The False Promise Of Best Practices
Adopting best practices without doing the hard work of developing your own is a sure path to mediocrity.
Originally published Jan 18, 2025 on Forbes
The implicit promise of best practices is understandably alluring: Turn someone else's blood, sweat and tears into your advantage. The problem is nothing in life works that way. Someone else's time in the gym doesn't get you into shape. Someone else's time on the slopes doesn't make you an expert skier. Someone else's calloused fingers don’t make you a great guitar player. It doesn't matter how much they share about what they’ve learned, you can’t recreate excellence without your own blood, sweat, and tears. Trying to do so always ends in mediocrity.
We all know this inherently.
So, if it doesn’t work anywhere else in life, why do we delude ourselves into thinking it will work in organizations? Why do we believe we can adopt someone else’s journey of learned excellence and make it our own? This delusion is why strategy execution is the butt of so many organizational jokes. It’s why the proverbial consulting binders gather dust on a shelf. Getting instructions on what to do and actually doing it are worlds apart.
One of the culprits of this dynamic is the conflation of knowledge and wisdom. Best practices are knowledge. The ability to bring them to life requires wisdom. The former can be captured in a book or document. The latter requires trial, error, risk, experimentation, failure, and learning. Knowledge can be communicated and transferred, but wisdom cannot. And collective wisdom is what separates good organizations from great ones. Members are on the ground together continually trying and perfecting. They develop muscle memory that can’t be put into words.
Best practices, at their best, are directional maps. They are knowledge of the territory but not the wisdom to navigate it. Best practices, at their worst, are mistaken for wisdom. Cursory knowledge masquerading as wisdom in an organization never turns out well.
Successful, high-performing organizations see themselves as wisdom creating machines. Everything, whether success or failure, becomes critical fodder for the road ahead. They treat internally generated wisdom as gold. They generate it through continual experiments together and tell the stories of it relentlessly. They embed the expectation of risk-taking, failing, and learning as core to their culture of excellence.
High performing organizations also realize that best practices are, by definition, backwards looking. They can only explain success in retrospect. They can't account for the myriad variables moving forward in your situation. Friedrich Nietzsche captured this well when he wrote, “When one has finished building one's house one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way, before one began.” Home building best practices are well known, but until you do it yourself you don't really understand what it entails to do it successfully.
The lion's share of an organization’s competitive advantage comes from its capabilities. The bad news is that there is no shortcut to building those capabilities. The good news is that once you build them, they’re hard to replicate.
In 1835 while traveling around the United States to write Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.” It's easy to draw a straight line from that observation to our obsession with best practices today. They seem like a shortcut to success. The irony is that they are often the opposite. Attempts to adopt best practices without risk-taking and struggle backfire. They lead to poor execution and increased cynicism.
Perhaps the most problematic aspect of best practices is that they lull people into a false sense of confidence. Assuming the practices hold the answer to a problem, people stop doing the hard work of trying to discover the answers themselves. In so doing, they miss a critical point: The practices never hold the real value. The work to discover them does.