Brainstorming on the general applicability of management ‘best practice’ to social change organizations

• I would start from the premise that, although social change organizations can learn certainly from 'business-like practices', it might be helpful to first understand the premises and worldviews that underlie these practices and systems before trying to adopt them as a 'best' practice. The NGO I worked with for 9 years, (and many other grants management NGOs), promotes financial management 'best practice' with its grantees, which essentially means 'solid, professional, transparent, efficient, etc.' financial management systems that are mostly geared towards rendering accounts to donors. That might be OK if, in the process, internal users of financial information (e.g. what financial information does any individual or team need to be better informed and make better decisions), and internal users of financial services (e.g. things such as getting paid, or requesting an advance, etc.), were taken into account as part of the design of 'best practice' systems. I feel that internal needs and downward accountability needs are often not addresses in these 'best practice' systems.
  
• I think there is a big difference between the 'best practice' systems that are promoted within the development industry and best practices in the private sector, usually because (in my opinion) the tools, models and practices in many development NGOs represent very dated (and a tiny selection of what is actually out there) private sector best practice. Human resource management is an area, for example, where private sector practices and HR theory are light years ahead of what most of the NGOs I've worked with are using. Issues of job design, extrinsic (theory X) versus intrinsic (theory Y) rewards and sticks, and even issues of shared identity have been debated for 30-40 years, yet most of the NGOs I have worked with have administrative focused HR systems that don't do much for developing shared vision and co-construction of organizational and individual identity.
  
• I think we can learn a lot from systemic thinking and its philosophy in this area. Many best practice management systems assume that there are objectively definable problems and issues for which 'hard' systems can be engineered to solve—project management best practice is an example. In my research I am using Checkland's soft systems theory to rethink systems and the worldviews that underlie them. A log frame is a classic example of a management best practice hard system that might be useful for designing a bridge, but, with its linear design towards predefined 'objectives', it often ignores the emergent, unpredictable nature of 'soft' human challenges and development, for which there is no one right, objective answer (and even if there was, it couldn't be known far in advance).
  
• There are also the critical and emancipatory systemic thinking traditions that offer even deeper critiques of management systems, their worldviews and their boundaries. Related, but not from the systemic tradition is critical management studies (CMS) movement, which has some really good critiques of blind application of management best practice, although some of the authors seem to find a conspiracy of world domination in everything they see J
  
• Local theory and organizational learning—I am interested in creating local, organization level organizational theory and systems, and then enrich them with good external thinking if relevant, but not start from the outside. There is a lot here to be explored.
  
• I recently used Wordle (an online tool for creating 'weighted' word diagrams based on any selection of text) to create the two images below. The first came out of an organizational self-assessment facilitated (by my previous NGO team Ecuador) in 2003 with three Ecuadorian indigenous federations on the capacities that they perceived as important for their own organizational effectiveness. The second diagram is a Wordle of the McKinsey best practices model for nonprofit capacity. The question I would ask is if the McKinsey model applicable as standard best practice in this particular situation? I don't see how it can be. I believe that organizational management is situational (based on local realities, including the broader context) and emergent. McKinsey (and multiple other best practice models), in my opinion, assumes management is static and pre-definable. This is a clash of worldviews/philosophy, which needs to be addressed at that level as well.
  

Figure 1--Indigenous federations' 'rough' capacity development worldviews

Figure 2--McKinsey nonprofit 'rough' capacity development worldviews

• A research question that goes directly to the management side of things (my own research question is more on a strategic and methodological level) might be:
  

  To what extent do the management practices and systems of social change organizations take into account the complexity (external and internal) of the social change they aim to support, and the identities of the people who would put these systems and practices to use?