The Drum Beat 310 - Best of Practices?

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This Drum Beat is one of a series of commentary and analysis pieces. Warren Feek, Executive Director of The Communication Initiative, takes a close look at those words or phrases that, when used repeatedly in meetings, tend to make one question their meaning and usefulness.

This piece has been on The CI website as a ConunDRUM - click here. As a result of that publication, 34 people (to date) have rated the article and contributed their own thoughts on the issue. A few excerpted comments have been included below Warren's article; the complete and continually growing list of them can be seen by clicking here. To contribute your own comments, please either submit a page review on this issue of The Drum Beat (click here) or send a message to wfeek@comminit.com Many thanks!

We are interested in featuring a range of critical analysis commentaries of the communication for change field. These will appear regularly on the first Monday of each month and are meant to inspire dialogue throughout the month. Though we cannot guarantee to feature your commentary, as we have a limited number of issues to be published each year, if you wish to contribute please contact Deborah Heimann dheimann@comminit.com Many thanks! 

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Best of Practices?

OK, let's start with a little quiz. Picture yourself in a meeting or just chatting with a colleague. Is there a particular word or phrase which when used by participants in the meeting or by this colleague in an informal chat gets you just a little agitated? Maybe very agitated? I am sure you know the feeling. The blood moves a little quicker. You feel a little more edgy and itchy. You wish you could ban that word or phrase being used - or at least restrict it to, let's say, 5 times a meeting or conversation. Ironically, though internally agitated, externally you may show contradictory signs. You slump a little in your chair. Shoulders droop a little. A "here we go again" feeling gently inhabits you. And it is even worse when you find yourself uttering that very word or phrase that agitates you!

The word or phrase will be different for different people. Some have mentioned "empowerment", "capacity building", "developing countries" or any word that has the root "particip" - "participation", "participatory", "participative" amongst their "I get agitated" prompt. It can have a theme - for example, any phrase related to American sports [which are a mystery to most of us!], such as "who will quarterback this programme", "we are in a full count situation", "that came out of left field", "this needs a full court press" and many others. The word can be an every-day one: "culture", "context" and "community" have been cited. It might be one of our own little inventions - "results based management" gets a number of votes. I witnessed a whole meeting actually demonstrate open agitation when someone tried to use Mr. Potato Head as a metaphor. [Sorry, no time to explain to the uninitiated what is Mr Potato Head!]

I have avoided telling you - but can delay no longer. The phrase that really gets me going is..."best practice". And this makes my life difficult as "best practice" seems to be everywhere. Most organisations I know have a person or a team of people trying to identify and/or describe "best practice" related to their field and there are all manner of "best practice" publications in existence and being produced regularly.

Can someone please tell me what is best practice and why do we spend so much time trying to identify it? I understand "good practice", "innovative practice", "excellent practice" and "creative practice". But how do you decide what is "best" when all practice - all development action including communication interventions addressing priority development issues - takes place in different contexts, with different purposes, different population groups and significantly different opportunities, involving challenges within widely varying cultural, political and resource environments. Compounding this problem is the implication of judging something the "best": that we all need to think about also doing what that practice is doing because it is the best! The "best practice" highlighted after an exhaustive international search may work in the poor barrio on the outskirts of Cali, Colombia, but may be completely inappropriate - perhaps even "bad practice" - if replicated in Blantyre, Malawi; Puna, India; Kuala Trenggannu, Malaysia and even the town in which I was raised - New Plymouth, New Zealand. Probably even Barranquilla, Colombia would not do what they do in Cali, Colombia because it just would not work in Barranquilla. Things are different in Barranquilla! And, if the point of labeling something the "best" is not that others replicate, then why label it the "best"?

As can be seen from the above paragraph I got a little agitated - though I must say, it does feel good to get it out there [I am sure therapy has a word for this]! As a result the calming down process has now kicked in!

Why are "best practice" and its natural extensions of "replication" and "going to scale" bad for progress on development issues? I would suggest the following reasons.

• They imply uniformity when we need greater diversity - diversity matching the number of contexts - an almost infinite number.
• They have the strong possibility of disempowering people and organisations - those who are doing great stuff in their contexts see something rated as the best which they know will not work in their situations and wonder why they do not get the recognition they feel they deserve.
• They bias the suggested required action towards the large agencies, international agencies and away from the small, local organisations.
• They send the wrong message, namely, that what really matters is the detailed programme itself not the principles to which that programme works or the lessons learned from their experience - not as the best lessons learned but as an overall contribution to building a body of knowledge for the work.
• Finally, they are not exactly the result of a "scientific" decision making process - how is one piece of practice "best" and not another - who decides and on what basis?

Now before anyone says - ah hah! - but the whole of The Communication Initiative process is based on sharing best practice - let me try to clarify! We are not. We try to share everything. There are now over 35,000 pages of summarised practice, thinking and initiatives [so that you can quickly review if information and ideas on a page are useful to you and your work]. The experiences, ideas and information on those pages come from you within the network. We put them up without favour or qualification. Why? - because you will all have different interests and demands. So, we try to put the power in your hands. You can decide - in your setting - what is the "best practice" for you to learn from. And, by using the page review forms at the bottom of each page, you can provide your view of the idea, experience and information on any page - a peer review process - providing a practitoner's and network view on practice.

So - if you are in meeting with me and someone says "best practice" please do not all look my way! I will not know what to do. Probably just slink a little in my chair!

Thanks for considering this.

Warren Feek
Executive Director, The Communication Initiative
wfeek@comminit.com
March 3 2005

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Please participate in a Pulse Poll.

Agreeing on "best" practices is an important step for improving the effectiveness of development interventions.

Do you agree or disagree?

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A selection of comments received thus far on the above article:

"I always want to ask "best practice for who?" when I hear that phrase (and I do hear it often). It is said with such certainty, that I also wonder who has defined it as "best". I suspect it is not the communities where the intervention has taken place. I guess there is a continuing search for the "magic bullet" - because people want answers, they want things to work, and to work quickly...The road forward is long - and perhaps we would be wise to step away from bringing "best practices" to the work before us - rather we might strive to build stronger bridges to the communities and local people for whom we are working to improve quality of life. Hey they might even have some of there own "best practices" that work."

"The UNESCO coastal practitioners have an alternative: wise practice."

""best practice" is a horrible bureaucratic term. It has no meaning anymore. Can't we just learn from the experience, good or bad? Why this fake attempt to elevate some practices to the top?"

"If something works within the context of which it is applied, then that is what must be considered best, for getting accomplished that which has need of doing. How can anyone argue in good conscious with common sense and what works, within the reality it is applied, if it accomplishes the task at hand? While at all time, being open to that which works better! To declare best practice, for everything in all circustances, is to go against both of these fundemental concepts and everything that has been learned by those within the development community doing the work."

"I work for IRC, an information and advisory centre on water, sanitation and hygiene in poor rural and semi-urban areas. We believe that some research we have carried out with our partners from the SOuth and the North has some value and ought to be shared in other contexts. In this respect, we have started setting up some 'learning alliances' which consist of a working group addressing a particular issue in a particular setting by involving all the relevant stakeholders (communities, civil society, local government, international NGO's, Universities etc.)... I think that the work which was successful (leading to making best practices explicit) can be adapted and applied to other contexts if the actors of that context are part of the working group."

"I had believed the idea behind a "best practice" is to identify those things which work in given situation(s) and that can be replicated in other situations. I believe there are some situations where practices can be replicated in vastly different settings. To think otherwise is to say we can not learn from others...I believe a best practice should not be applied as if it were a mold but can be a learning tool for some."

"...the problem may not be with the phrase but rather its application. I look at 'best practice' in terms of underlying principle or methodology and that is what should inform my practice, adjusting where necessary and refining where appropriate. This way, I guess, will evolve into a local 'best practice'. To me, it is usually the how rather than the what about best practice that matters."

"We are all in such a frantic search for ANYTHING that works in the HIV prevention firld, that when CDC gives us "best practices" we eat them up, often without question. Your piece has turned the "question it" switch back on in my head."

"My "instant shudder" word is "feedback." Feedback is the high pitch squeeling sound that isproduced when amicrophone is placed too near a speaker. It is unpleasant to say the least. Unfortunately, most verbal feedback is as useless and unpleasant. What the person requesting feedback wants is his own voice or his own ideas fed back to him. Or, the word is used for information that nobody wants to hear or is in the form of information that issimilar to a bovine waste product."

"The real work is out in the field- where you wont even have the time to think about "best practices""

"Warren is absolutely right. Words have not only lost their true meaning (have to sometimes look up the dictionary to know the exact meaning) but the edge to them. They all sound empty especially when one is actually implementing projects / programmes at the field level."

"I do agree with Warren, and will play the devil's advocate in justifying the position of those who use this Warren alienating term: "They" probably mean those interventions that "worked" at that place, in that time, under these particular circumstances, and not necessarily "best of all practices". The disagreement here is with the language, but who more than communicators should use the most descriptive language?"

"Best practice is often seen as a set of guidelines drawn from experience that set out a 'gold standard' to be achieved. The difficulty with identifying something as a best practice is that it often makes people who are already doing very good practice feel undervalued and insecure. In the search for what is best, we can sometimes throw out what is good."

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RESULTS of past Pulse Poll

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the wrong focus for long term sustainable development.

Agree: 59.46%
Disagree: 27.03%
Unsure: 13.51%
Number of Participants: 37

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This issue of The Drum Beat is an opinion piece and has been written and signed by the individual writer. The views expressed herein are the perspective of the writer and are not necessarily reflective of the views or opinions of The Communication Initiative or any of The Communication Initiative Partners. 

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The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners. 

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