Baseline Practice Prevalence as Persistence Predictor
RCTClinical Trial
External management consultants often attempt to instill advanced, highly specialized management practices in poorly managed firms, leading to high post-intervention drop rates.
Picture this
Think of teaching sports techniques to a beginner; a student is far more likely to permanently retain basic fundamental drills that everyone in the league uses than obscure, hyper-complex tactical plays that nobody else in their town practices.
What the evidence says
Baseline practice prevalence in 2008 was a statistically significant positive predictor of practice retention from 2011 to 2017 (coefficient = 0.095, p<0.05), demonstrating that standard industry practices persist while novel, advanced practices revert.
- Who was studied
- 1,042 practice-by-plant cells across 28 manufacturing plants in 17 family-owned textile firms near Mumbai, India.
- How
- OLS regression analysis linking practice-level changes between 2011 and 2017 to baseline 2008 usage frequency across all study plants.
What to do
Focus management transformation programs on embedding standard industry-wide operational practices before introducing complex or novel analytical routines.
From the source
"...the positive coefficient indicates that common practices were more likely to be maintained (so uncommon practices were more likely to be dropped). This highlights that the intervention was more successful at getting badly managed plants to adopt relatively standard practices..."
Do-Management-Interventions-Lasts_Bloom-et-al_June2018.pdf