I was on a phone conversation and was asked whether I compared my clients against others in the business to help them figure out where they’re at. E.g. do I offer my partners the chance to benchmark. And after a bit of thought, I said that no, I didn’t, and explained why. Moreover, they found my answer intriguing, so I thought I’d share it with you.

So, as I’ve said before, I don’t like best practices. In fact, as I’ve written before, I think we shouldn’t benchmark ourselves against others. That’s a bad practice. Why? Because then we’re comparing ourselves against a relative measure. And I think we should be comparing ourselves to a principled metric about where we could and should be.

In fact, in the Revolution book, I created such a benchmark.  Using my performance ecosystem model, I took the six fundamental elements and elaborated them. The first core element I documented is a learning culture. That’s accompanied by the approach to formal learning, looking at your instructional design and delivery. Then you move to performance focus, how you’re supporting performance in the world. We move on to social, how you’re facilitating informal learning and innovation. The next step is how you measure what you’re doing. Finally, there’s your infrastructure, how you’re creating the ecosystem environment. For each here I have a principle and an approach.

What I’ve done in the benchmarking instrument is take each of these and extend them. So, for each element broke it into two components, as there are nuances. And, for each, I proposed four levels of maturity:

• Unaware: here you’re not thinking ecosystem
• Initiating: now you’re beginning to establish an ecosystem approach
• Mature: you’ve reached a working approach
• Leading: at this level you’re setting the pace, thinking ahead

Thus, rather than benchmarking yourself against others, you have a principled approach with which to measure yourself. This instrument is fully elaborated in the Revolutionize L&D book, and goes into detail on each of the twelve rows.

And that was my response to the query. As a person, on principle you’re not supposed to compare yourself to others, but to your own progress. How to set your benchmarks? Against formal criteria. The same is true for organizations. I’ve tried to make a scrutable framework, the Revolution Field Guide, so to speak. So, please, look to best principles, not practices, and evaluate yourself similarly.

A colleague, after hearing my take on economics, suggested I should tell this story. It’s a bit light-hearted, but it does make a point. And I’ve expanded it here for the purposes of reading versus listening. You can use other services or products, but I’ve used fish and chips because it’s quite viscerally obvious.

Good fish and chips are a delight.  When done well, they’re crispy, light, and not soggy. Texturally, the crunch of the batter complements the flakiness of the fish as the crunchier exterior of the chips (fries, for us Yanks) complements the softness of the potato inside. Flavorwise it’s similarly a win, the battered fish a culinary combination of a lightly savory batter against the simple perfection of the fish, and the chips provide a smooth complement. Even colorwise, the light gold of the chips set against the richer gold of the fish makes an appealing platter.  It’s a favorite from England to the Antipodes.

And we know how to do it.  We know that having the proper temperature, and a balanced batter, and the right sized fries, are key to the perfection. There is variation, the thickness of the fries or the components of the batter, but we know the  parameters.  We can do this reliably and repeatably.

So why, of all things, do we still have shops that sell greasy, sodden fish and chips? You know they’re out there. Certainly consumers should avoid such places and only patronize purveyors who are able to replicate a recipe that’s widely known.  Yet, it is unfortunately all too easy to wander from town to town, from suburb to suburb, and find a surprising variation.  This just doesn’t make sense!

And that’s an important “doesn’t make sense”.  Because, economics tells us that competition will drive a continuing increase in the quality of products and services. Consumers will seek out the optimal product, and those who can’t compete will fall away. Yet these variations have existed for decades!  “Ladies & gentlemen, we have a conundrum!”

The result? The fundamental foundation of our economy is broken.  (And, of course, I’m using a wee bit of exaggeration for humor.) However, I’m also making a point: we need to be careful about the base statements we hear.

The fact of the matter is that consumers aren’t optimizing, they’re ‘satisficing’. That is, consumers will choose ‘satisfactory’ solutions rather than optimal. It’s a tradeoff: go a mile or two further for good fish and chips, or just go around the corner for the less desirable version. Hey, we’re tired at the end of a long day, or the kids are on a rampage, or…  This, in the organizational sense, was the basis of Herb Simon’s Nobel Prize in Economics, before he went on to be a leader of the cognitive science revolution.

The underlying point, besides making an affectionate dig at our economic model, is that the details matter. A joke is that economics predictions have no real basis in science, but then important assumptions are made regardless. This isn’t a political rant, in any case, it’s more a point about the fundamentals of society, and how we evaluate them.  As requested.

This issue came up recently, and it’s worth a think. What would a CEO hope to see from L&D?  And I think this is in two major areas. The first is for optimum execution, and the other is for continual innovation. It’s easier to talk about the former, so we’ll start there. However,  if (or, rather, when ;) L&D starts executing on the other half, we should be looking for tangible outcomes there too.

Optimal Execution

To start with, we need specific responses for the things an organization knows they need to do (until that can be automated? Orgs must do what matters, and address any gaps.  Should our glorious leader care about us doing what we’re supposed to? No. Instead, this individual is concerned with gaps that have emerged and that they’re fixed. Of course, we have to admit problems we’re having as well.

The CEO shouldn’t have to care how efficient we are. That’s a given!  Sure, when requested, we must be able to demonstrate that our costs were covered by the benefits of the change. But the fact that we’re no more expensive than anyone else per seat per hour is just assumed!  If we’re asked, we should be able to show that, and it can be in a written report. However, mentioning efficiency in the C-suite is a ticket out.

What a CEO (should) care about are any performance gaps that have arisen in previous meetings and the changes that L&D has achieved.  You know, “we’ve been able to decrease those troubling call handling times back down to x.5 minutes” or “we identified the problem and were able to reduce the errors in manufacturing back to our y/100 baseline” These may even include “saving us $z”.

To do this, of course, means you’re actually addressing key business impact drivers. You need to be talking to the business units, using their measures and performance consulting to find and fix the problems. It’s not “ok, we’ll get you a course on this”, it’s “sure, we can do that course, and tell me what the outcome should be, how will we know it worked?”

Yes, particularly at the beginning when you’re establishing credibility, you may be asked for ROI. How much did it cost to fix this. You do want the fix to cost less than the problem. But that won’t be the main criteria. The CEO should be focusing on strategy, and fixing problems that prevent being able to execute on those directions.

Continual Innovation

That strategy, of course, comes from new ideas. And, to be fair, so too due the fixes to problems. That’s the learning that occurs outside the course!  Research, innovation, design, trouble-shooting, all these start with a question and ultimately an answer will be learned. It comes from experimentation and reflection, as well as looking at what others’ have done (inside and out).

What are the. measures here?  Well, if we take the result that innovation comes from collective constructive friction instead of the individual brainstorm, then meaningful social media activity would be one indicator. Increasing either the quantity of quality discussions would be one.  Just ‘activity’ in the social systems has been one initial measure. But we can go further.

We should expect the impact of these activities to impact particular outcomes. If it’s in sales, we should see more proposals generated, higher success rates, lower closing times, lower closing costs, and other such metrics. In operations, we might see fewer errors, more experiments, more new product ideas generated.  And so on. E.g. “we increased the percentage of…” The point is that if people are sharing lessons learned, we should see faster learning and higher success rates and/or greater innovations.

Of course, we have to count these. Whatever method, whether xAPI or proprietary, we should be tracking activity and correlating with business metrics. With a little thought, we can be looking for and leveraging interesting relationships between what people do in learning (and performing) and what the outcomes are.

We could also be reporting out on the outputs of sessions that L&D facilitates. At least, initially, and then the overall increase in innovation metrics would be appropriate. The key role of L&D in innovation is developing capabilities around best principles, and that includes facilitating and developing facilitative skills.

Impact

The take-home is that the CEO shouldn’t want to hear our internal metrics on effectiveness and efficiency. Don’t expect that person to know about learning theory, best approaches, nor L&D benchmarks. They want, and need, organizational impact.  Even the number of or percentage of employees who’ve taken L&D services isn’t enough. What has that done?  Report impact on the organization. Let the CEO know how much you’ve helped the key metrics, which are directly tied to the bottom line. Yes, you have to start working with business partners. Yes, it requires breaking some molds. But ultimately, L&D will live, or die, by whether they’re accountable to, and contributing to, organizational success in demonstrable ways.

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” – Wayne Gretsky

This quote, over-used to the point of being a cliché, is still relevant. I was just reading Simon Terry’s amusing and insightful post on ‘best practices’ (against them, of course), and it reminded me of this phrase. He said “Best practices are often racing to where someone used to be”, and that’s critical. And I’ve argued against best practices, and I want to go further.

So he’s right that when we’re invoking best practices, we’re taking what someone’s already done, and trying to emulate it. He argues that they’ve already probably iterated in making it work, in their org. Also, that by the time you do, they’ve moved on. They may even have abandoned it!  Which isn’t, directly, my complaint.

My argument against best practices is that they worked for them, but their situation’s different. The practice may be antithetical to your culture. And thinking that you can just graft it on is broken. Which is kind of Simon’s point to.   And he’s right that if you do get it working, you find that the time it hass taken means it’s already out of date.

So my suggestion has been to look to best principles: why did it work?  Abstract out the underlying principle, and figure out how (or even whether) to instantiate that in your own organization.  You’d want to identify a gap in your way of working, search through possible principles, identify one that matches, and work to implement it.  That makes more sense.  And, of course, it should be a fix that even if it takes time, will be meaningful.

But now I want to go further. I argue for comprehending the affordances of new technology to leapfrog the stage of replicating what was done in the old. Here I’m making a similar sort of argument. What I want orgs to do is to define an optimal situation, and then work to that! Yes, I know it sounds like a fairytale, but I think it’s a defensible approach. Of course, your path there will differ from another’s (there’s no free lunch :), but if you can identify what a good state for your org would be, you can move to it. It involves incorporating many relevant principles in a coherent whole. Then you can strategize the path there from your current content.

The point is to figure out what the right future is, and skate there, not back-filling the problems you currently have. Beyond individual principles to a coherent whole. Proactive instead of reactive. That seems to make sense to me. Of course, I realize the other old cliché, “when. you’re up to your ass in alligators”, but maybe it’s time to change the game a bit more fundamentally. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the swamp anyway?  I welcome your thoughts!