Why is it Difficult to Integrate Best Practices?

There is an entire industry related to moving “best practice” activities from one company to other companies within the same industry. This moving of practices is generally accepted as an essential component of a corporate improvement strategy.

Differences?
Why, however, are there still dramatic performance differences between industry participants?
The original idea has been compromised. “Best practice” pioneers looked carefully at competing or complimentary firms for practice examples that could represent a step of progress if brought back to the sponsoring organization. They studied, brought these examples back, and then fitted them carefully to the client organization and supported their implantation to ensure successful adoption.
Over time, however, others short-circuited the most valuable part of this fitting process and now merely ‘copy and paste’ activities into client firms. The results are not as positive as initially proposed.
Why is it so hard to transfer activities to other organizations?

Cultural Support.
Consider for a moment Disney or Ritz-Carlton. Both have made a substantial income from training competitors to be just like them. Do both really want competitors to steal market share and profits? No. They understand the underlying support is the reason for their success rather than the actual practices and they also understand that this cultural support is extremely difficult to replicate. So they continue to train waves of people and enthused executives rush to ‘paste’ just-learned, obviously-effective activities into their organizations.

The long-term prognosis, however, for these transplanted practices is less-than encouraging. Most often the target organization’s culture acts as an immune system which attacks the ‘alien’ practices like a body rejects foreign organisms. Professionals see another rejection and add this failed initiative to the organization’s lexicon of less-than effective change efforts.

Both Disney and Ritz-Carlton know the power of culture.
Unless the ‘best practice’ happens to coincide with multiple needs and pre-existing management perspectives, the new ‘practice’ is doomed to fade since it lacks the cultural and management support necessary to survive.

Vest Practices™ vs. Best Practices
We promote ‘Vest Practices™’ as opposed to ‘Best Practices’. A ‘Vest Practice™’ represents an improvement in strategic practice that is pre-fitted to fall within the organization’s range of cultural support. We shape each practice until it can be demonstrated to fall close to the heartbeat of the organization’s values and operating modes. It is intentionally constructed to look as though it grew out of the target organization’s culture – to avoid rejection and facilitate adoption by the organization’s prevailing practice.

Each practice, therefore, represents a step out to the limit of the culture’s support but not a step beyond it. Only in this way is it possible to, over time, expand an organization’s capability while preserving employee engagement.

While it is entirely legitimate to look to other organizations or industries for examples of practices that represent a tangible step forward for your organization, each ‘prospective practice’, however, must be tailored to your organization’s operating culture.

This ability to ‘fit’ practices to an organization is a main component of our consulting distinctive and took over a decade to develop. When we propose a set of actions to support a strategic priority, we have already conducted a sophisticated eight-step operational and six-dimensional cultural analysis to ensure the suggested actions will be readily adopted.