Joe Gerstandt | keynote speaker, freedom fighter, freak-flag flier

A lot of what I do involves applying behavioral science for better business and organizational outcomes. In my consulting, facilitating and speaking I spend the bulk of my time talking with people about issues related to:

• diversity
• inclusion
• innovation
• organizational culture
• group dynamics
• trust
• generative relationships
• communication
• empathy
• change

These are all things that I am very passionate about and things that I see as being highly interrelated. They are also things that have a lot to do with the social and relational aspect of work and involve our intangible assets. Because these areas of focus all live in or around our relationships and transactions with other human beings, they are also very complex, dynamic and fluid. At least from my perspective they are. But in my experience, people do not really want to spend time in ambiguity. They want silver bullets.

I am not a silver bullet person. I have come to believe very strongly that, especially with regards to human capital, talent management, organizational development work (any and all work involving people and culture) silver bullets are a lie.

One of our favorite silver bullet lies is clearly the prized “best practice.”

Despite the fact that people build careers on them and write books about them, best practices are largely B.S., and here is why:

1. Each organizational culture is unique. Just like each person is unique, each organization is unique. And just like every self-help or empowerment tip does not work for every person, “best practices” do not necessarily work for all organizations or even groups within an organization. Just because something works somewhere else does not mean that it is going to work for you. We should be looking at what other organizations are doing, we should look at organizations in a variety of industries for ideas on how we can improve our practices. But we should treat this observation as simply research and the generation of ideas…not the pursuit of silver bullets, and we should not see what others are doing as answers or solutions for us.
2. Correlation is not Causality. This is probably the most common and most significant blind spot in all “research” that is attached to human capital and organizational development work. In his book The HALO Effect, Phil Rosenzweig devotes an entire chapter to this issue. He actually kicks the chapter off with an excerpt from Stephen Jay Goulds Full House: “A famous statistician once showed a precise correlation between arrests for public drunkeness and the number of Baptist preachers in nineteenth-century America. The correlation is real and intense, but we may assume that the two increases are causally unrelated, and that both arise as consequences of a single different factor: a marked increase in the American population. So we have two variable which are correlated, they are moving in the same direction at almost the exact same rate. They are closely correlated, but that does not mean that one is causing the other. But we often assume causality in the world of people practices. We look at an organization that is successful and has a superior employee retention rate and we notice that they also have one of the best compensation packages in the industry. We then make the assumption that one causes the other, and before you know it industry leading compensation is a “best practice”, without having done anything to actually prove a connection of causality. We rarely do, and we rarely can.

This work does not happen in a laboratory. When we are observing one variable we can not hold the myriad other internal and external variables constant. Actually proving causality and measuring the amount of causality is incredibly difficult in human capital practices. But we consistently overlook the issue of causality and jump into an expensive dance with unproven best practices. These best practices often come with loads of data…just not the right kind of data and not analyzed in the right ways. The Best Practice Boondoggle is one of the driving engines behind the Metrics Myth, which supports the careers of even more thought-leaders, consultants and authors…this idea that only stuff that can be measured matters.

I would humbly suggest to you that the real truth is this…nothing that truly matters can be measured.

The funny thing is that I think we all know this. As much as we run around and talk about numbers and ratios and metrics and ROI and blah, blah, blah we all know that the real stuff cannot be measured. We all know that our numbers can be accurate and organized and we can still be powerfully dysfunctional.

People revert to metrics out of fear, not out of vision.

-Patrick Lencioni

We are lying to ourselves and to each other. If HR is going to transform itself and transform the way we do business, this lie will have to stop. We will have to put down the flow charts, pie charts, and spread sheets and have real conversations about real things like real human beings. If you are looking for a best practice or a high “ROI”, you are looking for an easy out.

Look. See. Listen. Tell the truth. Know yourself, know your people, and know your culture. Always look to what others are doing, as well as how and why they are doing it and also consider what they are not doing. Do not just look at what successful organizations are doing, but also look at those that are struggling.  I am not saying that studying what others consider to be best practices is without value, I am not saying that we should not measure things.  I am saying that we put far too much emphasis and rely far too heavily on both.

I believe it is increasingly important to know your own problems and find your own solutions. Beyond being profitable for those selling them, the “best practice” is not all it is made out to be.

-be good to each other