What Decision-Makers Get Wrong About “Best Practice”
“Best practice” is comforting language.
It suggests safety. It implies consensus. It feels defensible — especially in environments where decisions are scrutinized long after they’re made.
But in enterprise systems, best practice is rarely the same thing as best decision.
Where Best Practice Comes From
Most best practices are retrospective. They describe what worked somewhere, under a specific set of conditions, with a particular mix of people, governance, and timing.
What they don’t describe is how transferable that success actually is.
When organizations adopt best practices wholesale, they often import assumptions they never agreed to — about process maturity, data discipline, staffing levels, or tolerance for change.
The Hidden Tradeoff
Best practices optimize for predictability, not fit.
They reduce variability, which is helpful for vendors and implementers. But they also constrain how an organization can operate, report, and adapt over time.
That tradeoff is rarely discussed explicitly. It’s treated as the cost of doing things “the right way.”
Why Leaders Lean on It Anyway
Best practice provides cover.
If something goes wrong, it’s easier to say:
“We followed industry best practices.”
than:
“We made a deliberate choice, and it carried risk.”
But avoiding ownership doesn’t reduce risk. It just delays accountability.
What Better Looks Like
Strong decisions treat best practice as input, not instruction.
They ask:
Which practices align with how we actually operate?
Which ones create friction we’re not staffed to manage?
Where does deviation create advantage, not danger?
This requires judgment. And judgment is harder than compliance.
Final Thought
Best practice is a starting point — not a destination.
The goal isn’t to look like a successful organization on paper. It’s to operate like one in reality.
Helping leaders navigate that distinction is a recurring theme in advisory work we support through 7Dimensions Consulting, where context matters more than convention.
