On Best Practice (or not)

Susan Cramm asks in a post today 'Why Do We Ignore "Best Practices"?.' She cites a CIO who has rejected using a proven project methodology on a high-risk project -- a decision that has now jeopardized his project. Cramm is interested in understanding why people who know better put their projects or even their jobs at risk by failing to use known best practices. The post suggests that the CIO engendered risk on his project because he ignored best practice. I suspect the dynamic is rather different: since the project was high-risk, he ignored best practice... because he knew better.

I wrote on this just about a year ago, when I was reading Ori and Ram Brafman's insightful book "Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior." Particularly when the risks are high, educated well-seasoned professionals abdicate the normal rules (rational but unnatural practices) for emotionally-based instinctive responses -- not what one thinks one ought to do, but what one feels should be done. At the moment the professional reverts to 'common sense' in a life-or-death moment, you might as well place your destiny in the hands of the evolutionary ancestor for whom this worked often enough to pass along his genes. He may have been a veteran airline pilot when your plane took off; in an emergency, you hope he doesn't turn into a Cro-Magnon mid-flight.

There's probably a biological reason why this happens, but our culture certainly reinforces it powerfully. The American culture deifies the action hero for whom normal rules do not apply. Interestingly, these heroes often have a skill set that is only acquired through much professional, rigorous training -- Rambo, Dirty Harry, Gordon Gecko. Because they are at the apex of their professions, we willingly grant them license to discard all of that and play by their own rules. We revere their irreverence for rules that lesser mortals (like us) have to live by. Maybe their Hollywood-style outcomes justify what we really believe is the 'best' practice - acting on instinct.

My older post reminded me of the project that inspired it. At the time, I needed to make a decision on how best to help the team get back on track. We shared the same goals, so alignment was not a problem. No one disputed the metrics; the team understood they were not hitting them despite being highly focused on them. We had a clear difference of opinion on what process changes should be made -- and since I'm corporate, it was easy to assume that I just didn't understand. The team really wanted to achieve their goals, and their confidence in meeting them was based on their belief in their solutions. It felt like an impasse.

So it's a year later: how did it turn out? The team achieved a break-through, and this year has consistently far exceeded what we previously thought would be high-performance results, based on prior benchmarks. Their results are inspirational, and I am awed by their achievements. Yes, we got back to 'best practices' in process improvement, but not by forcing it on them. Instead, I realized that I was working with a team that was highly focused on results. The team thought the goal was the metric, which felt high-risk because they didn't know how to move it. So, they brought their emotions to solving the problem. I simply changed their immediate goal: they would demonstrate to me their competency in process improvement. I agreed that they could implement whatever changes they could support with data from their process analysis.

In the end, they made only a slight change to the process. And yet - they are achieving far more out of their process than they did before. Why? Well, it turns out that during their process analysis the team started to understand why some steps were best practice even though they seemed counter-intuitive. All of the team came to embrace the process as written, and once it was no longer subverted by well-meaning team members who thought they knew better, the process started working for them. After their break-through, I asked one employee how they were so successful. He responded: "It's the process. Don't take my process away from me." It's now their process, not corporate's. I wouldn't dream of touching it now.

Cramm's CIO will never be convinced to change his course by rational argument, nor by increasingly dire metrics from his project. Because he cares deeply, and because he is professionally trained, he is all the more likely to continue with his decision, to which he's by now irrevocably committed. If his board were to take the risk off the table, and re-frame the task in a way that enabled him to bring his professional judgment back online, it's possible he could make a fundamental shift that would engender success.