Bill Barowy wrote:
" The outline of the paper (our topic is assessment) is:
1.Intro
2.Present Assessment Practices
3.Best Assessment Practices
4.Discussion
5.Recommendations
With sections 2 and 3 beginning to delineate a zoped as described in lbe,
and indeed, the expansive learning cycle (as an ideal of course) is one of
the things used to describe the best practice of university-wide coordinated
assessments,"
I am very cautious about the term 'best practice' in relation to lbe and
zopeds. I suppose it depends what is meant but usually, in our organisation
based experience, it seems to impose a constraint on lbe. 'Best practice'
seems to imply identifying something which already exists somewhere, and
extending its use. This seems to me to equate to Frank Blackler's 'normal'
innovation, and NOT his 'boundary' innovation. Someone or other (Dan
Maurino, I think) also talked of 'normal' expertise, meaning to become adept
at what is already there. YE has pointed out that lbe is concerned with
'what is not yet known'.
This is of vital importance when business in a small country like NZ tries
to take on those of the USA. We have two relevant current sites in which we
work. One is a tiny (by American standards) NZ manufacturer which has
designed a product which won the 'world's best design' prize at a Chicago
international trade fair. The other is a small NZ team (4 people) of a large
American multinational IT company, where this team solved a major corporate
problem that huge resources in the United States head office had repeatedly
failed to solve. In both these cases 'best practice' wasn't good enough. The
design teams in both cases successfully entered new territory in their
internal work practices which can easily be identified as being grounded in
lbe principles, even though at the time they started they had never heard of
CHAT, lbe or YE.
Of course when you work in such contexts you are constantly confronted with
the contradictions of surplus theories of value and so on, which Paul
reminds us about. It turns out that such contradictions have significant
explanatory power in understanding the success of these teams. We intend to
offer a paper on this subject to the Amsterdam ISCRAT.
However if Bill means that stimulating lbe is ITSELF defined as 'best
practice', then other problems arise which seem to me to be grounded in
epistemology. 'Best practice' is MBA -speak, and probably indicative of an
MBA-grounded culture. In aviation there are now very serious problems
emerging because Crew Resource Management (CRM) - which can be thought of as
trying to instantiate lbe on flight decks - has been widely
institutionalised as a 'best practice' standard operating procedure divorced
from culture. The result in such cases is a deterioration in operational
standards. When somebody uses 'lbe' and 'best practice' in the same sentence
I worry that this is indicative of a cultural misalignment with the
potential for disastrous consequences.
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
T
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