My friend, Luis Suarez provided the post, Why Best Practices Don’t Work for Knowledge Work. It nicely articulates some ideas I have been thinking about for some time.  Luis was, in turn, moved to write by a post from Oscar Berg, Forget about copying best practices. Luis noted that he has been blogging about knowledge management for seven years and has yet to write a post on KM best practices.  He writes, “”Best Practices” are the worst thing you can apply to any kind of knowledge work. Any kind. Social Computing is no different.”

Luis claries that he is objecting to the word “best” and that good practices are certainly possible. He finds best practices associated with the terms: static, fixed, inalterable, unmodified, unbeatable, perfect. In contrast, he finds knowledge work, and enterprise 2.0 certainly falls into this bucket, is: dynamic, flexible, malleable, modifiable, flowing, a continuous learning experience, imperfect.  Luis goes on to say that practices that are successful in knowledge work are very context dependent and this is why there cannot be a standard set of best practices. I could not agree more.

In the early nineties I was involved with a number of colleagues at a small consulting firm helping a large property casualty insurance developing a process approach to knowledge work and the technology to deliver it to their knowledge workers. We eventually learned of the term “knowledge management” and applied that to what we were doing but it was really more like a primitive version of enterprise 2.0.  Although the firm was small a number of the senior execs at the firm were from big consulting. They wanted to package what we did and sell it to others as a repeatable offering.

It never worked quite like that because what we had done was very content dependent. I raised these objections internally but this was seen as counter to effective sales.  No one wanted to hear the phrase “it depends” when asked about best practices. Sure we followed some common process steps in developing a strategy and an implementation plan during the creation of further projects.

However, the people on the ground who had done a prior project knew to not try to simply offer what was done before. They understood the concept of context and knew that the substance of the new work needed to reflect the needs of the current situation rather than universal best practices. The senior people trying to sell the work did not want to hear this.  After all if we did not offer best practices how could be justify the high fees we were charging. Unfortunately, the senor people buying the work also wanted a best practice solution.

Later, I went to work for a large consulting firm and was part of a thought leadership group. The senior partners were always asking us to present our firm’s best practices in knowledge management to clients. We would groan and try to offer case examples of successes instead.

It was better to try to sell the fact that we had done the work successfully before, what happen and why, than to try to say that we had the secret recipe of best practices.  Of course, if you are trying to staff projects with new recruits who provide higher margins for the firm, it was better to say that you were arming them with the secret recipes.

Based on my experience, I agree with Luis that best practices can do more harm that good.  This does not mean that there cannot be lessons learned and some starting points to keep in mind as you move to new work.  There are great benefits to doing something the second time.  The German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote, “nothing more can be attempted that to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see.”