Jermaine Edwards argues that best practices shouldn't be adopted wholesale. Adjustments are targeted improvements to what you're already doing, while changes mean your whole approach is wrong. Most organizations confuse the two and miss incremental wins.
Chapters
Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guy, speaking to you from the Customer Philosophy Notes. Now, in the Customer Philosophy Notes, I tend to talk about those areas that perhaps are unspoken of. And so let me introduce you to the first subset of questions, and it's a belief that many organizations hold that actually is destroying their ability to think more clearly about what they do. And that's best practices do not solve problems. Now, what do I mean by best practices don't solve problems? What I mean are that the moment you try to adopt the best practice to solve a problem, you've missed the whole point of what a best practice is supposed to do for you. It's supposed to illuminate to you as an organization that the practices you have need adjusting, not that it needs complete change. And so oftentimes we'll look at the changes an organization has made as the best practice and we'll think that what we need to do is adopt the exact same change. Well, actually, that's not the purpose of a best practice. The purpose is for you to understand what needs to be adjusted rather than what needs to be changed. And the difference between adjustments and changes are this: adjustments point out specific areas that, if improved, give you greater impact on your energy. Change requires a thought or an observation that everything that you're doing is absolutely wrong. And so what you need to do is think about, are we absolutely wrong on this or do we need an adjustment? Do we need specific areas in the business that need to be transformed in a way that gives us a better result? Or do we need a complete change? Now, if you don't have a methodology for thinking that through, you're always going to adopt best practices thinking you need changes when really what you need are adjustments. So ask yourself this question: do you need a change or do you need an adjustment? And if you download actually the text below, I'll show you exactly what model to use so you can determine whether or not your business needs to change or whether you simply need to adjust. As Philosophy Notes number 1, best practices don't solve problems, and if you think it does, then perhaps you do need a change.
