Why “Best Practices” Are Killing Your Innovation

Somewhere along the way, “best practices” became a sacred term in business. We chase them. We benchmark against them. We build playbooks around them. But here’s the thing no one wants to admit:

Best practices are backward-looking.
They’re based on what worked for someone else, in a different context, with different people, at a different time.

If your team is solving the same exact problem, under the same exact constraints, then sure—reuse the approach. But if you’re trying to do something better, faster, or more meaningful? Best practices will box you in.

The Hidden Cost of Doing Things “the Right Way”

When I walk into organizations that say they want to be innovative, I often find teams buried in documentation—brand guidelines, process handbooks, toolkits, workflow maps. All in the name of “doing it the right way.”

The unspoken belief is this: If we just follow the recipe, we’ll get the results.

But innovation doesn’t come from recipes. It comes from questions. From tension. From iteration. From disagreement. From play. From not knowing what will work and having the courage to try anyway.

Best practices often reward conformity, not creativity.
And the longer you rely on them, the more your teams lose the muscle memory of solving new problems in new ways.

When Best Practices Help—And When They Hurt

There’s nothing inherently wrong with structure. The danger comes when you stop questioning why a structure exists in the first place.

Here’s a quick test:

The more complexity, ambiguity, or creativity your work involves, the more best practices should be treated as a starting point—not a finish line.

What to Do Instead: Principles > Practices

Rather than importing someone else’s solution, empower your team to develop their own—grounded in clear principles rather than rigid steps.

Instead of asking, “What’s the best practice?”
Ask, “What’s the outcome we want, and what’s getting in the way?”

Here’s what that shift might look like:

Want a Real-World Example?

One team I worked with had a gold-standard process for launching digital campaigns. Timelines. Templates. Approval flows. It worked great—for about two years.

Then, campaign results started tanking.

Why?
Because the world changed.
Customer behavior changed.
Platform algorithms changed.
And the process didn’t.

No one wanted to abandon it—after all, it was “best practice.” But when we paused, questioned the assumptions, and ran a quick design sprint, the team rebuilt their launch approach from the ground up. The new method was faster, leaner, and more responsive. Results improved immediately.

The Bottom Line

If you want predictable outcomes, best practices are fine.
If you want breakthroughs, you need better questions.

Let your teams explore. Let them challenge the defaults. And most importantly, build a culture that treats curiosity—not compliance—as the gold standard.