Introducing "best practices" to non-experts?

["Geoff Hart" <geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

The problem is that you can lead a techwhirler to best practices, 
but you can't make them think. <g> That is, the problem you're 
facing is the same one any teacher faces, namely that of 
motivating someone to become interested in learning. If you can't 
raise that motivation, you're not going to succeed. Although the 
precise tack you have to take will differ for each person, there are 
various "univeral" tools that work for most students.

One thing that works particularly well is to figure out what 
"professional" tricks are going to help your colleagues do their jobs 
better or more easily. (Relevance and elegance are powerful tools 
for getting someone interested in a new way of looking at things.) If 
you can find "neat" or "peculiar" stuff that relates to what you're 
doing, that tends to stick in the mind too. And for each trick or tool 
or "tease" you introduce, you can casually mention the learning 
resources available to the person (e.g., steer them here, show 
them William Horton's icon book, etc.). The ones who really want 
to learn and expand their professional skills will gleefully seize 
upon what you provide and start learning on your own. The others 
will take a bit more work to get going, but at least you've given 
them tools that move them in the right direction, and you can 
continue doing so by adding the less interesting things to the 
repertoire... such as standards.

Speaking of standards, the most important way to begin a dialogue 
is--surprise!--to begin a dialog. Start with something like "I'd like us 
to begin doing things the same way, because apart from the 
benefits of consistency, it's a kindness to our editor". From that 
point, you can begin discussing the specific consistency or style 
issues you need to address, and hopefully reach a consensus. 
One useful tool might be to use techwr-l as your source of 
authority: "This is my opinion, and here's why. This is your opinion, 
and here's why. Let's put the question to techwr-l and see what 
other professionals think, and why. Then we can try again to reach 
consensus." Better still, this sounds like a marvelous opportunity 
to do some audience analysis and usability testing: "We've been 
doing it this way since the dawn of time because it's what our 
users wanted. But maybe their needs have changed. Let's ask 
them, and we'll use their responses as the basis for our new 
styles!"

And although you may be well versed in the theory of the field, and 
familiar with what works and what doesn't, never let that blind you 
to your own blindness: sometimes a newcomer from outside the 
field can shed significant new light on old issues, provide significant 
insights you've forgotten about or never pondered, and overturn old 
dogmas that deserve to be overturned.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"If you can't explain it to an 8-year-old, you don't understand it"--Albert Einstein