How to find your own best practices

Why looking internally for ideas is often the best source, plus four questions to guide your search.

Hello everyone 👋

This week we are looking at a case study on how to find your own internal best practices. Before we look for outside ideas, we should thoroughly explore what is already working internally. After all, these ideas have already been vetted and proven by your own efforts.

I. Before you look outside, take a peek inside

As I prepared for a strategic planning session, a client comment caught my eye. 

I knew market expansion was going to be a key topic in our conversation and this comment was my starting point.

Every organization is seeking “best practices” but not enough are looking in the best place: your own efforts.

Comments like this are like warning lights, alerting me that this organization has not fully uncovered what is already working internally and rolled it widely enough.

Looking internally is better for three reasons:

1. You already have proof that this idea will work for you.

2. There’s no need to make drastic changes such as introducing unknown technology or a complex process.

3. Your people will be more amenable to an idea that is already working compared to a “foreign” one.

This week’s newsletter is all about how you can find these internal best practices.

II. Demystifying your success

In our strategic session, I used the comment you saw earlier to drive a conversation around the best way for this organization to expand into a new market.

I wanted to know what was distinct about this specific program and in a few minutes, we had the following criteria:

a) The person who started this program was driven, self-motivated and organized

b) The program had been requested by a group of people (demand already existed)

c) The person had experience other programs herself and decided to start her own

I love when foggy ideas are broken down into its building blocks. The organization could then take these building blocks and construct all kinds of process improvements.

It could use it as a filtering criteria before starting a new program, it could use it in its marketing efforts to attract the right people or it could use it to determine how to improve other programs.

The criteria becomes the decision-making rules across many areas including marketing, funding, sales and more.

There was no need to attend a 3-day conference on the best way to expand or to read multiple books. They just had to look inside their organization for the clues to success.

III. Four questions to guide your search

You can apply this process to a wide range of areas.

I was recently talking to a president who felt frustrated with his eight-person leadership team. He wanted ideas for how to resolve conflict and motivate them. 

Before jumping into solutions, we spent a few minutes going through examples and identifying patterns i.e. looking for best practices.

We realized that his issues were predominantly with two out of the eight and those two individuals had similar academic backgrounds. We identified the best practices for the six high-performing individuals and rolled those out to the other two.

There’s all kinds of internal best practices that you haven’t fully tapped into. Here are several questions to guide your search.

1. What activities or parts of our organization work well with minimal issues?

2. Which individuals are easy to work with and which ones aren’t?

3. What initiatives have worked well in the past?

4. What feels easy and hard as an organization?

The goal here is to identify the reasons behind success. It could be due to specific people, specific circumstances or specific strengths behind your organization.

Once you know why, you can figure out how to apply these rules to similar ideas. It all starts with asking the right questions.

IV. Future-proofing ourselves and reducing cognitive load for others

Here are my favorite articles from the Substack world.

Rishad Tobaccowala

wrote a post on how to future-proof ourselves in a world that isn’t changing rapidly but often unpredictably.

Malhar Manek

wrote a post that made me think of how vagueness is inherently annoying for humans. Saying “let’s meet sometime next week” requires more thinking than “let’s meet Friday at 4 pm.”

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That’s all I have for this week!

Until next week,

Ruben

P.S. If you would like to know all the areas where internal best practices could be hiding within your organization, look into booking a “Thinking Session.” In less than 60 minutes, we can identify these areas and prepare an action plan for how to roll out the success criteria to the rest of the organization.