Best Practice - A Philosophical Stance

Comment by Aidan on From Best Practice to Next Practice

---

I take a more philosophical stance on the nature of best practice and next practice.

The process of formulating best practice was never open and inclusive. It was dominated by vested interests on both the supply side and demand side. If we said it was Stalinist we would not be so far wrong. What happens when a practice is imposed is that its meanings change. My favourite practice quote is from Ronald Stamper who said that if you want to change the meaning of a piece of information you should attach a budget to it. And that was way before government targetitis. So I would claim that people are (still) interested in best practice in order to avoid taking responsibility for the outcomes. That tells us everything we need to know.

I am not as cynical as that sounds. Next practice says that I should deliberately open up a space that shows where the real work is, where this is precisely not the problem we solved last time. We can do this by resisting closure, by refusing to say that we understand what needs to be done. There are both supply side and demand side players who absolutely resist this and want to write contracts that allocate risk. And we know where that leads.

So I am interested in next practice because it is next and refuses closure.


Originally posted at https://next-practice-research-initiative.blogspot.com/2010/09/from-best-practice-to-next-practice.html