Against Best Practices: Why Following Industry Advice Is Keeping You Average

The Best Practice Trap

Best practices exist because they worked for someone, at some point, in some context. They get codified, published, and repeated until they become conventional wisdom.

The problem: by the time a practice is widely known as "best," two things have happened. First, everyone is doing it — which means it has lost its competitive edge. Second, the conditions that made it effective may no longer exist.

Following best practices is a strategy for getting results that are good enough to be unremarkable.

Where Original Thinking Creates Advantage

The consultants and companies that achieve disproportionate results are almost always the ones who questioned a best practice at the right moment.

They asked: "What does everyone in this industry believe that might be wrong?" Then they tested the opposite assumption.

Sometimes the test fails. Sometimes it reveals a genuine edge that competitors, following best practices, will not discover for years.

A Framework for Developing Your Own Practices

Step 1: Catalog the best practices in your domain Write down the 10–15 pieces of advice that everyone in your industry agrees on. These are your candidates for questioning.

Step 2: Identify which ones you have accepted without evidence For each best practice, ask: have you personally seen this work, or are you repeating something you read? Untested assumptions are the richest territory.

Step 3: Test the opposite Pick one assumption and run a deliberate experiment. What happens if you do the opposite of the advice? The outcome — success or failure — produces original knowledge.

Step 4: Publish what you find Documenting your experiments, including the failures, is the foundation of genuine thought leadership. It is not possible to fake.