The Never Ending Treadmill of Chasing Best Practices

Many organizations invest significant time and money in implementing best practices in hopes of surpassing the performance of their competitors. Unfortunately, the best these organizations can hope for is to match the performance of their best-performing peers, not surpass it – and even this outcome is highly unlikely.

23 February 2024

Many organizations spend significant time and money implementing processes and procedures deemed to be best practices in their industry. The best such organizations can hope to achieve through these efforts is to catch up to and equal their highest-performing peers; for the implementation of best practices can never raise an organization above its best competitors. But even catching up to competitors through the implementation of best practices is highly unlikely. It is much more likely that organizations that chase best practices will settle into mediocrity than ever match their best-performing peers.

Processes and procedures become best practices by showing their ability to produce good results across numerous different organizations in an industry. Thus when an organization implements a best practice, it is starting to do something that is already being done by at least some of its competitors. The best an organization can therefore hope to achieve through the implementation of best practices is to match the performance of its competitors that are already doing the same thing. The implementation of a best practice cannot be expected to improve an organization’s performance beyond that of other organizations that are already following the best practice.

While the implementation of best practices can, in theory, bring the performance of an organization up to that of its best-performing competitors, there are good reasons to believe this rarely happens. One of these reasons is that innovative and early adopter organizations rarely stand still.

All best practices start somewhere. For every best practice, there is an organization that decided to try something no one else had done (the innovative organization) and there is a set of organizations that decided to follow suit before the practice was fully proven (the early adopter organizations). And it is unlikely these organizations are standing still while other organizations try to catch up to them by implementing the best practices they developed. It is much more likely that while other organizations are playing catch up, innovative and earlier adopter organizations are pushing forward into new untried territories, and in the process creating tomorrow’s best practices.

The relentless forward movement of innovative and earlier adopter organizations often leaves organizations that implement best practices in a constant game of catch-up in which they are perpetually a few steps behind their best-performing competitors. In fact, the only way for most organizations to catch up is to stop playing the game; that is, stop chasing best practices and start developing them. This is, of course, much easier said than done.

There is safety in following the well-worn path of those who have come before you, and there is real danger in stepping off this path. Organizations that want to step off the treadmill of chasing best practices developed by other organizations need to become comfortable and proficient at operating in an environment of controlled risk. This does not happen overnight. It requires a significant cultural change that takes time to bring about. This is why so few organizations attempt to make this change, and why even fewer have the patience to stick it out to the end. But the few that do make it, move from chasing best practices to setting them.