The problem with best practice
Facing uncertainty, leaders love to ask: “What’s best practice here?”
It sounds smart, safe and strategic, and often it is. Benchmarking against best practice can be a useful yardstick. It can reveal gaps and help ensure you’re not reinventing the wheel unnecessarily or wandering off into fairyland.
But “best practice” can also be a trap. By definition, it’s a backward-looking concept, a distillation of what worked somewhere else, at some other time, under conditions you don’t necessarily face now. Adopted uncritically, it can stifle originality, have you missing the real issues and produce the illusion rather than the reality of safety.
Don’t just copy and paste. Rather, interrogate the context and ask: what’s the best practice *for here and now*? In other words, use best practice - but as a starting point, not an end point.
That requires curiosity, judgement and the courage to step away from the template. It’s harder than asking for a ready-made answer, but it’s how you create the next “best practice.”
Until next week,
Madeleine
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