Best Practice is not to Rely on "Best Practices"

The enthusiasm of many people for "best practices" annoys me. I rather accept the idea of "good practice" as in the FDA standards for good manufacturing practice and good clinical practice. It seems to me that there are standards that make sense in that context.

However, the search for a "best practice" normally seems to me to be a sign of intellectual laziness. First, practices must fit circumstances -- the problems to be addressed and the resources with which to address them. Indeed, I would accept that it is a "best practice" to review good practices in order to adopt that most suited to ones needs and resources, adopting it as appropriate to fit those circumstances. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be what most people are looking for when they search for a best practice. Rather, I fear, they are searching for a model that works somewhere else that they can adopt as a whole without work or thought.

More fundamentally, it seems to me that development programs can always be improved. The idea that one can adopt a "best practice" suggests that one might sit back and quit thinking about how to make things better. If Einstein had sat back and accepted Newtonian mechanics as "best practice" we might never have gotten relativity theory. If the constitution had been accepted as "best practice" we would never have the ammendments to the constitution, and that would be sad indeed.

Habitual behavior is a necessary adaptation to our limited capacity to find better ways of doing things. But for important areas of development as of life, we should strive to do better. So start out with a good practice and stive for a better practive, accepting the likelihood that you will never achieve a best practice.

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
Voltaire

This sentiment can be translated, "the best is the enemy of good enough". It is one I like and use from time to time. Of course, it is the opposite of what I have just written.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Emerson

How do we resolve the apparent conflict? I think that the wise understand when "good" is good enough, and when the effort to make things better is sufficiently likely to pay off to warrant the investment in doing so.

Of course, Voltaire is very smart, and he understood that sometimes one side wins, and sometimes the other; sometimes the wise man sides with the blancos and sometimes with the colorados.

Don't sweat the small stuff!
Do sweat the important stuff!