The Truth About Best Practices

For decades in the business world I’ve been hearing about Best Practices. What a load of garbage! They’re not Best Practices. They’re just somebody else’s used practices, passed on from one boring, uncreative company to the next. Best Practices are the business equivalent of a forty-year-old fruitcake.
Business weenies love to talk about Best Practices. It’s like they’re saying “Somebody else already figured out the right way to do this or that.” That’s false on the face of it. The best way to do something is the way that makes sense in the moment and in context. All the information that would influence the answer to the question “What is our best option here?” is found in the situation itself.
We can’t pretend that porting old, moldy practices from one company to another and one context to the next is smart, or even responsible.
If we trusted the people we so painstakingly hire to do the work for us, we’d let them have a lot more latitude and say-so than we do. That’s our fear showing itself. “No, no, no! We’ve already set that procedure. Don’t you dare change it!”
Maybe the landscape has changed since the Best Practice was installed. It is the nature of physical systems, after all, to change and keep changing.
It’s only in the grey, stodgy and stultified business and institutional worlds that we pretend that things aren’t changing all around us. We pretend that we can sit around a conference table and write a Best Practice, print it into manuals and call it good. We delude ourselves that that’s a great solution to any problem.
How about this? What if we shared our vision for our organization and shared some pointers for folks who aren’t sure how to proceed, and then let our talented and brilliant employees figure out the best solution based on the facts at hand?

Of course, the facts at hand can include anything from a customer or co-worker’s tone of voice to the time of the month (nearer or further from month-end, for instance) to the urgency of the other issues on your desk or your To Do list.
We hire adults, so why not let them behave as adults do, and make decisions based on what they perceive in the ecosystem? That’s how our species survived this long. We didn’t make it here from the veldt and the savannah by repeating other people’s rules and hard-as-rock fruitcake practices.
I was a corporate HR leader for eons. I think I heard three good ideas from other companies during that time. The first one I recall was the idea of paying employees to bring in their friends for job openings in our company. We glommed onto that in a heartbeat.