Best Practices Aren’t.

Rerun from 2014 (gently updated)

One of the most cherished consulting tropes to emerge, zombie-like, from the 20th century is the notion of “best practices.” The narrative foisted on managers proceeds as follows:

There are companies and government organizations achieving radical success - better than you, anyway - and if you would like to taste that success in the future, you must repeat their rituals, which are “the best.” (We can, of course, show you these in detail for a modest fee.)¹

Best practices are notionally distilled from the “lessons learned” of companies that transubstantiated from “good to great” during the largest economic expansion in human history. Ergo, managers everywhere are expected to study and internalize these lessons as dogma, to be strictly applied when making either policies or purchases so that they, too, can lead their organizations to glory.

Let us cut to the sacrilegious chase: this managerial conceit is, at its most charitable, built on egregious cognitive misconceptions. Less charitably, the whole practice strongly resembles protection rackets. While they may have helped (or seemed to help) organizations in past decades, best practices in 2025 are a fraud.

Here are the logical failures underpinning any practice described as “best”:

1. Past is not prologue.

The underlying presumption regarding lessons learned and best practices is “What’s past is prologue.” We take on faith (not evidence) that what has worked before will simply work again. We presume that a substantially different global context has no bearing on past decision frameworks. There is almost no data that would support such an assumption, and it’s not how most of us make personal decisions; but it is tacitly believed, ubiquitous, and dangerous.

2. One size does not fit all.

Another presumption around best practices is that we live in an economic era of constant growth, and that maximizing growth is therefore the goal of all organizations. If the pharmaceutical industry is growing 11% a year and consumer electronics is growing 10% a year, then by golly, we should be growing too, no matter what we do for a living. Also, growth is the only goal, so if you are achieving it, then your job is done.

Maybe that type of strategy could fly in 1964 or 1984 or even 2004, but in 2023, that assumption leads to disaster. The demographic wind of the Baby Boomer consumer society is no longer at anyone’s back, industrial concentration has changed the notion of competition, and so rampant growth can no longer be the raison d’être of every single company. If you are an industrial lubricant company trying to emulate the “best practices” of Apple or Samsung because both are growing, then you are truly lost. There is no likely correlation between their future and yours.

Your path will be unique, for good and for ill.

3. We have critical failures of understanding of our own decision-making processes.

One of the worst cognitive failures around lessons learned and best practices is the screwy idea that we even comprehend decision making for large institutions enough to repeat them.

The whole process goes wrong from the get-go. We interview executives about how they made a set of decisions. They fill in gaps of reasoning to explain times when they went with deep intuition, informed by unarticulated experience and bias.  Finding it hard to explain their intuition, they inaccurately weigh other decision variables, dutifully captured by the interviewer.

Second, interviewers themselves fall victim to several classic biases which further distort the findings of how any organization makes a successful decision. For example, once an interviewer hears a certain answer to a question, they develop a confirmation bias and are often less likely to capture subsequent responses that contradict the initial reason for success.

Third, the interviewer ‘captures’ what they hear - as filtered through their own cognitive bias - chunking a narrative into a predetermined set of questions or data elements. By the end of the data capture process, the mavens of best practice have taken inaccurate representations of the past, run them through a filter of confirmation bias and then added a third layer of inaccuracy in the retelling - and now you’re supposed to repeat the decisions of those original executives. It’s like a game of telephone, with billions of dollars and lives on the line.

Add to this faulty process the fact that global systems are reaching a level of complexity that absolutely defies the rigid, hierarchy-dependent chains of command of the past century. We barely understand today’s strategic environment, much less the command structure that would make superior decisions within it. But you are still, unbelievably, expected to apishly repeat past practices going under the term, “best.”

4. A discipline of managerial research became a business - and then a racket.

The false authority conferred by best practices has become a lucrative consulting opportunity in which large professional service firms offer CYA to executives making a decision in an unprecedented strategic environment. The organizational value of best practices takes a backseat to the value derived from the mitigation of reputation risk.

Let us use the example of the technology space. Decision makers offset risk by only purchasing from highly rated vendors, as determined by third-party market analysts using a proprietary framework. In turn, vendors must pay to be assessed by these same analysts. Awards for “quality” are given out with the grandeur of royal knighthoods. It is an open secret in the industry that when payments are missed to these market analysts, the reported quality of one’s offerings tends to drop precipitously - often disappearing from newly issued “analysis.” The excuse offered is: ‘Well, we can’t fully analyze without deploying analysts to interview them and study their data. Someone has to pay for this.’ The fact that this is the exact methodology of quality assessment that destroyed the mortgage markets in 2008 and nearly knocked civilization back to the Bronze Age is a serious offense that requires rectification. Then again, to compare such a system to the failures of Moody’s and Standard & Poors in the 2000s is to give it too much credit; it resembles much more the local gangs that would throw a brick through your storefront and then sell you plate glass.

Outside of technology, there are assessment frameworks for best practices that look somewhat less like La Cosa Nostra. These are dependent on a business model of counterfeit authority rather than threats to reputation. A brand new strategic situation emerges, be it from Bitcoin or Vietnamese manufacturing or $120/barrel oil or the hollowing of the middle class. Rather than study uncertainties, many executives find it more comforting to follow the regressive path to a best practice, suggested by a consultancy well known for such things. Everybody involved knows their role and their lines, saving them all from the discomfort of recognizing the challenge of our age: that this is all new, and your organization is on its own when it comes to defining and then achieving success.

Enough with best practices. They don’t exist, and if they did, they might only be for the one company that discovered them. Instead, let us all be invigorated by a new challenge - to find the best for us, and to discover the best in us. And let future generations decide if our decisions and actions are worth exalting or emulating.

1. I originally had this as a block quote but lost the citation; please advise if you know the source so I can attribute.