Process improvement: Strive to do better than your best

by Jeffrey Cohn The dictionary defines best as "of the highest quality, excellence, or standing." From this comes best practices, which Wikipedia defines as "a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means." The definition continues, "a 'best' practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered." What happens to our drive for improvement when we hear a practice being referred to as best? There is a natural tendency to think only about the first part of the definition and assume our work is done. Couple that with the fact that many things referred to as best practices are developed elsewhere and shared with us for us to adopt. Often these decisions are made near or at the top of our organizational hierarchies, and the challenge becomes one of implementation: "Do what worked for them and it should solve our problems too." I met a colleague this week that arrived at her healthcare role via a pathway that brought her to Silicon Valley. She has been struck by the tendency for healthcare workers to look to their superiors for permission prior to trying something new. She stated that things were quite different in the IT world. People, recognizing situations in which improvements were needed, took the initiative to try to make changes and then inform their bosses about the results of those experiments. There was a culture of ongoing improvement that included and, in fact, relied on the idea that for many of...
Source: hospital impact - Category: Health Managers Authors: Source Type: blogs