Managing for Serendipity or why we should lay off "best practice" in KM

Over the last two to three years I have asked well over 100 audiences at conferences, in company workshops and academic seminars a simple question: “What spreads fastest in your organisation, stories of failure or stories of success?” The inevitable answer is failure and there are good reasons for this. Over the millennia the human race has come to realise that being equipped with several stories of failure is far more valuable than a story of success. This implies that the common knowledge management focus on best practice is in effect contrary to natural practice; an attempt to impose an idealistic structured process onto the natural activity of learning and knowledge transfer through a focus on efficiency at the cost of effectiveness. The adoption of best practice implies that: 1. there is a best way to do something, 2. we can identify and codify what that thing is, 3. we can then get employees to follow best practice, 4. and that it is desirable that they should do so. In this article I want to argue that in other than a very limited set of circumstances all four statements are false and that in fact best practice is simply entrained past practice. I will start by establishing some basic principles relating to human decision making to provide a framework to examine the above questions. I will then conclude that a major area of knowledge management practice should be to create worse practice systems on the grounds that they provide better and more resilient approaches to learning. Human decision making: patterns and context