Be Better Than Best Practices

This is an excerpt from the weekly Unthinkable newsletter. Every Monday, I share ONE idea or story about trusting your intuition to break from conventional thinking and do better work. Subscribe here.

Last week, we explored a question: How do we find clarity faster? When faced with Advice Overload, it can be difficult to know which strategy, tactic, tool, or idea we should apply to our work. But occasionally, our intuition delivers a lightning-strike moment of clarity. What if we could generate those proactively? Could we actually control our ability to find clarity on-demand, and do so quicker and quicker over time? That’s what we explored last week. 

If you missed it, make sure you go back and read it here. Today we’re going one step further.

Remember the graphic depicting what intuition might look like? We imagined it as a funnel. By pouring information into the top, the funnel puts some pressure on whatever goes inside — like best practices — and creates a more condensed stream at the bottom. This helps us get more proactive about alllllll that information out there and find clarity, faster.

So, what does the condensing? What puts pressure on all that information? Our context.  

Best practices can’t account for the variables of our own unique situations, and so at best, they provide approximations or estimates. They create AVERAGE work and results. And while the expert can’t possibly know the details of our situation, we certainly can. If we understood our context, we could use those details to make the best possible decisions for us, in our specific situation. And we could get increasingly skilled at doing this, until our decision-making seems almost instant -- that's the power of intuition.

The people we admire as "geniuses" seem to have that instant clarity generator in their back pocket. That's because they've honed their intuition for awhile, so what they do feels magical. But it’s not. They just understand their own context better than we do.

But now I’m wondering: What IS our context?

If we’re going to press all kinds of best practices and ideas through that funnel, then, uh … what IS the funnel? Obviously, we aren’t walking around our offices carrying a giant funnel ... into which we pour information ... by cramming our notebooks into the company blender ... with a little bit of milk ... but two percent only because I'm watching my figure...

No! (Right? If you're actually doing that, please take a selfie.) The funnel is just a hashtag metaphor. So back in the real world, what's it made of? What IS our context?
 
I think our context is made up of three parts: YOU, YOUR CUSTOMER, and YOURRESOURCES.

Think about it: In anything you do in your career, those three things are the fundamental pieces involved. There’s always a person or a group doing the work (you), a person or a group receiving the work (customers, or perhaps gatekeepers like bosses that we’re convincing), and then there's the means for making the work happen (resources).

And no two collections of those three things are exactly the same, most especially because YOU don't exist in other situations.

Of course, we all realize this in theory. But we rarely apply it.

So, perhaps visualizing the concept of "context" will help us all view intuition as a practical thing, rather than an ephemeral moment. Right now, best practices have the edge because best practices can be documented. They can be taught. They can (and are) listified by every expert -- the good, the bad, and the "I'm pretty sure you bought your followers and I'm shocked people actually pay you" (i.e., the ugly).

The way we can put original thinking on equal footing with conventional thinking is to visualize it, then go apply it. In other words, we need to investigate the three parts of our context to find our answers, rather than search for someone else's. After all, if we do what's best in our situation, then that IS the best practice. It's just not the AVERAGE practice being shared around our industry. But who cares? We've found the best approach for our own situation.

Look, I know you want to do better work. We all want faster, bigger, and better results, however we define that word. To do that, we don't need the very best best practice. We need something BETTER. Because we aspire to DO better. 

It's time we stopped obsessing over everyone else's answers for us, and instead, asked ourselves the right questions. THAT is how you investigate your context. THAT is how you trust your intuition.