More on the decline of best practices
Here's another reason why I hate best practices. The words are those of Johns Hopkins University president, William R. Brody, and they come from a speech he delivered at the end of April:
Risk aversion is eventually going to drive America into second-class status in our increasingly global economy. Guaranteed outcomes mean lowering our expectations. And lowered expectations lead to mediocrity and sub-par performance.
We need to ask ourselves: what's going on here? (Emphasis added throughout)
Our interest in best practices reflects our growing desire for guaranteed outcomes and a lack of tolerance for risk. But best practices do not provide guaranteed or even reliable outcomes. In fact, they rarely work out the way we have in mind when we copy them. In the comments to my last posting on this subject, there were suggestions that best practices are useful for learning. I can understand that view, but I would challenge it. Best practices typically inhibit real learning by limiting the scope of possible inquiry, i.e., we focus our attention on what we know from the best practice and not on what we don't know, which is typically where things break down and where learning is most needed. Yet we assume the best practice is comprehensive in its handling of the unforeseen because, after all, it's a best practice. Unfortunately, that is virtually never the case, because best practices deal only with the very specific, context dependent problems their originating organizations are trying to solve at any given moment. Most best practices don't produce either genuine insight or foresight until they've broken down or failed altogether.
