The Pursuit of Best Practices

If you look at the operational blueprints of almost any organization today, you will find a landscape governed by the frantic pursuit of “best practice.” We are told these industry-standard frameworks represent the gold standard of efficiency—the definitive, optimized way to execute a given task.

But there is a temporal glitch happening in the modern corporate space.

Historically, a best practice was a backwards-looking asset. It required years of data, trial, and error to prove it was truly the absolute “best” way to achieve a predictable result. Today, that timeline has completely collapsed. We now see enterprise “best practices” routinely published for software updates that dropped one week ago, or frameworks codified for tools that are barely three months old. It is speculative fiction shipped as established methodology.

Enterprise ‘best practices’ published for software updates that dropped last week are like speculative fiction shipped as established methodology.

Is it yet another side effect of the frantic AI gold rush? Maybe.

But even outside of the AI panic, I’ve always found the term “best practice” problematic. Luckily, I’m not alone.

I remember the exact moment the puzzle pieces clicked for me. It was during a live session by internal communications expert Joanna Parsons. She noted that as communicators, we know language has power, yet we willingly use a phrase that actively stifles innovation:

“If you call something the best way to do something, it really shuts down any curiosity for other ways to do that. Like why would you look for a better way to do something when there’s already a best? You can’t have better than best.”

As someone who works in information design, and someone driven by a stubborn curiosity to tinker with and improve the systems around me, that hit hard.

“Best” is a deceptive word in the corporate vocabulary. It provides a comforting illusion that the heavy lifting of thinking has already been done by someone else, somewhere else. It encourages teams to copy-paste templates in the name of efficiency. Why reinvent the wheel, right?

The problem is that workflows are living structures. What worked for a tech giant in Silicon Valley three years ago, or even three months ago, will likely choke a scaling operation in today’s context.

To be fair, true “best practices” absolutely exist where deviation means catastrophe. I mean, you certainly don’t want any creative tinkering in aviation safety, data encryption standards, or tax accounting compliance.

But for evolving spaces like communication, operations, and design? The rules change.

While Joanna suggests a linguistic pivot to “good practice” to keep curiosity alive, the real operational challenge requires discernment—knowing when to lock a process down, and when to let it breathe.

Building templates and processes without room for feedback and contextual updates, is the same as building an algorithm that repeats without introspection.

This is where information design comes into play.

Last week, I talked about how a document template shouldn’t just be aesthetic scaffolding; it should be a logic engine that strips away verbal padding and forces teams to face their contradictions on the page.

If we apply that same logic here, a template cannot be a static monument carved in stone. It has to be a structural baseline that asks questions. It needs to work as a system that actively keeps you innovating and changing.

If your templates and processes don’t have built-in room for feedback, optimization, and contextual updates, they’re not actually aimed at efficiency. You’ve instead built an algorithm that repeats without introspection.

There is a fine line between a proven baseline and a stagnant status quo. The trick is to treat templates as a starting line, build for “good,” and design systems that leave your team the room to grow.

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Parsons, J. (2024, February 20). There’s no such thing as best practice in internal communication [Audio podcast episode]. In You’re My CommsHERO. CommsHero. https://commshero.com/podcasts/theres-no-such-thing-as-best-practice-in-internal-communication-joanna-parsons/