[Dan, good to see you here! I followed your writing for some time a few years ago and had sort of "lost" you since.]

I have worried for some time about how “Best Practice” can work to freeze change that is needed and worth while. It’s really true that what’s a great approach today, in one situation, can be old and outdated thinking tomorrow. I see this in particular in work involving the environment and animals.

Establishing one approach as a best practice makes people see innovation as unnecessary, and even, sometimes, as a real threat and danger to be resisted with all of our might. That’s a bad scene for the group that has a different slant on the situation, even when their approach can be proven to work better from all angles. What happens is that funders don’t fund the new approach; other groups don’t inform the public about the “alternative.” People find confusion over what is really “best?” Who is the authority? How should a regular person distinguish what is labelled as best, as distinct from what works best in practice? It’s not clear, and needed changes become a field for severe burnout.

It seems to me that the consultant’s role has to be more than a mere facilitator to help a board find its own way. The consultant has to provide knowledge of what a board’s legal and fiduciary responsibilities and requirements are, both substantively and procedurally.

Although they are common practices for many boards, things like fund raising and strategic planning are really side projects that boards may voluntarily take on, but they are not of the essence.

I do see some validity, for example, in approaching decision making in medicine from the standpoint of what has worked well in practice, as opposed to what my doctor learned in med school or what the last pharmaceutical salesperson she saw told her. One premise that makes this logic work in medicine is that the systems that comprise the human body and the processes that govern its functioning are fairly well understood. Clinical research is also some of the most highly rigorous and controlled research being done today.

Even so, what I also count on my physician to know are the unique circumstances and medical history of her patients as UNIQUE individuals. If a patient has a special life circumstance, is contraindicated for a specific treatment, or suffers from dementia, there may well be good reason to deviate from “best practice.” Aristotle called this “practical wisdom” – the ability to apply universal principles to particular situations.

Organizations and communities are far more varied than the functioning of the human body from one person to the next, I submit. The state of our knowledge about effective community leadership practices is also less empirical and more interpretive – and necessarily so, than double-blind controlled experiments.

I resonate with Laura Deaton’s wish for a shared consulting lexicon and wonder what a vocabulary for talking about community and social contexts would look like. Also useful might be a library of “design patterns” – solution approaches that have worked in certain kinds of situations, and design principles – guidelines for intelligently fitting and adapting what has worked elsewhere to the unique context community leaders and their constituents live in.

A final reason why I am wary of evidence-based “best practices” is that they skew the leadership challenge towards the merely rational. Medical science is wonderful, but I also want my doctor to care about me. Community leaders need to be educated and informed, but they must integrate intelligence with heart and soul and creativity and passion and caring. I have yet to read a best practice report where the effects of those variables were measured.

I love Tammie’s words above – “collective laziness.” I also appreciate Christina’s concrete example in the microfinance world.

Laura, thank you for your thoughtfulness about this issue. I think a lexicon is important (perhaps a topic for another #NPCons chat at Twitter?) but I think it goes beyond language. If, as Tammie suggests (and you know I encourage) we start at what success would look like and reverse engineer from there, language change will be one of many conditions we will want to have in place on the road to creating a different way of being as consultants.

But that has to come first. If we are to truly be catalysts for community change, does the “best practice magic pill” Mark talks about above have a place? As we continue to build new, more effective, emerging and generative practice, how can we ensure those don’t just become the next ism against which we are rebelling as “best practice” 2 and 7 and 15 years from now?

Those are among the conditions we have the opportunity to explore as we create what it means to be consultants who are catalysts for community change. It’s why we created this blog – and why I am so excited to explore this topic with you all!

BTW, I find it interesting there has been virtually no defense of “best practice” as a tool or an approach or a term, anywhere I have raised this question. What does that mean?
HG

Big problems often stem from small problems. Small problems are often caused by oversight. Oversight is often fixed by whatever you want to cobble together and call “best practices”.

Nobody likes a magic wand, magic pill or whatever. Everyone’s issues are unique, at least so they think.

OK, Ill boil it down further: “We’ve always done it that way.”

Mark

PS: What’s a marketing guy doing hanging out here? That cant be a best practice

I hope I didn’t convey a cavalier attitude about the use of words. Words do matter, as you’ve already shown by encouraging us to shift our language away from “nonprofit” and toward “community benefit.” I get it, and value it; I really do. And, I do understand your own reaction to the word “best” although I find that I struggle just as much with the term “better” that Christina Jordan suggested. Better practices or good practices or bad practices actually carry the same questions…”For who? Better than what?”

Most of my work in the community benefit sector has focused on helping struggling organizations through transitions, and as Katie Tong mentioned, I’m often starting at ground zero with no current practices. Programs have halted and the board simply “isn’t” a board in any functional way. Encouraging the passionate die-hards that are frantically trying to rescue the sinking ship to look outward is usually not only imperative, but also a saving grace. To me, reaching for better still seems far less valuable and inspirational under those circumstances than reaching for best. Perhaps best practices is actually a phrase that can be useful under some circumstances, and harmful under others?

Are we talking the need for a shared consulting lexicon that we believe will lead to more possibility and expanded futures for the organizations we serve? Before your initial post, it wouldn’t have been on the top of my list, yet I felt my own “it drives me nuts” when I read David Svet’s post and encountered the words “superiors” and “subordinates,” which are words that I wiped out of my leadership vocabulary long ago because I found them to be denigrating and yes, almost always harmful. Superior to whom? To what? Yuck.

So I’ve come full circle. I actually do think more exploration into the language that we use to move the sector forward would be valuable, and could supplement the incredibly useful tools that you are already putting in the toolkits of both consultants and leaders. But language change still won’t be enough. Those words need to be lived and breathed by people who “get them” to really create change. Words, attitudes, and behavior will all need to shift to eliminate the consultants who wield best practices by “enforcing external standards.”

Thanks again for your passion and your work. I always learn from each interaction with you.

Certainly, it is extremely useful to know what others have done that has worked well, and very (very!) important to learn from mistakes that others have made. As long as the world remains in such a mess, however, I just simply can’t buy into the idea that anyone has figured out the “best” way to do much of anything. Also, if we believe in change, and strive for change, then what is “best” today may not be what’s best tomorrow. And what’s best in one socio-cultural context may not be right at all in another context.

Beyond semantics, there was an article today in the Boston Globe that cites 2 recent indepth studies which question whether microlending actually fights poverty or not. As a former microfinance practitioner in Africa, I have quietly believed for years that the mf industry at large is on the wrong track… My main argument has been that for the past decade plus, the “Best Practices” preached in microfinance have focused on the sustainability of institutions, not their clients. I shifted my own energies toward an emphasis on job creation long ago, and have become a huge fan of orgs like Kenya’s Equity Bank, who’ve dared to defy some “best practices” and now outperform most MFIs in the region.

All in all, “best” is a dangerous term. Let’s hope, for the sake of the community benefit sector, that we can always strive to do better.

I think this is really interesting. Business schools and consulting agencies often push us to explore best practices. To an extent, I think it’s a reflection of our collective laziness – no need to consider a vision of what we want and backtrack to how to get there; we can just copy someone else. Unfortunately, best practices fail to take into account differences in time, community and perhaps most importantly people! On the one hand, looking at best practices can spur ideas. On the other hand, this method tends to put restrictions on what we consider (whether consciously or subconsciously). I have to say, you have certainly inspired in me a desire to steer clear of best practice methodology and consider first possibility. Thanks!