"Best of Practices?"

Warren Feek's complete essay:

"The phrase that really gets me going is...'best practice'. And this makes my life difficult as 'best practice' seems to be everywhere. Most organizations 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."

It gets me going too! Feek states further:

"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'?.........

"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 summarized 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 favor 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 practitioner's and network view on practice."

Feek is addressing a key misunderstanding about “Knowledge for Development”. Many people feel that the point is to know what the best alternative is in key situations. I think the real issue is to develop expertise useful in analyzing situations and problems. Development practitioners should have a wealth of structured knowledge. They should analyze each important situation or problem specifically, bring the appropriate knowledge to bear, in order to diagnose, prescribe and prognosticate.

I use the medical terms deliberately, because I think we all know the difference between consulting a fully qualified physician, and consulting a medical manual that contains a lot of codified medical knowledge. The physician uses his/her expertise to diagnose the problem, prescribe a remedy, and make a prognosis of the evolution of the treated problem. He/she knows that the treatment may be in error, and is plans to make mid course corrections. There is a major effort to move physicians more fully into “knowledge based” practice, which involves physicians mastering the body of evidence that has been accumulated over time as to the efficacy of different remedies as applied to different conditions. In the past, much medical knowledge has been tacit, acquired by physicians through an aprenticeship, and now efforts are under way to move to more explicit knowledge based on results of controlled studies. But everyone should recognize that the physician faces a complex interaction of differences in the agents of the same disease, differences of patient physical responses to the same disease agents and remedies, and differences in the environmental responses to both patients conditions and disease agents. It is the expertise of the physician that brings knowledge to bear on the complex interaction of agent, host and environment. Many health problems are minor, and can be self-diagnosed and self-prescribed by the lay person, but for life and death situations, I want an expert at my side.

So too, development practitioners should develop expertise, mastering large bodies of codified development experience, not so they should choose the best recipe from their big development cookbook for each problem, but so that they can guide a development process after analysis.