Best-Practice Delusion

The assumption that practices which succeeded elsewhere can be transplanted to produce similar results. This ignores a fundamental truth: what made another organization successful emerged from their specific context—their people, history, market position, and timing.

Why Best Practices Fail

The best-practice delusion offers a seductive shortcut: instead of doing the hard work of understanding your unique situation, simply copy what worked for successful organizations. It promises reduced risk, faster implementation, and proven results.

The delusion persists because it occasionally works—when the copying organization's context closely matches the source organization's context. But these matches are rarer than they appear. What looks like similar situations often differ in critical invisible dimensions: organizational culture, talent density, customer expectations, competitive dynamics, or historical momentum.

Best practices are pattern-matched to visible actions while the invisible conditions that made them work remain hidden. We see Toyota's kanban boards and daily standups. We don't see the decades of cultural development, the specific supplier relationships, or the particular market conditions that made those practices effective.

The Cargo Cult Pattern

During World War II, Pacific island communities observed that military bases received supplies via aircraft. After the war ended, some communities built replica runways, control towers, and wooden headphones, hoping to attract the planes back. They had copied the visible artifacts without understanding the invisible system that produced the results.

Organizations do the same thing constantly:

Spotify's squad model became a template for hundreds of companies seeking agile transformation. Most failed to replicate Spotify's results because they copied the structure without understanding Spotify's specific engineering culture, talent market position, and business model that made squads work.

Google's 20% time inspired countless innovation programs. Few produced breakthrough products because they implemented the policy without Google's particular combination of technical talent, risk tolerance, and business model that could absorb failed experiments.

Amazon's "two-pizza teams" became organizational gospel. Companies restructured around small teams without Amazon's supporting infrastructure: the API-based architecture, the ruthless accountability systems, or the long-term investment horizon that made small-team autonomy viable.

The Hidden Variables

Every successful practice rests on a foundation of enabling conditions:

Cultural preconditions. Practices assume certain values, trust levels, and behavioral norms that took years to develop.

Capability prerequisites. Success required skills, tools, or infrastructure that aren't obvious from outside observation.

Contextual fit. The practice solved a specific problem in a specific situation that may not match yours.

Timing dependencies. What worked during growth may fail during contraction. What worked before market maturity may fail after.

A Better Approach

Instead of asking "What practices should we copy?", ask "What problems are we trying to solve, and what conditions do we have to work with?" Design practices that fit your context rather than importing solutions designed for someone else's situation.

Study successful organizations not to copy their practices but to understand their principles—then apply those principles in ways that fit your reality.