I've yelled about Best Practices before and will continue to do so now The thing about a Practice is that it's a tool - it helps you do a thing. It will be better at achieving some goals and worse at achieving others, so you need to pick your goal FIRST and only then pick the Practices to reach it.
My experience of "Best Practice" is that it is an execution instead of a strategy. It's far more about familiarity with that practice than that practice being provably "best" in any way. I like asking the devs why React, Angular, etc early on. It's ALWAYS familiarity and not a technical reason.
A practice may be Best to reach one goal over another, or in one context over another. What the legion of Thought Thinkers in tech proclaims when they nominate a Best Practice is "these goals are the goals you should have, these contexts are the contexts you should create."
If you pick up bundles of Best Practices like 36-packs of canned tuna at Costco, you don't get the opportunity to set your own goals. The system you just adopted will incentivize its own goals; it will make it easier to do the things the system was designed for, so those things will get done.
No one loves this outcome more than Nothing Managers, because it relieves them of having to think. It's much easier to govern the adoption of Best Practices than to figure out what you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve it. Throw the book at your people, and go for lunch.
This works best when your manager is also a Nothing Manager (most of the time!) and has no way to evaluate whether your strategy is creating value Adopting Best Practices is a self-contained outcome. We are adopting Best Practices so that we can have a Best Practices org. The value* is obvious**!
If it's not working, you don't have to trouble your brain; Best Practices are interoperable so you can always find a coach/consultant/course that will help you Practice them More Better. Of course, just like metrics, the usefulness of a practice is inversely proportional to its universality.
None of this is new, of course. David Noble called it out in 1995: the first priority of managers is job security, not productivity.
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Sociologists DiMaggio & Powell called the process you're talking about "institutional isomorphism" and claimed that orgs copy each other because when they need to decide something and don't know how, they look to another org and assume (probably wrongly) they had a good reason for doing it that way.
ooh “institutional isomorphism” is a fun one, adding that to my collection
Peter Drucker, on managers (1955): "It always requires twice as much effort and skill to stay up as it did to climb up." The managers put their considerable efforts into staying in place.
Also, a best practice is now considered one because of years of proof that it works. The problem with that is that the context changed during those years, which makes that best practice less relevant as time goes by. Applying it as is is just digging your own grave, you should always look further.
Reminds me of @bretdevereaux.bsky.social's piece on ancient religion - the rituals were that way *because they worked* and if they did not work, it must have meant that you didn't do them properly enough (or the gods are angered) rather than because the ritual did not work. Best Practices!
This makes it so much clearer! "This org is dedicated to aligning with industry-standard religious rituals until the gods smile upon us with profit"
OK. So I'm not the only one concerned with the big tuna haul mentioned earlier.
I really love this talk from @eaton.fyi called "The Doctrine Gap" because I think it clearly articulates what's missing when we talk about strategy or tactics or best practices or goals or any of the other words we use to describe how a team should operate. eaton.fyi/talks/the-do...
Tired: Scrum Wired: Deep Battle