Adopt, Adapt, or Abandon

Encourage and share best practices.

Practitioners: tactical, integrative, and strategic

Adopt, Adapt, or Abandon

This one seems simple on the surface, and that is what makes is so dangerous. What is wrong with sharing best practices is how we go about the practice. Immediately a phrase I picked up from one of my clients comes to mind – adopt, adapt, or abandon. There are too many variables that can change when moving from one location to another. Layout, equipment, people, materials, culture; all these variables can create enough of a difference that outcomes will be different.

How different? The answer to that question depends upon the level of precision you see in the world. For me, operational excellence is process precision measured in seconds not minutes or hours. With this level of precision in mind, everything is different. Does that mean sharing best practices is a useless activity? By no means. When we share the same process profile but not the same process footprint, we share similar problems. If your improvement work can shed light on my process problem, you can save me time finding it.

Ownership Makes a Difference

What does this offer? Adopt, adapt, or abandon. My team still needs to work through the improvement process. We need to own our methods. My team can benefit from your experience and offer us ideas to consider and experiment with. We can take your learning and build on it. This can accelerate our process without removing our opportunity.

All three levels of practitioners can participate because there are processes from the line levels of an organization to the executive levels, and every process can be improved. Whether delivering value through a product or service or delivering shareholder value to investors, there is a process at work. That is another topic.

Best practices can become worst nightmares when they are demanded to be implemented under circumstances that render them ineffective. Our teams know this. When leaders behave in this way, they diminish their own credibility through their unwillingness to understand. When you believe, “If it worked for them, it would work for us”, then you are the problem. That is another topic, too.