The Road to Mediocrity is Paved with Best Practices.
No matter which industry you have spent time in, you have undoubtedly heard repeated references to “best practices”. This term is an oxymoron, since if everyone is following so-called “best practices”, they cannot be possibly be best, in fact the “best” that they can be is average.
The simple fact that there are a single set of practices that have been universally agreed upon as being ‘best’ should send out a giant red flag. Once an idea or methodology is held in such widespread esteem, you can bet that it has reached it’s zenith in terms of effectiveness.
As an example, in Khrushchev’s Russia, best practices for running a centrally planned economy spelled disastrous. Source: The centralized road to mediocrity – Financial Times, 28 February, 2006
Yet the common-sense belief that central co-ordination and direction, and the uniform implementation of best practice, are bound to improve performance remains ingrained despite the contrary evidence derived from the failures of planning in both government and business organisations around the globe.
In an uncertain, changing world, most decisions are wrong, and success comes not from the inspired visions of exceptional leaders, or prescience achieved through sophisticated analysis, but through small-scale experimentation that rapidly imitates success and acknowledges failure. This disciplined pluralism is the true genius of the market economy.
In the same way that centralized economic planning leads to mediocrity, implementing best practices across an organization will inevitably lead to the same fate. This isn’t to say of course that there isn’t ever a place for so called best practices. Any organization that is objectively behind the curve could hold to benefit a great deal from adopting practices that have been tested at the expense of someone else’s time and effort. To expect to gain any sort of competitive advantage based on implementing such practices would be foolish. However, ignoring them completely would be a similar folly, since they were once meaningful and your competitors are aware of them.
Update: Of course there is no sense in re-inventing the wheel for each and every remedial task. In these cases adopting best practices allows for cheap improvement. Only when it comes to key processes and decisions am I advocating throwing best practices out the window.
Nice post…everytime I hear someone say “best practices” i want to punch them in the throat.
Mostly agree.
However making use of best practices in places that you don’t see to be your core competencies could be quite effective as the are often a cheap way to get a decent level of competency.
For example, following a “best practice” to achieve clean/neat work environment by hiring professional cleaners instead of experimenting with ways to get your employees to keep the office neat is what you want to do in most cases.
Maksim, good point. There is no sense in re-inventing the wheel for each and every remedial task. In these cases adopting best practices allows for cheap improvement. Only when it comes to key processes and decisions am I advocating throwing best practices out the window.
I think you’ve confused common practices with best practices. “Best” does not have to be common, and learning from the best is a good thing. Conversely, it is nice that it has been practiced, i.e. there is some proof that it works somewhere before you adopt it yourself. For example, best practices in building a web 2.0 web site should probably include copying the LAMP stack that got YouTube so far, rather than a Microsoft stack that is commonly practiced by most companies.
And I would absolutely want my key processes and decisions to be around best practices.
I think what you mean to say is that if you are trying to innovate then you are going to have to move away from best practices – but with that comes risks and you have to know how to deal with them rather than just be proud that you “not mediocre”. Moving away from best practices is most likely to be a path into poor practices rather than it is to be an improvement.
Hi Adam,
There are two kinds of best practices: proven and declaired. Unfortunately, the latter is more frequent. Communism was an unproven utopia and it is inherent in human behavior to follow crowds whether they are right or wrong (examples: Nazism , communism, most things ending in …ism). For more information on that check out a book called Nudge.
Proven best practices are another story. Without them we wouldn’t have medicine, science, math or any other field whir requires generations of research and standard protocol to benefit us today.
A harvard professor has a great podcast online, talking about Evidence-Based management. His name is Jeffrey Pfeffer. Feel free to look him up.
In the mean time, the next time you go to a doctor, make sure to ask him not to apply best practices on you, and tell us how that goes.
From the first panel in the Dilbert cartoon, it’s the “just like everyone else” assumption that I’m not comfortable with. In programming, there’s a minority who read books and blogs to continually improve their skills. These are the people who are actually aware of best practices and use them. It’s isnt “everyone else”. It isn’t even a majority.
Where I work we have a set of coding standards that are used as a guideline. All interns and new hires are told to follow them, but experienced programmers who know what they are doing are told to break the rules in situations where the rules don’t make sense. Organized code reviews keep everyone from straying too far away from the guidelines.
Nice post. This made me think a little differently about the idea of best practices. Adopting best practices means sitting still while others (possibly your competitors) are pushing the edge forward.
I see reference to this term often in the world of web development, but now that I think about it, this term may be the bar for inexperienced developers to reach. In some cases, even mediocre might be an improvement.
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While the idea is very funny and I agree with the idea behind it, I believe the term ‘best practices’ still has merit.
It depends on if you measure worst to best by number of people doing it or number of options.
A crude example of the first would be “Being the market leader is the best practice” — only one company can really be it.
An example of the second would be “Using tool A instead of B, C, D, or E is the best practice.” This is so regardless of how many people are using tool A.