Beware of Best Practices

Remember the old line, “Nobody ever got fired for using IBM?”

It could just as easily have said, “Nobody ever got fired for using best practices.”

If you’re building a sizable organization, inevitably you’re going to rely a lot on third parties to help you along. Investors, lawyers, advisors, and the like.

And what do they all have in common? Each wants their agenda fulfilled, as much as possible, as soon as possible.

So even if they’re listening to your vision and nodding along, the reptilian part of their brain is daydreaming about getting the deal done.

Anything that gets in the way of that daydream is going to be a problem.

Just as electricity always goes down the path of least resistance, so will they. 

They’re wired for expediency. And fair enough. It’s called human nature or whatever. 

But that bias toward expediency is incentivized to do one thing. Get the damn deal signed. Your vision is somewhere further down the list. 

Which is why these people often reach for “best practices” instead of building better ones. 

Because “best practices” often have very little to do with what’s actually best. They’re just what’s already been normalized. Pre-approved. Sanded down into something everyone agrees is safe. 

But safe is sometimes dangerous. 

A best practice is the thing nobody can get blamed for choosing. That’s the whole appeal. Trouble is the option nobody can fault you for using is almost never the one that wins. And if something is obvious enough to be a best practice, chances are your competitors are already doing it. So there’s no edge there. It’s the cost of entry. 

The moment an organization starts treating inherited wisdom as unquestionable wisdom, curiosity starts going down the drain. That’s how companies calcify. 

Of course, some “best practices” earn their keep. There’s no prize for reinventing payroll software or fire exits. 

But blindly following precedent on autopilot is just outsourcing your thinking. A way of avoiding the harder question. “What if the future requires a different answer than the past?”

The companies that have changed our world rarely did so by accepting the default settings. Same for leaders.

You won’t get fired for following a best practice. But you won’t build something that matters with them either.