Wherever you look today, people are searching for an improvement in performance. Benchmarking is a popular way to define “good practice”, measure performance and identify gaps.
Unfortunately, benchmarking activities can often generate a ‘league table’ mentality and reduce collaboration between business units and departments. Rather than sharing what they know, people start to hoard knowledge because it gives them an advantage over their peers -‘knowledge is power’.

Whilst working with BP, I jointly developed an approach to benchmarking and self-assessment which overcame these negative aspects, and resulted in good practices being discovered and shared. The result was a high-performing culture that recognised that “knowledge-sharing is power”. It proved to be an entirely new way to improve performance; I describe the approach as benchsharing™.
Geoff Parcell and I have described the process in depth in our book, “No More Consultants”.

Since that time, our approach has been adopted by many other organisations:

UNAIDS, UNITAR and the World Health Organisation (for building AIDS competence and in the fight against malaria)
Orange (for their Learning and Development processes)
Oracle (for checking the health of their consulting networks)
Nationwide Building Society (transforming a supply chain into a supplier network)
GCHQ (for assessing employee engagement)
Syngenta (for manufacturing capability)
Offshore Wind Industry (multi-company approach to reduce costs)
Centrica (project management capabilities)
E.ON (Health and Safety capability in power stations)
NHS (infection control and commissioning)
The Health Foundation (networking capability across the NHS)
The Health Foundation (quality improvement across the NHS)
NHS Improvement (quality improvement)
Department of Health and UK Regional Government (Using it to benchmark Commissioning and analytical capability)
National School of Government (assessing Learning & Development Capability)
Henley Business School (assessing the effectiveness of document management and innovation in organisations)
MB Vermeer (assessing the capability of their Brand consultancy teams)
DfID (organisational learning)
The Law Society (knowledge management capability)
World Bank (knowledge and information management)
Met Office (knowledge and information management)
IFAD (organisational learning)