor suggested I play a duet — WITH MY MOTHER! Had smartphones been around, this would have warranted a classic, “OMG” text — or worse. But I’m committed to keeping these posts at or below a PG-13 rating. {Note: That isn’t me in the picture — but that’s how I felt.}

My mother was an accomplished pianist — and she can still play — but some of the virtuosity of her material has ‘frayed’ a bit with disuse. Nevertheless, her part was easy for her (even today). As for me, despite the fact that I’d be: playing a violin, in front of my classmates, with my mother — my part was a real stretch for my skill level.

Continue reading “What vs How: Which is more important and why we don’t act accordingly.”

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Using Best Practices in Different Organizations

Best Practices Stamp

Very early in any engagement, or discussion I have with individuals representing an organization, I hear the same declaration:

We’re different.

True. Anyone who’s been associated with more than one organization (which means you’ve been working more than five years) can testify that no organization is like another. In fact, if you think of two organizations typically considered close competitors, you’re probably thinking that they’re not only different, they’re complete opposites. (We have a tendency to accentuate differences and diminish similarities – but that’s for another time.)

Based on the fact that all organizations are different, the logic of implementing a “carbon copy” (for you Millennials and late era Boomers, “mirror image”) practice that was done in another organization is flawed.

If no two organizations are alike, then why does it make any sense to pursue “best practices”?

There are a few reasons why organizations frequently seek best practices:

  1. As social organizations we continuously compare ourselves to others.
  2. As social organizations we continuously seek to exceed others.
  3. As commercial organizations we continuously seek maximum effectiveness at minimum effort.

Quite simply, we want to know how we compare, compete and function relative to others. The same motivations drive individuals.

Despite the self-evident reality that all organizations are different, “best practices” are alluring because they feed our needs for comparing, competing and functioning at optimal levels.

Beyond allure, there are legitimate reasons why a quest for best practices makes sense.

Best practices can legitimately inform similar efforts in other organizations.

Note especially the terms, “inform” and “similar.”

The key to making best practices work across organizations is to extract the key principles, actions and lessons and then adapt them to fit in other organizations.

Implications for Best Practices:

  1. Replication is not the goal. It has to work in the new organization.
  2. HOW is more important than WHAT. It’s all about execution.

When pursuing “best practices” be sure to take time to consider HOW a given practice can be, or is implemented in a different organization. It’s much more important to know how (or why) a given practice adds value than to precisely replicate said practice step-by-step.