Is “Best Practice” a noun or verb?
By Shelley Burns
One aspect of my job is to help hospital managers decode a set of performance benchmarks and develop action plans to address gaps the benchmarks uncover. As a result, managers ask me all the time: “What is the best practice for (insert any hospital department or process here)?”
Many ask as if the best practice is an object, something to be acquired from an external source, or a shiny round solution to all problems – in essence, a noun. Grammar was not my forte, but I learned from “Schoolhouse Rock” that a noun is a person, place, or thing, and a verb is an action or state of being. It troubled me – why is a change or improvement to the status quo (the best practice) characterized as a noun?
I looked up the word practice in the Visual Thesaurus (love it!) and sure enough, it’s a noun. However, some of the definitions describe verbs: “a customary way of operation or behavior”; “systematic training by multiple repetitions”; and “translating an idea into action.” I really like that last definition!
Scrolling down in the Visual Thesaurus, I see that practice is also a verb: “carry out, as in job or profession”; “learn by repetition”; “engage in rehearsal”; and “perform.” Now that makes more sense!
Treating the best practice as a noun – something you can import without consideration of organizational goals, environment, or talent – will lead to disaster or, if you’re lucky, no forward motion. I liken it to my childhood piano experience, which was similar to that of many other people, I’m sure. I was required to “practice” for 30 minutes every day and I certainly did my time on the piano bench. However, I was a lazy practicer, much more prone to daydreaming about how much better I’d sound on a grand piano, instead of putting the hard work into my pieces so that I could actually improve. How many of us treat the best practice for our departments and processes the same way?
Make the best practice a verb in your organization. Challenge managers to reset their activities between searching for the best practice and actually doing something, no matter how small, to improve the current practice. Research is necessary, of course, but it should follow the 80/20 rule. That is, 80 percent of your time, resources and energy should be spent in doing, repeating, measuring, tweaking, changing, improving – these verbs are the true characteristics of the best practice. Your own practice will improve each time you streamline a procedure or remove an inefficient step. And the more often you practice improvement, the better you’ll become. And pretty soon, the best practice will be the one you’ve built yourself.
Shelley Burns is director of knowledge management at HMC.
