No Benchmarking in LOs LO7784

Michael McMaster (Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk)
Fri, 7 Jun 1996 07:10:39 +0000

Replying to LO7731 --

The term benchmarking is used so broadly that to be against it is to
be against any comparison. The question raised in a provocative way
as it was here is useful to me because it challenges the accepted
thinking and reveals that there is a lot of mush there.

Much of what passes for effective learning or knowledge gathering is
little more than "being seen to be doing the right thing" and has
little impact on the development of a company. But that doesn't
invalidate the idea. It does suggest you should be careful with the
term - either operational define it for yourself/organisation or
avoid its use if not powerful in your organisation.

There is a term almost always used along with the phrase
"benchmarking" that I find somewhat incongruous in a learning
organisation context. That phrase is "best practice".

Not that I find anything wrong or incompatible with searching for
best practice (the current best standard in a field) and learning
from that as well as measuring against it. It is the pervasive
nature of the statement which often implies that the source of what
is most useful for one company is the best practice of another.

This approach matches the limited view of learning that is "learning
from experience" is the major possibility of learning. I think it's
the minor one. The major possibility of learning, for me, is
generative, creative, innovative and not one of learning from
experience or learning (directly) from others.

In my view of the world - a world of complex adaptive systems and
emergent evolution - there is no "best" anything and "best" isn't
even the goal. What there is that is of interest and importance to
me is "useful". (And useful isn't known before the fact either.)

What I suggest companies seek, if they are pursuing learning as a
strategy for survival or growth or winning or (fill in your own), is
that they look at what others do in ways that provide information
that can be rechunked and recombined in new ways to produce what no
one has thought before. This activity does not fit within most uses
of "benchmarking" (and certainly not its original use) and has no
necessary relation to seeking out "best practice".

My goal in all of this is to become the benchmark standard for others
and to be seen to have the current best practice by creative learning
from a field of possibility much larger than others are considering.
I expect this to emerge from complexity - not to be learned in any
direct way from what others in my field are already doing.

Michael McMaster : Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk
book cafe site : http://www.vision-nest.com/BTBookCafe
Intelligence is the underlying organisational principle
of the universe. Heraclitus

-- 

Michael McMaster <Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>