Share Best Practices to Accelerate Improvement

Share ideas, information, and feedback, and encourage others to do the same.

Practitioners: tactical, integrative, and strategic

When we solve common problems, the next logical step is to share ideas, information, and feedback. What is it that makes sharing best practices so challenging? Could it be the way we approach the process of sharing? Just because we solved a problem, doesn’t mean others can solve their problem in the same way. When we share best practices we can accelerate improvement, but there are risks of which to be cautious.

There may be learning opportunities from what we have accomplished, but there are also many variables of which we have no awareness. The best practice that creates the greatest value is the one that is locally developed.

When we develop standard work, who do we invite to participate in solving problems? If your answer does not include the people who do the work every day, we have something else to work on before we tackle this idea.

Then what about best practices? What is the point? The point is sharing ideas, information, and feedback to encourage others to solve their problems. The solution may not look exactly like ours, but if the problem is common in some ways, the solution will be similar in some ways, too.

Share Best Practices

What then do we share? How do our organizational partners find the information for which they are looking? How do we track down common problems? How do we search for the solutions that have been successful? Best practice sharing often feels forced. Here is the solution we implemented, just use it. I expect this problem to be solved next week!

If you haven’t picked up on the functional / relational view of processes that I speak of frequently, we just shifted to the relational side. When culture is coercive, and performance is demanded, commitment is absent, and solutions are superficial. The term from today’s topic on which I am focusing is encourage. There is nothing encouraging about ‘find something you like about it’. To share best practices requires influence not force.

Offering our teams every resource they need to help them solve their own problems will create a solution that is owned locally, developed from local knowledge, and appropriate for local conditions. How about, “Can you help me solve this problem? What can I do to help you? What do you need from me?”