If you have not yet had experience with best practices or lessons learned I’d like to introduce these concepts to you. If you have had experience with one or the other, I’d like to introduce you to the idea of merging them, which is new. You may have taken part in a best practices or a lessons learned activity, been disappointed, and set the thing aside as promising in the abstract, but unworkable in practice. Disappointments are not uncommon here. Design and conduct of the activity all too often have flaws that are punishing, but avoidable. I’ll point out the most common flaws and suggest a workable design. However, I’ll use the opportunity of this brief paper to tell you not how to do it, but why to do it, encouraging you emphatically to try it, or to try it again with refreshed understanding.
I’ll begin by defining some of the jargon, at the same time using it to sketch out the features of BPLL. You'll note that the definitions of a best practice and a lesson learned show them to be two sides of the same coin, pointing up the logic of combining them into a single activity. Next we'll move on to the benefits. Since I’m proselytizing and so many of us are religious about numbers today, I’ll express the why in bottom-line dollars. In an example from the literature, we'll see how one corporation saved over half a billion dollars with a major breakthrough internal benchmarking activity. In a different example, a comparison of the corporate suggestion systems of America and Japan, we'll see how satisfying savings can come from even small constant incremental process improvements. The conclusion is that there is no one right size for a best practice or a lesson learned. At any size, it will have some magnitude of positive value, ranging from directly proportional to its size to n times greater. As to merging the two activities, in a final example we'll see how a once-great public utility succeeded in getting what it wanted out of a lessons learned activity but, without the balance of a synchronous best practices activity, ultimately lost its way. The conclusion is that with just one or the other the glass is half empty. Therefore I’ll close by offering my gestalten “whole things” business model in which BPLL is fully integrated into the larger flow of doing business.
BPLL is a large subject. We'll focus here on three aspects: (1) that big hot activity or small cool activity, best practices and lessons learned are valuable management tools; (2) that as valuable as they are individually, it makes sense to merge them into one activity to avoid only being able to see the trees or, conversely, finding yourself only looking at the forest; and (3) that, built into your organization's business model, best practices lessons learned is one thing that can make the difference between barely surviving and thriving.
Why “Best Practices Lessons Learned (BPLL)”?
Think of corporate intelligence as the ability to learn and understand from corporate experience. It is the ability to acquire and attain knowledge. It is the ability to respond quickly and successfully to a new situation, using the faculty of reason in directing conduct, solving problems, and performing work effectively. The corporate intelligence quotient (CIQ) is the measure of success in using these abilities to accomplish tasks.
Organizational learning (O-learning) and organizational knowledge (O-knowledge) make up the CIQ. O-learning is coming to know and coming to know how. It is acquiring information and skill by instruction, study, observation, and experience. O-knowledge is the act, fact, and state of knowing and understanding. O-learning and O-knowledge are by definition predictors of the corporation's future performance.
Best practices (BPs) and lessons learned (LLs) are the building blocks of O-learning and O-knowledge. A BP is a good work practice or innovation captured and shared to promote repetition, or the business model for such a practice or innovation. An LL is a poor work practice or experience captured and shared to preclude repetition. They are mirror images of one another.
In BPLL, I have merged the natural complements of best practices and lessons learned into one activity. Modern corporations typically elect to use one or the other, and which of the two depends on whether they see their glass as half-empty or half-full. That old conundrum represents a false choice. BPLL helps the stakeholders to see that their glass is both half-empty and half-full, and that it makes sense to develop a gestalten perspective on doing business.
By the way, for the purposes of this discussion, the corporation is a handy unit of scrutiny. If your own view is other than from the very top of the mountain, substitute organization for corporation and the analogy is pretty straightforward. An organization in this context can be any project team, program, function, location, facility, plant, site, area or field office, headquarters, agency, entrepreneurial enterprise, or not-for-profit. The fact is, even an individual could be an organization in this context, finding the organizing principles of BPLL a curative for the un-examined life. Lest we wax too poetic, back to business.
The objective of BPLL is to improve the methods that currently exist within the corporation for performing work and solving problems. To meet this objective it can be useful to open new lines of communication between stakeholders. Note, however, that BPLL is designed to advance cooperation within the organization without creating an additional function or imposing new requirements. BPLL enables stakeholders to improve a set of work practices by candidly surfacing, exploring, and resolving workplace issues together. The stakeholders are all individuals who participate in, depend on, or expect to benefit from the performance of a set of work practices, e.g., executive, senior, and line managers, and particularly project managers; performing personnel, which may include volunteers; sponsors; customers; and end users.
After major defense contract awards, competitors are freed to ask for a debriefing with the customer. Smart losers always ask for a debriefing to find out why they lost. Rarer, wise winners ask for a debriefing to find out as much as they can about how they succeeded, so in future they can do the same things over again with a fair expectation of more success.
This how is the process. BPLL the process is a means to raising the CIQ. It is a means to making it possible to learn from both mistakes and triumphs, building a record of what is learned, putting this record into the corporate knowledge base in an easily accessible form, and acquiring the habit of future reference and use, thereby achieving continuous improvement.
BPLL, always a work in progress, includes everything needed to assess and adapt the process for a particular application. The elements are a practical understanding of the process, specific instructions, implementation models, and tools. To fit an application, the elements of BPLL are reviewed and revised in light of the organization's and the stakeholders’ individual operating needs. An application is any current focus of BPLL attention. Examples are (1) day-to-day operations over a specified period of time in a location, such as a facility, plant, site, area or field office, or headquarters; (2) an organizational function, such as logistics or training, over a specific period; and (3) an event or effort, such as any project or program. However, corporations, particularly, do best to implement the BPLL process as ongoing and open-ended.
Beyond improved morale and productivity, BPLL provides mutual benefits to the stakeholders. Problems are surfaced in real time. They are disclosed in anonymity. Issues are analyzed comprehensively with independent third-party objectivity. They are resolved in a spirit of cooperation and consensus-building. Management commitment to the process and the outcomes is informed, authentic and explicit. The focus is on fixing the problem, not the blame. There is positive public acknowledgement of individual contributors and their contributions. Solutions are in writing, balanced, easily accessed and understood. Further, BPLL provides the means to communicate O-knowledge effectively and to ensure that beneficial information is factored into planning, work processes, and activities. Consistent sharing of results enables stakeholders to recognize and respond to realizable improvements as well as to potential dangers. BPLL helps to prevent reoccurrences of negative experiences, to institutionalize positive experiences, and to highlight innovative ways to perform work or solve problems with greater efficiency, cost effectiveness, and personal satisfaction.
Why “A View From the Trenches”?
I do a good deal of my work, mostly consulting on proposal making and other new-business project and program developing, in the trenches. “Corporate Image” and “Organizational Vision,” “Core Values,” and “Mission” and “Purpose” statements come down from the mountain. And rightly so. It is for them to be the compelling guiding force, motivating people to work to a common end, focusing, galvanizing people to put forth their best efforts, inspiring. They must be meaningful to people up and down the organization. But BPLL is a thing of the trenches. BPLL is down in the diggings, in the details that are so everyday and experiential that recognition of the need and discovery of the ways to do something better are lost with the doers, unless and until we make a successful effort to capture and share what is learned.
And it was from the trenches, over two decades, that I observed this intuitively valuable management tool corrode with one disappointing application after another. The concept was theoretically sound, but real-world application regularly defeated theory. Why?
I began to notice that the disappointing activities invariably had one or more of a short list of fatal flaws, most commonly: (1) lack of management commitment, which was reflected particularly in the design and conduct of the activity; (2) surfacing of all issues and problems in a public forum, which inevitably caught the activity in a tangle of personalities; and (3) selection (often self-selection) of the organization's responsible manager to be facilitator, which tended to burden the activity with personal agendas and corporate politics.
Critical elements of a successful BPLL activity, then, are the incorporation of management commitment on paper, anonymity for the stakeholders, and an independent third-party facilitator.
So, we can do it. Now, should we?
If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got. — “Moms” Mabley
Exhibit 1 is a standard business school model for the life cycle of a corporation over time. [No, the coulda woulda shoulda is not standard. Or is it?] First, let's look at the phrase, over time. If we are looking at the model for a dot-com like many which have given us the adage “easy com, easy go,” then the time might be a fast year. If, on the other hand, this is the model for The New York Times Company, then the time is 1896 and counting. A corporation's reason for being and its responsibility to its investors and employees is to make the growth leg as steep as possible and the maturity leg as broad as possible for as long as possible.
On the growth leg you instinctively Do, Learn by doing, then Do better. On the maturity leg, if you don't want to find yourself on the coulda woulda shoulda slide, you BPLL. Bourgeois, Duhaime, and Stimpert, in their college text Strategic Management (1999, second edition), warn that an organization can fall into what they call a “competency trap.” The term is sufficiently evocative to stand without further discussion in this brief space. To stay out of the trap, continue to Do, Learn by doing, then Do better. Take the initiative to pursue excellence through new and innovative ideas or methods for performing work and solving problems. Take corrective actions to improve poor or limited but necessary work practices or approaches. Take preventive actions to discard, replace, or work around poor work practices or approaches. This is not rocket science. It's common sense.
But what's the bottom line?
An early women's lib T-shirt read: So many men. So little time. Your quandry is similar. I hear it often: So many new management theories. So little money. Every experiment is expensive. Every process you implement has to more than pay for itself. Let's turn to the literature to see what can happen when this thing is done well. In “If We Only Knew What We Know” (California Management Review Spring 1998), Carla O’Dell offers a number of real-world success stories having to do with the identification and transfer of internal best practices. She is president of the American Productivity and Quality Center and director of its International Benchmarking Clearinghouse. Take a moment for what may be the most dramatic of her several examples.
In 1993 or so, Texas Instruments was making a hash of delivery dates and cycle times. Key customers were threatening to walk. TI turned to best-practices big time to save the day. Specifically, it kicked off a 13-facility reengineering and benchmarking project on order fulfillment, and including cycle time reduction and increased throughput. By 1994 the payoff was the creation of additional capacity equal to that of an entire wafer fabrication works. Let me put that another way. By 1994 the payoff was the creation of additional capacity equal to $500 to $800 million's worth of new wafer fab operation. And in 1995 TI did it all over again, creating “Free Fab No. 2.”
TI’s extensive, intensive best-practices program paid off handsomely. But do we have to turn ourselves upside down and inside out to benefit from best practices lessons learned? No.
BPLL is not a game of home runs — although home runs like TI’s are happily added to the record books — it is mostly a game of base hits. Four singles in a row score like a homer, and they're easier to come by. What's more, they leave the bases loaded for more runs, not to mention the effect of doubles and triples.
You must eat the elephant one bite at a time. — Twi proverb
I have supported a certain new-business development manager on a number of proposal efforts. He called me one day and said that he was thinking of trying his hand at lessons learned. His plan was to identify all the problems that had come up during a recent bid, to solicit solutions, and then to document the ten “best” lessons learned. Read: the ten biggest, the 10 sexiest. John Rehfeld (Alchemy of a Leader 1994) would call that the American way. Americans, he notes, are reluctant, even embarrassed to make suggestions that will result in only minor improvements.
Exhibit 1
Rehfeld, an American who for 12 years held senior management positions in two major Japanese companies, later authored a book about merging American and Japanese management styles to compete more effectively in a global business environment. In a chapter subtitled, “Continuous Improvement and How to Make It Work,” he compares the suggestion systems of the two countries. Exhibit 2 presents his results. Think of an employee suggestion as a BP or LL. The analogy is pure. In the exhibit, America is going for the big play, Japan is taking things one base at a time. The Japanese systems are designed and satisfied to ferret out small constant incremental process improvements. And at the bottom line is an economic benefit more than ten times as great for these incremental process improvements than for all the big sexy breakthrough ideas.
Again, BPs and LLs are the building blocks of O-learning and O-knowledge. Employee suggestions are both BPs and LLs. They capture the workplace gainfully and painfully employed in the day-to-day. Both BPs and LLs are essential to achieving continuous improvement. Then it follows that, as valuable as they are individually, it is smart and can even be critical to merge best practices and lessons learned into one activity. Let's look at that idea, and also look at the idea that, once integrated with one another, best practices lessons learned ought to be fully integrated into the way we do business.
Exhibit 2
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. — Will Rogers
Bourgeois et al, in a discussion of “lower-level” and “higher-level” O-learning, point out a tendency for organizations to emphasize lower-level learning. Adopting the definitions of organizational scholar J.G. March, they say that the lower relates to “exploitation of the known” and the higher to “exploration of the new.” In BPLL terms, the lower relates to LLs and the higher to BPs. Take a moment for a dramatic example from Bourgeois et al of a competency trap and the consequences of lower-level myopia.
In the 1950s, the American railroads were after increased capital intensity. That's a fancy way of saying that by replacing their steam locomotives with more powerful diesel locomotives and their smaller older freight cars with big new ones, they figured they could downsize [the term wouldn't be coined for another 25 years] their workforces and still move the same amount of freight. It worked. Now they ran longer trains, each hauling way more freight than before. Fewer trains were needed, so fewer trainmen were needed. During the Fabulous ’Fifties something like half a million people were dropped from railroad payrolls. But fewer trains and fewer trainmen also meant slower service. And it was at just about this time that trucking got on the fast track to faster service. A lesson learned on the railroads’ lessons learned: while they were busy getting better at doing what they did, in the words of Bourgeois et al. they “missed the most important development in transportation in the twentieth century.”
The professors’ conclusion: “Both types of learning are absolutely critical to organizational effectiveness.”
Exhibit 3 is a business model for a generic corporation. In my gestalten model, BPLL takes its rightful place in the flow of doing business: from new-business development to contractual performance, strategically managed, enhanced by research and development and governed by quality and cost initiatives, informed by best practices (internal benchmarking) and lessons learned, leading to corporate intelligence, customer retention, and to more new business.
I want to share with you an unusual piece of U.S. Government prose. It comes from an agency responsible for acquisitions and procurements. Its author is anonymous. I came across it when a competitor asked our customer to compare and contrast proposal risk with performance risk because they were both called out as evaluation factors in the Request For Proposal. The Government's answer to that long-ago Question 25 was the following:
First, proposal risk relates to the identification and assessment of the risks associated with an offeror's proposed approach as it relates to accomplishing the requirements of the solicitation…
Second, performance risk relates to the assessment of an of-feror's present and past work record to assess confidence in the offeror's ability to successfully perform as proposed…
The following example is provided to illustrate the difference between performance risk and proposal risk. A hypothetical government agency is conducting a source selection using a performance specification to put a person on the moon. One of the proposals received is from a ladder manufacturer who proposes to meet the requirement with a ladder. The performance risk reveals that this ladder manufacturer has a stellar reputation for cost-effectiveness, quality and on time delivery. The firm has been in business for 150 years and is the undisputed leader of the ladder industry. The performance risk assessment group, which is separate from the technical evaluation team, determined the performance risk is low. The technical evaluation team determined the proposed approach to meet the solicitation requirement is a high proposal risk, for obvious reasons.
Exhibit 3
Business is a risky business. We all face proposal risks (with or without actual proposals) and performance risks everyday. Only with best practices lessons learned can we hope to keep the risks low, or more reasonably, at least as low as possible. To anyone who says, or thinks to himself, We can't afford to do that right now, I submit that you can't afford not to.
Best practices lessons learned is not a fad. It is not something you get to after you've gotten to everything else. It is part and parcel of everything else. It is the way to survive and flourish and excel. BPLL is a process. Potentially there are as many best practices lessons learned processes, that is, ways to see it and do it as there are organizations. Every way stands to move you forward. The thing is to begin.
While I have brought my personal insights to this practical study, my continuing efforts are largely a synthesis of the work of various management scholars and organizations. I am particularly indebted to those referenced here, Prof L.J. “Jay” Bourgeois III and his coauthors, Dr Carla O’Dell, and John Rehfeld, and also to the U.S. Department of Energy.