Is "Good" Good Enough?

With the rise of social media and crowdsourcing, do companies need to be concerned with allowing only the “best” ideas, the “best” work and the “best” solutions to be visible and leveraged? Knowing that this takes resources to review and vet practices, can we afford this investment or are we comfortable with "good"?

Simply, this is the wrong question. Too often I hear “best practices” still. This is what knowledge management built its own foundation on – capturing and sharing best practices. While this may still have some merit, good may be good enough if the work/ process/content/information/idea solves the problem. Who cares if it’s the “best” if it meets the needs of the client or user? In a complicated landscape of needs and problems, KM should be helping people find an accurate and appropriate fit not the “best” practice. “Best” can be hard to define so let’s stop spinning our wheels to do so.

Instead of complicated vetting processes where it takes weeks to get a “best practice” posted in a database, we should embrace the following:

• Focus on capturing the right metadata for content to allow problem to be connected to solution

• Social content rating systems to allow what ahs worked for people to bubble up naturally

• Commenting on content is another fantastic feature of collaboration software

• Empowering people to tell stories at a monthly show and tell luncheon

• Let people judge for themselves – a tough culture shift for some organizations