Transmission Project - best practice

Making Best Practices Adequate

Ben Sheldon — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:26:04 +0000

The Transmission Project has long made the argument that it is a lack of resources and capacity that prevent organizations from successfully adopting best practices, not ignorance of those practices. Our focus on honest practice recognizes the need to take a broader focus on an organization’s capacity and environmental context.

From Adapt and Adopt: An Experiment in Making Best Practices Adequate in an Organization [PDF], by Nelly Burrin, Gil Regev and Alain Wegmann:

So called best practices promise many advantages to organizations that adopt them. Reusing these practices, however, requires their adaptation to the specific context of each organization. This adaptation means that for a specific organization, the practices cannot be best. They can, at the most, be good or widely used, but not best.

…that term “Best Practices” is an oversell. It essentially hides the need to adapt any practice to the context of a specific organization. Organizations would do well to not get blinded by the marketing promise of best practices and remember that much work is needed before they can be used.

“a best practice framework is really an exercise in organizational and cultural change. Failing to realize that can be a recipe for disaster”

Article on eLearning Software

admin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:49:58 +0000

An article explaining eLearning possibilities by corps member Colin Pizarek and Idealware’s Senior Editor, Chris Bernard.

Link to Article: http://www.idealware.org/articles/considering-elearning-software

Revisiting Honest Practice

Belinda Rawlins — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:44:01 +0000

Looking back through my writings about honest practice, I came across this piece originally published in the NAMAC eBulletin.

“You can’t copy your way to the top.”

This “meta lesson” from The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership struck me when advising a colleague on a grant that wanted applicants to document the use of “best practices” in their proposed project. The real kick was that the funder was only interested in new projects and proclaimed to support innovation.

My mind reeled. If “best practices” are the standards of excellence within organizations considered high performing, how can it be expected that those standards could be immediately implemented in startup programs? What of differences in organizational culture and constituencies, not to mention technical and information systems? Is innovation supported if funding follows conventional wisdom? How do we know that wisdom is valid when our industry is trained to share only the lessons of success and not of failure?

Organizations need support not just in their success, but also in their mistakes. Since the funding community is unlikely to be first jumping on this bandwagon, I propose cultivating space to learn from the honest practices we experience every day. Encourage reflection on reality when possible.

Steps in the Decision Process to Form a Subsidiary

Mira Allen — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:16:47 +0000

A step by step guide to determine if a nonprofit should start a forprofit subsidiary. Prepared by Randy Cox.

Honesty is such a lonely word

Belinda Rawlins — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:11:22 +0000

At the Transmission Project, you hear us talking about the concept of honest practice rather than best practice. We believe it is equally, if not more, instrcuctive to examine more than what worked. We want to know about surprises, the unexpected, even the failures.

I perked up when, in my RSS reader, I spotted this in a recent post at Museum 2.0:

What’s the best way to share information about your experiments–what worked and what didn’t? Publish.

There are many other fabulous reports out there to learn from, but there are far more languishing in file cabinets. I was a bit surprised as I worked on the book at how often I could get access to a evaluation report with some sleuthing and asking–and how infrequently those reports were publicly available in any form. Please, if you go to the time and expense of evaluating your institution’s projects, find a way to share what you’ve learned.

Nina Simon shares evaluation and research studies on participatory projects in museums. I highly recommend checking out these links as much of what you’ll find has great application in many public engagement efforts.

Check back here regularly for artifacts and stories from the projects we support at the Transmission Project. And let us know what you learn.