“Follow best practices.”
It is one of the most familiar bromides in modern institutions. Whether it’s introducing new technology, redesigning processes or scaling operations, best practices are perceived to be safe shortcuts to success.
But in lots of businesses, best practices are no longer doing the trick.
They’re quietly running interference for progress.
The awkward reality is, that what worked for someone else somewhere else at some other time can be a danger when dumbed down and xeroxed mindlessly.
Why We Love Best Practices So Much
Good practice provides certainty in a complex setting. They mitigate risk, provide structure and make it easier to justify decisions.
They are by leaders:
• Appear validated by industry success
• Reduce the need for experimentation
• Offer defensible decisions to stakeholders
• Establish calm and control
In fast-moving organizations, best practices seem like a stabilizing influence. But stability is not synonymous with effectiveness.
How Best Practices Become Anti-Patterns
Optimal procedures are inevitably backward-looking. They have been codified from past successes, often in settings that no longer prevail.
Markets evolve. Technology shifts. Customer expectations change. But best practices are a frozen moment in time.
When organizations mechanically apply them, they are optimizing for yesterday’s problems at today’s requirements. What was an economy of scale has turned into a source of friction.
The Price of Uniformity
One of the perils of best practices is that they shortchange judgment.
When you tell teams to “just follow the playbook,” they stop asking themselves why the playbook applies or if it should. Decision-making turns mechanical instead of deliberate.
Over time:
• Context is ignored
• Edge cases multiply
• Work gets inflexible not fluid
The structure seems disciplined, but it loses its acumen in reacting intelligently to change.
Best practices can obscure structural problems.
Best practices in many corporations are a leitmotif for not doing any real thinking about problems.
And instead of focusing on murky ownership, broken workflows or a lack of process, they apply templates, checklists and methods borrowed from other places.
These treatments can resolve the symptoms, but not the underlying irradiance. On paper, the organization is mature, but in execution they find that everyone struggles.
Best practices are often about treating symptoms, not systems.
When Best Is Compliance Theater
Sometimes best practices become rituals.
Teams don’t implement processes because they make for better results, but because people want them. A review is performed, documentation produced and frameworks deployed — even when the fit isn’t right.
This creates compliance without clarity.
They turn work into doing things “the right way,” rather than achieving the right results. Resources are wasted keeping systems running rather than focusing on adding value.
Why the Best Companies Break the Rules
Companies that routinely outperform their peers don’t dismiss best practices — they situate them.
They ask:
• Why does this practice exist?
• What problem does it solve?
• Is it within our parameters and objectives?
• What if we don’t heed it?
They treat best practices as input, not prescription.
This is a high-confidence, mature approach that enables organizations to architect systems in accordance with their reality rather than trying to cram their round hole into the square-peg architecture of some template.
Best Practices to Best Decisions
The change that we need is a shift from best practices to best decisions.
Best decisions are:
• Grounded in current context
• Owned by accountable teams
• Data driven, but not paralyzed by it
• Meant to change and adapt as conditions warrant
This way of thinking puts judgement above compliance and learning over perfection.
Designing for Principles, Not Prescriptions
Unlike brittle practices, resilient organizations design for principles.
Principles state intent without specifying action. They guide and allow for adjustments.
For example:
• “Decisions are made closest to the work” is stronger than any fixed approval hierarchy.
• ‘Systems should raise the cognitive load’ is more valuable than requiring a particular tool.
Principles are more scalable, because they guide thinking, not just behavior.
Letting Go of Safety Blankets
It can feel risky to forsake best practices. They provide psychological safety and outside confirmation.
But holding on to them for comfort’s sake can often prove more costly in the long run — and not just about speed, relevance, or innovation.
True resilience results from designing systems that can sense, adapt and learn — not by blindly copying and pasting what worked somewhere else in the past.
Final Thought
Best practices aren’t evil by default.
They’re dangerous when they substitute for thinking.
Organizations are not in peril because they disregard best practices. They fail if they no longer question them.
But it’s precisely those companies that recognize not only that there is a difference between what people say best practices are and how things actually play out, but also when to deviate from them — intentionally, mindfully and strategically.
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