The Plasmid Prep by Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch
Everyone wants best practice. It’s in the name: it’s the best. Who would want second-best practice?
I think uncritical and unexamined acceptance of the idea of “best practice” causes people in organisations to make bad decisions. In this issue, I'm not going to look at decision-making. I'm going to look at the idea of "best practice" through the lens of a very strange book chapter about simple chores assigned to scientists in genetic engineering labs.
The problematic concept of “best practice”
Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch wrote about the problems with “best practice” in a book chapter called “The sociology of a genetic engineering technique: Ritual and rationality in the performance of the plasmid prep”. Jordan and Lynch are sociologists of science and technology. They use concepts from sociology to try to understand how science gets done and how technology has a place in the world.
They say they were interested in the Prep because it was beginning to become standardised. There was evidence that scientists had determined the “right way” to do the plasmid prep. The “right way” was documented in a variety of places. There were books and instructions that described the sequence of activities that you were supposed to follow. Scientific laboratory suppliers had begun selling kits of all the things you needed to complete a Prep.
The Prep was seen as so boring that it was a “chore” that senior scientists would assign to juniors.
In the general scheme of things, performing the plasmid prep is just as necessary, but no more remarkable, than the initial P-K4 move in a classic chess match.
So they could investigate the emerging standardisation of the Prep, Jordan and Lynch did some “deep hanging out” in some genetic engineering labs and interviewed some scientists about how they did the plasmid prep.
Each lab does the Prep differently. Jordan and Lynch say that it’s like each lab has a dialect for doing the Prep. Some labs have different criteria for what the end result, or “yield”, of the Prep should be. Labs that collaborate tend to adopt similar processes. A lab’s procedure depends on the equipment available, so when a lab upgrades to a new piece of equipment, the procedure also changes.
The leader of a lab, obviously, has an incentive to try to standardise the lab’s procedure. A common process would make it easier to write up experiments and would also make it easier to teach new lab members how things are done. Jordan and Lynch tell a story of when that was tried.
A directive from the principal investigator required that a biology supply-house protocol be followed rigorously. After its implementation, acceptable mini-prep results occurred. To the surprise of all the participants involved, however, it was discovered during a follow-up discussion that one technician had consistently and unwittingly left out two steps. Nevertheless, this technician achieved “superb” results with this non-standard procedure. His deletion of these steps saved one hours’ time from a three-hour procedure.
Eventually, the rest of the lab adopted this new process. After that particular technician left the lab, the procedure was still being taught to new lab members. Jordan and Lynch say they heard of similar things happening:
- A “standardised” process is adopted by a group
- A local variation emerges in a small sub-set of the group
- The local variation is seen to have various advantages
- The local variation is adopted by the wider group
Even within labs, Jordan and Lynch found that there were personal variations. Even when everyone said they were following the standardised approach they were actually doing different things. They tell a long story about Edward, a new post-doctoral researcher. Edward was trying to get better at the Prep, so he had asked his lab-mates to show him their techniques.
What he found instead was a baffling array of variations. Each of his nine colleagues seemed to have worked out their own method, and these all varied from the canon.
Edward was frustrated and irritated by this. No-one had a sensible reason why their approach was different; all insisted that their way worked. Edward told Jordan and Lynch that he had "lost friends” over his insistence there should be rational explanations for everyone's different process.
It was as if each of his colleagues produced their own black box, and that for him—a novice seeking to learn a conventional version of them—this threatened the unity and coherence of the practice.
Edward wanted to follow the procedure as it was written down, and it wasn’t working for him. But eventually, something clicked. Jordan and Lynch quote Edward directly:
I’m not doing things any differently, things are just working better. And I think it has to do with this just having gone through the throes of making a lot of mistakes or all the mistakes. So for me that’s always been sort of a mystical magical experience.
So that’s weird: A scientist’s best explanation for why he stopped struggling with a standardised process is… magic? Later Jordan and Lynch quote Edward again:
For me at least there’s a certain magic in going through a process over and over again and going through the throes of developing a process, and at some point, something happens.
Every scientist Jordan and Lynch spoke to said that following the standardised steps for doing the Prep should work every time. But the same scientists also said that everyone, and every lab, has their own superstitions and rituals. One lab had a ritual of turning off the overhead lights when working with DNA, inconveniencing everyone else in the lab. Other labs develop rituals around using only certain beakers or flasks. Some other labs develop rituals around extra sterilisation of already sterile equipment.
Ritual rationality and the black box
We’ve gone a long way from thinking about best practice to talking about superstitions and rituals. The connection is the concept of the Black Box.
When I studied computer science, we did a “Black Box” assignment. We were given one specification and three versions of an algorithm that implemented the specification. To pass, we had to say which one produced the correct output, and how the others were wrong. We couldn’t see the code for the different algorithms; we could only put data in and see what came out.
Lots of things we encounter in daily life get treated as black boxes. Very few people really understand how their car works or how Netflix makes recommendations. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how things work. The stories we tell help us make sense of complex things.
In sociology, the term Black Box does a similar job. It can refer to the idea that there are some things that are simply accepted as working. We can’t see the mechanism in the box that produces the outcome. We take for granted that the outcome is reliable.
In their chapter, Jordan and Lynch are exploring this concept of the Black Box. The Plasmid Prep is supposed to be approaching standardisation — it’s going to become a black box. Scientists accept that there is a thing called the Plasmid Prep, and that there is a recipe to do it. It’s basic enough that you can assign it to an inexperienced scientist. But, when you look at how people do the Prep, there’s variation between labs, and between people in labs. And those people, scientists, have non-scientific explanations about why the variation exists. That seems to mean that it's not a black box! Even weirder, those same people say that the process is standardised.
Jordan and Lynch think this is a result: The concept of the Black Box is problematic. The Plasmid Prep isn’t a black box; it’s not transparent. It’s possibly not a box at all!
What this means in 2020
In 2020, a lot of organisations make the very rational decision to buy an existing tool, rather than build their own. This might be a Content Management System, a Customer Relationship Management system, an Enterprise Resource Planning system or some other platform or service.
These systems often come with the promise that they embody some kind of best practice, as if simply having the tool solves a problem. That’s the very definition of a black box.
But what we learn from Jordan and Lynch is that black boxes might not be black or even very boxy! What this means is that when organisations buy what they think is a “best practice” system they are often disappointed. They don’t really know how the platform works only that they've been told it does. That’s the black box.
Organisations end up here because they have a hard problem they need to solve. They’ve been told that the black box can solve their problem. Not only that, but the black box solves their problem in a “best practice” way. Hard problem plus best-practice black box equals easy solution is very tempting for organisations. You don't need to understand the problem, you just need to know that the black box promises to solve it.
The case of the plasmid prep suggests that making “best practice” use of a platform requires effort. Like Edward the young scientist, if you ask nine organisations how they use the platform-du-jour, you’ll get nine different answers. The platform vendor, like the laboratory supply company, might have a recipe that they say works. But when that recipe encounters reality, you can’t be sure that it will work first time.
There’s effort involved in making the black box work with your reality.
When an organisation adopts a new platform, it’s unlikely to work right away. Your efforts will go unrewarded and you’ll be confused. Persist and one day it will just “click”. How you get to that click won’t be rational. You have to do the work to make the platform, and the process, yours. Technology reveals the irrationality of organisations. You can fight it and be disappointed, or expect it and find a way through.
Serious things
Formal references
Jordan, K., & Lynch, M. (1992). The sociology of a genetic engineering technique: Ritual and rationality in the performance of the plasmid prep. In A. E. Clarke & J. H. Fujimura (Eds.), The right tools for the job: At work in twentieth-century life sciences (pp. 77–114). Princeton University Press.
Canonical URL
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691632759/the-right-tools-for-the-job
Publicly available source
Academic book chapters are notoriously difficult to locate online. I can’t even find a dodgy scan of the chapter.