Best Practices
I'm a big believer in sharing best practices. But do we do enough to challenge what we are doing, even when it is working? Continuing to get better, despite your success, is a key to sustained elite performance. This will make you think.
From Adam Grant's book, Think Again.
In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we've declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop questioning its vices, no longer curious about where its imperfect and where it could improve. Organizational learning should be an ongoing activity, but best practices imply it has reached an endpoint. We might be better off looking for better practices.
At NASA, although teams routinely debriefed after both training simulations and significant operational events, what sometimes stood in the way of exploring better practices was a performance culture that held people accountable for outcomes. Every time they delayed a scheduled launch, they faced widespread public criticism and threats to funding. Each time they celebrated a flight that made it into orbit, they were encouraging their engineers to focus on the fact that the launch resulted in a success rather than on the faulty processes that could jeopardize future launches. That left NASA regarding luck and repeating problematic practices, failing to rethink what qualified as acceptable risk. It wasn't for a lack of ability. After all, these were rocket scientists.
Focusing on results might be good for short-term performance, but it can be an obstacle to long-term learning. Sure enough, social scientists find that when people are held accountable only for whether the outcome was a success or failure, they are more likely to continue with ill-fated courses of action. Exclusively praising and rewarding results is dangerous because it breeds overconfidence in poor strategies incentivizing people to keep doing thins the way they've always done them. It isn't until a high-stakes decision goes horribly wrong that people pause to examine their practices.
We shouldn't have to wait until a space shuttle explodes or an astronaut nearly drowns to determine whether a decision was successful. Along with outcome accountability, we can create process accountability by evaluating how carefully different options are considered as people make decisions. A bad decision process is based on shallow thinking. A good process is grounded in deep thinking and rethinking, enabling people to form and express independent opinions. Research sows that when we have to explain procedures behind our decisions in real time, we think more critically process the possibilities more thoroughly.
Challenging your best practices, despite your success, is a huge key to sustaining elite performance. And as a basketball coach, it's very hard to do - because our results are public and how we are judged. Yet process accountability is huge in creating a championship culture.