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Why Bench - marking is a waste of time in High Performance Sport.
By Wayne Goldsmith | In Hot Topics
Benchmarking.
It has become one of the Buzz words in high performance sport.
Benchmarking means that someone in an organisation decides to find out what the best people in the industry are doing, learn from them and usually copy what they are doing.
For example, coaches in professional football codes will sometimes visit successful programs in other codes - maybe even in other nations - to try and learn what they do and how they became successful.
Institutes and Academies of Sport and Government sporting authorities often send people to other countries to benchmark systems, structures, programs and innovations.
It seems like a good idea. Travel to see another program, get some instant solutions to problems and some new ideas to help enhance performance - seems like a great idea.
However…………..
- It’s a waste of time
- It’s a waste of money
- Even if you have the time and the money it doesn’t work.
There is a simple reason why benchmarking is a waste of time in high performance sport - it’s someone else’s bench!
One mistake that has been repeated over and over and over and over in high performance sport is the benchmarking exercise - people looking for answers and breakthroughs in other places.
Here’s ten reasons why NOT to benchmark:
- Programs, systems and structures do not work outside of the culture that created them. The best example of this is Talent Identification. The mass TID models that were developed in Eastern Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s have been subsequently copied by every other sporting nation in some way and……with the exception of China and Cuba…..it has failed. Why? Because there was a unique set of social, political, cultural, economic and ideological factors in Eastern Europe when their TID model was developed which do not exist anywhere else in the world. Successful high performance sporting systems are culturally specific.
- Ideas, innovations and benchmarks are everywhere. However, ideas, innovations and benchmarks do not make a sustainable impact on an organisation unless supported by a systematic, holistic approach to change management and the implemention of the new ideas. Going on a benchmarking holiday, coming back with a bag full of tricks, gimmicks and ideas and throwing them into the organisation without a systematic, strategic approach to their evaluation, assessment, implementation and review is insanity.
- Benchmarking is not an end point. It is the starting point. It is only to give you an idea of where other people are - not so you can copy them - only so you know where to START and then proceed to do it better than they could ever dream. One of the silliest habits people get into is to do the benchmarking junket, come back to the Club or Country and say, “The Americans are doing xyz, so we have to do it that way here”.
- You assume the people, programs, and systems you are benchmarking are telling you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Think about it. If you had a cutting edge, ground breaking idea, would you give it away to another nation, club or coach for a couple of cappuccinos and a sandwich over lunch?
- Ideas are not political. Finding the ideas is easy. Fighting and winning the fights to get those ideas accepted by the political forces in your organisation….now that’s the problem. It’s not Ideas that are the issue - it’s the implementation of those ideas.
- At 6 am every Monday, one thousand consultants leave New York for a week of consulting in Los Angeles. At the same time, one thousand consultants leave Los Angeles to work in New York for seven days. Now the New York and LA consultants have the same stuff to teach but being from out of town gives them credibility, and the respective groups are lauded by their audiences as being innovative and possessing genius. The lesson is - genius might be living next door - have you bothered to listen?
- There are no absolutes in sport, in life, in business or in sport - (I needed to say sport twice). People often come back from benchmarking tours with a list of things that must be implemented because some other nation or team is doing it. If history has taught us anything it is that there are no “musts”, no “always”, no “nevers” and no “onlys”. In fact, if someone else is doing it, it probably is a good reason NOT to do it.
- A fundamental reason why benchmarking does not work is that if you and your people are any good, you are working at benchmark levels all the time and as such, your own rate of change and rate of improvement is faster than anything you will find. You are the benchmark.
- A really great way to stifle creativity, ingenuity and innovation in your own organisation is to spend thousands of dollars looking for new ideas in others. In the end, your own people give up trying to be creative and innovative and just give you the minimum standard - which in high performance sport - is suicide.
- You never find out the whole story. History - and benchmarking in sport is written by the winners. So you may be benchmarking at an organisation and be talking to someone who will explain their success is being due to ABC. Someone else in the organisation believes it is due to XYZ. Someone else believes that ABC cancelled out XYZ and success was actually due to something completely different. One important reason why benchmarking does not work is that you can never be sure if what you find out is the real reason behind the success.
So, benchmark if you have to. Sure it’s a great way to waste some time, meet some cool people and spend some professional development funding which allows you to tick the “professional development box” each year!
However, you are far better off looking within the organisation, examining the way you do what you do now and tapping into the genius and expertise in the people you already have rather than trying to copy something that can not be copied or attempt to repeat something that can not be repeated.
Peter Senge - the great Systems thinking author reminds us that organisations flourish when people are provided with the opportunity to be creative and to accelerate their own rate of learning. This in turn helps to create a Learning Organisation - and a learning organisation can achieve anything.
Benchmarking does the opposite - it stifles the creativity of your staff, dampens enthusiasm and curtails real innovation by telling people - “they do it better somewhere else”.
Guess what? They don’t!
Wayne Goldsmith
July 10, 2008
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Hi Wayne,
After meeting you at the HPC (Pretoria) today I just had to visit your website. Its just so sad that as I was reading this specific article about benchmarking I realized that this is what Netball South Africa has been doing all this time.Just like you said Copy paste copy paste copy paste. So sad but luckily it got me thinking again. Thumbs up!