Rethinking Best Practices: Why “Best” Isn’t Always Right for Your Business

When Best Practice Isn’t Best For Your Organization

If best practices are truly “best,” why do so many organizations struggle to adopt them? It’s not for lack of trying. Organizations spend millions on consultants, training programs, and change initiatives aimed at implementing these proven approaches. Yet somehow, the practices never quite stick.

The conventional wisdom says it’s a failure of execution. People resist change. Middle management lacks buy-in. Training isn’t sufficient. But what if the real problem isn’t with the organizations – it’s with the practices themselves?

The Misapplication of Research

Many of our cherished organizational truths stem from isolated studies of individual human behavior. Take multitasking. Research clearly shows that humans perform poorly when rapidly switching between tasks. This leads to the seemingly obvious conclusion that teams should work on one project at a time.

But here’s the problem: We’ve taken a finding about individual psychology and blindly applied it to complex organizational systems.

This is one of the biggest flaws of best practices—misapplying individual research to complex business systems.

Consider this: If working on multiple initiatives simultaneously is inherently ineffective, why do our most successful organizational roles – from CEOs to product managers – thrive on exactly this kind of broad engagement? The reality is that working across multiple domains often creates precisely the connections and insights that drive innovation and organizational learning.

This pattern repeats across organizations:

• Research shows that smaller groups solve problems faster, leading to arbitrary team size limits that ignore the complexity of the work.
• Studies demonstrate that positive feedback improves individual performance, spawning organization-wide recognition programs that sometimes backfire by creating unhealthy competition.
• Cognitive research indicates that humans struggle with probability assessment, resulting in complex risk management frameworks that often miss the bigger picture.

While none of these findings are wrong, they all make the same mistake: assuming that what’s optimal for individual performance automatically translates to organizational effectiveness.

The Standardization Trap

When best practices fail, it’s often because organizations assume standardization is always the right solution. We make assumptions about what “good” looks like without examining whether those assumptions serve our actual goals.

Consider a recent client who wanted to improve how they prioritized strategic initiatives. Their first instinct? Create a standardized scorecard to evaluate every initiative. On the surface, it made perfect sense. A scorecard would force everyone to agree on decision-making criteria and apply them consistently.

Six months later, they called us about their failed implementation. The scorecard that looked so promising on paper had created more problems than it solved. Decision-making, it turns out, rarely happens in a vacuum. Today’s critical factors might be irrelevant tomorrow. Some project benefits prove intangible yet substantive. And inevitably, people learn to game any standardized system.

This led us to ask them a crucial question:

“Imagine a world in which you could reliably make a good decision 95% of the time, but you never did figure out a standardized way to do it. Would that be a failure or a success?”

The question invariably causes leaders to pause. It challenges a deeply ingrained assumption that standardization and excellence are the same thing. Sometimes, upon reflection, standardization proves genuinely crucial – for regulatory compliance, scalable training, or consistent customer experience. But just as often, organizations discover they’ve conflated standardization with effectiveness, pursuing uniformity at the cost of letting teams develop approaches that work best in their unique contexts.

This reflexive reach for standardization shows up everywhere in business. We standardize project management across wildly different types of work. We force uniform performance reviews across diverse roles. We implement identical operating procedures across teams facing different challenges. While the intention – creating consistency and predictability – is sound, the assumption that standardization automatically leads to better results often goes unexamined.

How to Know When a Best Practice Is Holding You Back

The 5 Warning Signs of a Failing Best Practice

Best practices turn toxic when they shift from tools to dogma. Here’s how to spot when this is happening:

1. Defaulting to “because research shows…” without connecting to real business value. When teams can’t explain how a specific practice helps them deliver better results, they’re just going through the motions – copying what others do without understanding why it matters.
2. Rejecting any modifications as “not following the practice correctly.” This rigid thinking misses the point: best practices should be starting points that we adapt to our needs, not unchangeable rules. When teams can’t adjust practices to their situation, innovation dies.
3. Spending more energy enforcing the practice than measuring its impact. This happens when organizations focus more on following rules than getting results. Watch for teams spending more time proving they followed the practice than showing what that practice achieved.
4. Not being able to explain how the practice creates value. If teams can’t describe how a practice helps them do better work, it’s probably become an empty ritual. This usually means the practice has either outlived its usefulness or needs serious updating.
5. Making the practice more important than the outcome. This is the biggest red flag – when following the practice becomes more important than achieving what the practice was meant to help in the first place.

Breaking the Best Practice Trap—What to Do Instead

A Principles-First Approach to Business Success

Rather than immediately adopting best practices, start by identifying what really matters for your organization. Instead of jumping to “we need a standardized process,” establish clear principles that define success.

Let’s say you work at an IT support organization that wants to implement “industry standard” service ticketing practices. Now imagine that before launching the initiative, you established a simple principle: “No ticketing process should add more than 10 seconds to a customer service call.” That single principle would transform your entire approach.

Instead of blindly implementing a detailed ticketing template and script, you’d be more likely to pause to discover innovative ways to capture essential information while keeping calls efficient. The design principle also creates an important shift: moving from what YOU need (such as data) to what the CUSTOMER needs (a short phone call).

That’s the power of principles-first thinking. By establishing what matters most – in this case, efficient customer service – before jumping to solutions, you discover better questions:

“How could we track issues without slowing down calls?”

“What if different support teams captured information differently?”

“What data do we actually need versus what’s just nice to have?”

This approach works because it forces you to separate what you’re trying to achieve from assumptions about how to get there. It creates space for innovation while keeping you focused on what truly matters.

From Best Practice to Next Practice-A smarter way forward

The goal isn’t to abandon best practices entirely – it’s to evolve them. Start by understanding the core principle each practice aims to address. Then explore how that principle might be better served in your specific context.

Most importantly, stay humble. The next game-changing innovation won’t come from rigidly following today’s best practices. It will come from organizations willing to question assumptions, experiment thoughtfully, and create new practices that better serve their unique needs and circumstances.

After all, every best practice started as someone’s experiment. Maybe it’s time to start experimenting again.

Key Takeaways—Building a Smarter Business Strategy

• Best practices should be guidelines, not rigid rules.
• Standardization isn’t always the solution—sometimes, flexibility is more effective.
• Companies should evaluate whether a best practice aligns with their unique context before implementing it.

Want to move beyond rigid best practices? Discover how our expert consultants can help you create strategies that actually work for you.