Why Best Practices Are Bad for Business

Best practices have some value, but they’re not the tools your leaders need to chart a path forward in challenging times.

“A best practice can be useful, but it is not what creates the future,” said Paul David Walker, a business coach and author of Unleashing Genius: Leading Yourself, Teams and Corporations. “It is especially dangerous in a time of dramatic shifts in paradigms, which is what we’re going through now.”

At its heart, a best practice is an approximation of a solution for a problem in the past. Too often, leaders believe what led to that past success will lead to future wins. The financial crisis in 2008 ended that possibility, Walker said, opening up a business environment prone to rapid and dramatic changes. To keep up, a company needs leaders capable of decisive action rooted in present conditions, not the past.

“A company can only grow as fast as its leaders,” Walker said. “If leadership cannot grow, the company cannot grow. It’s not possible. That is why many CEOs today only last a couple of years.”

Getting Past the Past

Because something worked in the past, it is particularly hard for leaders to see an alternative. The reality is that conditions change too rapidly to rely on past best practice for exploring future opportunity.

“The velocity of change in the global environment is so fast that if you are using a best practice that comes from the past you can’t possibly be synchronized with the cause and effect of what the market wants and needs,” Walker said.

The answer is for leaders to learn to live in the present and use beliefs and assumptions based on past experience as a mechanism for decision making. “Genius comes from discovering what happens in the moment, not from what worked last week,” he said. “A genius holds that structure very lightly and uses it for a platform for discovery as opposed to a framework to guide their life.”

Walker described this ability to be present in the moment as “the stillness of a master,” and likens it to what athletes call the zone. Like a baseball batter facing a 95 mile-per-hour pitch, great leaders are able to slow down the moment to identify an emerging trend, whether it’s in the marketplace or in the company.