Best practices ignore context
“Best practices” are the enemy of intelligent decision-making. They represent the systematic elimination of context in favor of scalable mediocrity.
──── The context elimination machine
Best practices work by abstracting away the specific circumstances that make each situation unique. They promise universal solutions to particular problems.
This abstraction process necessarily destroys the contextual information that would lead to optimal decisions. Local knowledge, cultural nuances, historical factors, and situational specifics get filtered out as “noise.”
What remains is a simplified template that can be applied everywhere and works nowhere particularly well.
──── Industrial standardization logic
The best practices movement applies industrial standardization logic to complex human systems:
- Reduce variation to increase predictability
- Eliminate judgment to reduce training costs
- Standardize processes to enable scaling
- Minimize expertise to reduce labor costs
- Create repeatability to ensure consistency
This works for manufacturing widgets. It fails catastrophically for managing human complexity.
──── The consulting industrial complex
Management consulting firms have built billion-dollar industries around packaging and selling “best practices.”
They study successful organizations, extract seemingly generalizable patterns, and sell these patterns as universal solutions. The extraction process systematically removes the contextual factors that made the original practices successful.
Consultants benefit from this decontextualization because it makes their knowledge portable. The same “best practice” can be sold to hundreds of clients across different industries.
The clients pay for solutions that are guaranteed to be suboptimal for their specific circumstances.
──── Measurement destroys meaning
Best practices require quantifiable metrics to determine “best.” This measurement requirement eliminates unmeasurable but crucial factors:
Organizational culture can’t be quantified, so it gets ignored. Historical relationships between stakeholders don’t appear in metrics. Local knowledge accumulated over decades gets dismissed as “anecdotal.”
The most important contextual factors are often the least measurable ones.
──── Regulatory standardization
Government agencies love best practices because they simplify regulation and enforcement:
Instead of requiring agencies to understand complex local circumstances, regulators can mandate compliance with standardized practices. This shifts responsibility from regulators (who would need expertise) to organizations (who must follow templates).
Regulatory best practices eliminate the need for nuanced judgment by bureaucrats while creating the appearance of systematic oversight.
──── Educational credentialism
Business schools teach best practices as portable knowledge that justifies expensive degrees:
Students learn frameworks, models, and methodologies that claim universal applicability. This creates the illusion that business education provides transferable expertise.
The reality is that effective management requires deep contextual knowledge that can only be gained through specific experience. But contextual knowledge can’t be taught in classrooms or packaged into degree programs.
──── Technology platform lock-in
Software companies promote “best practices” that coincidentally require their platforms:
“Industry standard” practices get defined by the capabilities and limitations of dominant software platforms. Organizations adapt their processes to fit software requirements rather than choosing software that fits their processes.
Best practices become marketing tools for technology vendors who benefit from reducing organizational diversity.
──── The expertise elimination project
Best practices systematically eliminate the need for expertise:
Instead of hiring people who understand complex domains, organizations can hire people who follow standardized procedures. Expertise becomes expensive overhead rather than essential capability.
This creates a race to the bottom where organizations compete on their ability to function with minimal expertise rather than maximal effectiveness.
──── Local knowledge destruction
Communities and organizations accumulate contextual knowledge over time. Best practices systematically destroy this accumulated wisdom:
Practices that evolved to fit specific circumstances get replaced by generic templates. Local innovations get abandoned in favor of standard solutions. Institutional memory gets devalued in favor of external frameworks.
The knowledge destruction is permanent and irreversible.
──── Context as competitive advantage
Organizations that resist best practices and invest in contextual understanding often outperform their standardized competitors:
They make better decisions because they understand their specific circumstances. They adapt more effectively because they’re not constrained by generic frameworks. They innovate more successfully because they build on local knowledge rather than imported templates.
But contextual advantage is fragile and easily destroyed by best practices mandates.
──── The audit culture connection
Best practices serve audit culture by making organizational performance appear measurable and comparable:
Auditors can check compliance with standardized practices without understanding what the organization actually does. Performance evaluation gets reduced to template matching rather than outcome assessment.
This creates the appearance of accountability while eliminating actual responsibility for results.
──── Value system implications
Best practices represent a particular value system that prioritizes:
- Consistency over optimization
- Scalability over effectiveness
- Measurability over meaning
- Standardization over adaptation
- Process compliance over outcome achievement
These values serve institutional interests (scalability, predictability, control) while undermining operational effectiveness.
──── The innovation paradox
Organizations are told to follow best practices while simultaneously being encouraged to innovate:
Innovation requires experimentation, risk-taking, and departure from established patterns. Best practices require conformity, risk avoidance, and adherence to proven templates.
The contradiction is resolved by limiting “innovation” to superficial changes that don’t challenge fundamental standardization.
──── Resistance strategies
Effective organizations develop strategies to appear compliant with best practices while preserving contextual decision-making:
They implement formal processes that satisfy auditors while maintaining informal systems that actually drive performance. They use best practices language to describe context-specific solutions. They comply with standardization requirements while protecting local knowledge.
This requires sophisticated organizational capabilities and leadership that understands the tension between standardization and effectiveness.
──── The death of judgment
Best practices represent the systematic replacement of human judgment with algorithmic compliance:
Complex decisions get reduced to checklist execution. Situational assessment gets replaced by template matching. Experience-based wisdom gets devalued in favor of process adherence.
The result is organizations full of people who can follow procedures but can’t think.
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Best practices are standardization tools disguised as optimization methods. They systematically destroy the contextual knowledge that enables intelligent decision-making while creating the appearance of systematic improvement.
The best practice industry profits by selling simplified solutions to complex problems, extracting value from organizations while reducing their actual capabilities.
Real effectiveness requires understanding context, preserving local knowledge, and developing judgment. These capabilities cannot be standardized, packaged, or scaled without being destroyed.
The choice is between optimized solutions for specific circumstances or standardized mediocrity that works everywhere equally poorly.