The Dark Side of Best Practices

By Lon W. Schiffbauer, BA, MBA, PhD, SPHR

In business there’s this idea of a “best practice.” A best practice is a proven and established process that, if followed, will consistently yield the best possible results. For example, if you want to grow your wealth over time, making consistent investments into no-fee index funds is considered a best practice.

I like the idea of best practices. The promise these that systems hold is very alluring to me. They offer maximum output at minimal risk, and that’s pretty attractive. No need to overthink something or reinvent the wheel; follow these well-established standard practices and you can be fairly assured of the outcome. What’s more, you don’t need to be an innovative, entrepreneurial genius to get the results you want. Just follow the standard playbook and watch the success flow.

If only it were that simple.

In this article we’re going to explore a whole host of ways that best practice, rather than helping us, may be working against us. This is important because by failing to acknowledge and address these issues we run the risk of achieving an outcome that is mediocre at bests or, worse still, fooling ourselves into thinking we’re doing the best we can when in fact we are only touching the surface of our potential.

As Good as It Can Be

First, consider how best practices can lull us into a sense of complacency. If we’re not careful, the idea can cause us to turn off our brains and dull our drive for continuous improvement. If something is a best practice, after all, why fret and wring our hands when instead we can just follow the playbook and move on?

Some have tried to ameliorate the finality imbued in the idea of best practices and instead have adopted the term “best-known method,” or BKM. A best-known method is essentially the same thing as a best practice, but with one subtle difference. It recognizes that the practice is not immutable; that it’s simply the best method we have discovered thus far. It acknowledges that there may be better ways of doing things out there, but until we find these alternatives, this is the best we have. This invites critical examination of the practice and opens it up for future improvements.

I deeply appreciate the message of this slight tweaking of the term, but I question whether it has much of an effect in practice. Whether a best practice or a BKM, the risk to continuous improvement is often the same: plug in this method without challenging the logic and move on to other, more wicked problems. It’s just too easy to do what has always worked in the past, and too risky to try something new.

Questionable Validity

I also call into question the validity of these best practices in the first place. Just because someone says something is a best-known method doesn’t necessarily make it so. Maybe it worked for them, but this doesn’t mean it will work for everyone, let alone that it’s a documented best-known method. A practice doesn’t exist outside the context of the situation, and the situation varies from project to project. What’s more, I contend that we don’t always know what practices really led to our success and which one’s contributed very little. We might think that taking steps A, B, and C made our success possible, but it could be that these factors had very little bearing on the outcome. Finally, I believe that many supposed best practices get passed around with very little scrutiny, eventually becoming closer to something like an urban legend than a valid practice. And if you don’t know where a best practice originated, who’s to say it’s truly a best-known method?

Assume a Steady-State

A best practice is only the “best” so long as the conditions in which it operates don’t change, and when things haven’t changed in a long time (or heaven forbit, when they do change and we don’t see it), this can lull is into a false sense of security. For example, the practice of Just-in-Time inventory (JIT) synched-up raw material orders with manufacturers’ production schedules for the last five decades and was a well-established best practice—that is, until the pandemic hit. With no supply on-hand and the world shut down, manufacturing ground to a halt. Now companies are trying a “pack-and-hold” strategy. This means over-ordering materials and parts to prevent stockouts. In most cases, when it comes to keeping the machinery of industry chugging along, businesses are more interested in continuity than they are costs. The point is that best practices, if we’re not careful, can not only make us operationally lazy but can also make us blind to unanticipated risks coming down the road.

Failing to Account for Ambiguity

I would argue that best practices are a solid way to get the desired results when the practices are proven, which is to say, they have reliably delivered optimal results time after time. This is all well and good if you’re dealing with known systems and quantities—when trying to get a specific result from a common set of challenges. The example of building wealth over time is a great illustration of this principle. However, best practices can begin to fall flat if we have a less-than-perfect understanding of the challenge and are not entirely sure what kind of results we want to achieve. For instance, as a YouTube creator, I am forever asking myself the same questions every other creator asks: How long should my video be? How often should I publish? What is a winning thumbnail design? How do I get more views? And like many YouTube creators, I scour the Internet to learn from others to see what I can apply to my own craft. Now there are a plethora of people offering what they think are best practices, but even if can be considered such for their own channels and audiences, does that mean they hold equal value for my channel? My goal for Nutshell Brainery is to earn $10-30K of passive income a year, starting ten years from now, and in the process, have fun, experiment, be unfettered and untrammeled, be weird, and generally mess around, focusing more on the journey than on the results. With this in mind, what are the best practices I should be following? See what I mean? All of a sudden something like “videos should be between 8 and 10 minutes” seems out of context to my larger goals. The same can be said for all the other purported best-known methods, and before long I feel like I’m in an onerous quagmire of pseudo-best-practices.

Accepting the Conventional

Best practices don’t invite us to push the craft forward, to innovate, the experiment, to tread new ground, and discover new things. They tell us to stay inside the lanes and do things the way everyone else does them. In other words, they’re not interested in uniqueness and individuality; they’re interested in low-risk, consistent, predictable, homogenized results. If we reframe best practices as “conventional wisdom,” then I would offer up this thesis: Conventional wisdom yields conventional results. Now there’s nothing wrong with conventional results if that’s your goal. When I’m sitting in an aircraft getting ready for the pilot to land, you better believe I want conventional results. Now is not the time for experimentation and risk-taking! But for me and my business goals, conventional is the last thing I want.

So Where Does This Leave Me?

Best practices and best-known methods play a big part in my life, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Even as I build this weird business, best practices will play a major role in guiding the more mundane, rote decisions that have to be made. But when it comes to the creative side, I think rather than try to recreate someone else’s success by following best-known methods, I’ll be throwing a lot more spaghetti against the wall. Sure, it’ll make a mess, but great things can come from happy messes!

Lon is an Associate Professor of Business Management at Salt Lake Community College and holds an MBA, a PhD, and is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR). In addition to his academic background, Lon spent close to 30 years working and consulting for such companies as FedEx, Intel, eBay, and PayPal, as well as a variety of small to mid-sized companies around the world.