The Myth of Best Practice

“We need you to tell us what the best practice is here.” Every business consultant has heard it. Or its cousin: “We chose this firm because they’ve worked with so many companies like ours — they’ll bring the best practices in our industry.”

It is a reasonable thing to want. And the phrase has earned a strange authority in business language — used to dress up proposals, to backstop decisions, to push through requests, until it seems to outrank every other strategic objective in the room. In theory, “best practices” are the methods used by the best in an industry, and the logic is simple: to be the best, do what the ones at the top are doing. That logic has a few quiet pitfalls built into it, and any one of them can steer a business into trouble.

Following the wrong track

After the “war of the currents” in the late nineteenth century, American utilities standardized on 110 volts. The United States was leading the electricity industry and writing its rules, lighting homes and streets while Europe was still catching up. So when Europe finally built out its grids, the obvious move was to copy the leader.

They didn’t. By then the technology existed to run higher-voltage lines safely through residential areas, so Europe adopted the 220–240 volt standard instead — and reaped much higher efficiency over long-distance transmission. The followers, by refusing to follow, ended up with the better system.

The United States may yet move to higher voltages; plenty of homes already pull 240 for their larger appliances. But changing the standard now means rebuilding the equipment, cabling, transformers, and appliances of an entire country — overwhelmingly complex, expensive, and slow. The leader got locked in by its own head start.

That is the first pitfall, and it generalizes. Technology does not advance along a single line. It branches, fans out, opens directions nobody was looking at. So being the best never means walking one well-worn path. A company can pick a path and be the best on it — and that still tells you nothing about whether it is the only path, the best path, or a path that will still matter in ten years.

Pioneers and followers

Picture human knowledge as an expanding sphere. To be the best is to walk on its outer edge, right at the perimeter. And out there, past the surface, there is no one to imitate. There is no best practice and no worst — only theories being tried, failing, failing again, until one holds, and then a better one, and a better one after that. The whole frontier is not a “best practice.” It is a continuum of practices, each built on the last, each an improvement on the one before.

So if you are reaching for a best practice, you are by definition following someone — hoping you have picked the right one to follow, and, at best, doing it across a wide chasm. While they keep stacking improvement on improvement out at the edge, you are squinting back at a single frozen snapshot of one of their processes, lifted out of the web of interrelated processes that gave it meaning.

Performing well is a process, not a possession

High-performing organizations outperform their rivals not because they hold better tools or slicker processes, but because they have grown into a better shape. They became what they are.

Lift those tools and processes out and drop them into another company, and they stop being superior, because the thing that made them work did not come with them. It is like trying to become a world-class athlete by buying the champion’s blender and drinking their morning smoothie. The smoothie was never the point.

The best practices you can see from the outside are the residue of years of effort — an organization changing, transforming, and reshaping itself until it arrived here. And in going through those transformations, everything changed, not just the tools and methods an outsider can see. The culture changed. The people changed. The shape of the whole thing changed.

The history of management is crowded with the copy-paste approach to all of this — Kaizen, Lean, Agile, Muda, one borrowed excellence after another, each imported as a technique while the organizational dynamics and the culture that actually produced it were left behind. You cannot bolt Agile onto project management without transforming the organization around it. You cannot expect waste (Muda) to vanish without looking at the whole system that keeps producing it.

To be the best, you must not follow the best practices of others. You need to be the best. You need to live your best.