The Tyranny of Best Practice – Why Copying Success Is One of the Fastest Ways to Become Irrelevant
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Oksana Didyk is a strategist and researcher in political branding and customer insights. Author of "The Master Watching Over – The Strange Comfort of Strongmen," she explores leadership patterns in the Middle East and beyond, advising organizations on global strategy.
Few phrases are as reassuring in business as "best practice." It sounds responsible, evidence-based, and safe. Best practices promise certainty in an uncertain world. They offer examples of what has already worked, provide ready-made frameworks, and help organizations avoid reinventing the wheel. Yet after more than a decade of advising organizations on strategy, growth, stakeholder management, and market positioning across different industries and countries, I have become increasingly skeptical of the role best practices play in strategic decision-making. Not because best practices are wrong, but because they are often applied long after the conditions that made them successful have changed.
Some of the most expensive strategic mistakes I have witnessed did not begin with poor judgment, lack of expertise, or reckless decision-making. They began with intelligent leaders trying to replicate what had already worked elsewhere, and that is precisely where the danger lies.
Why we love best practices
Organizations do not embrace best practices because leaders lack imagination. They embrace them because uncertainty is expensive. Every strategic decision carries risk. Choosing a new market, redesigning a business model, investing in technology, or changing a customer experience can have significant consequences. Best practices reduce some of that discomfort by providing evidence that others have already succeeded.
Best practices offer more than guidance. They offer reassurance. They allow leaders to justify decisions internally, create alignment among stakeholders, and provide a sense of legitimacy when resources, careers, and reputations are at stake. When uncertainty rises, the appeal becomes even stronger. In many executive discussions, the question is no longer "What should we do?" It becomes, "What are successful organizations doing?" At first glance, this seems sensible. The problem is that strategy and imitation are not the same thing.
The shelf-life problem
The moment a practice becomes widely recognized as a best practice, its strategic value often begins to decline. By the time an approach appears in conference presentations, industry reports, executive workshops, business books, LinkedIn posts, and AI-generated recommendations, it has already been observed, analyzed, packaged, and replicated. In other words, it has become visible, and visibility changes the game. What once created differentiation gradually becomes standard practice. This is not because the practice stops working, but because competitors adopt it as well.
Consider how quickly organizations embraced social media strategies, agile methodologies, digital transformation programs, customer journey mapping, or, more recently, artificial intelligence initiatives. The first movers often gained advantages. The followers gained parity. Eventually, everyone began looking remarkably similar. Best practices are excellent at helping organizations catch up. They are far less effective at helping them stand out.
Success has context
One of the biggest flaws in best-practice thinking is the assumption that success can be copied independently of context. Organizations often observe outcomes without fully understanding the conditions that produced them. A company sees a successful innovation model and attempts to replicate it. A leadership team adopts a culture framework used by a high-performing organization. A business copies a market-entry strategy employed by an industry leader.
The visible actions are easy to identify. The invisible conditions are not. What is rarely transferred are the cultural norms, historical circumstances, incentive systems, stakeholder relationships, timing, organizational maturity, and internal capabilities that contributed to the original success. The result is a familiar pattern: the practice is copied, the outcome is not.
During my consulting work, I have repeatedly observed leaders searching for answers in external success stories while overlooking the unique realities of their own organizations. The question is often framed as "How did they do it?" A more useful question might be: "Why did it work there in the first place?" Those are not the same question.
The consultant's trap
Consultants are not immune to this dynamic. In fact, the consulting industry sometimes reinforces it. Frameworks, methodologies, and case studies are valuable because they help simplify complexity. They create common language and accelerate learning. The danger emerges when frameworks become substitutes for thinking. Some organizations become so focused on identifying proven solutions that they stop examining whether the problem itself is unique. They search for templates when they should be investigating context.
This tendency becomes particularly visible during periods of disruption. When uncertainty increases, leaders naturally look for examples of success. Yet disruption is precisely the moment when historical examples become less reliable. What worked under yesterday's conditions may not work under today's. The future rarely arrives wearing a name tag that says "best practice."
Why AI is making the problem bigger
Artificial intelligence is changing the relationship between knowledge and strategy. For most of modern business history, access to information was itself a competitive advantage. Today, information is increasingly available to everyone. AI can summarize reports, identify trends, generate frameworks, compare competitors, and recommend strategic approaches within seconds. This is an extraordinary development. It is also creating a subtle risk. As access to knowledge becomes democratized, organizations may be more likely to reach similar conclusions. The same prompts produce similar recommendations, the same reports generate similar insights, and the same benchmarks shape similar decisions.
Paradoxically, the widespread availability of strategic knowledge may increase strategic convergence. Organizations gain access to more answers while becoming less distinctive. The challenge for leaders is no longer finding information; it is deciding when not to follow it.
The Anti-Strategy Insight
This is where an Anti-Strategy perspective becomes useful. Anti-Strategy does not reject learning from others. It questions the assumption that widespread adoption equals strategic wisdom. Sometimes the most strategic question is not, "What is everyone else doing?" but, "What are we uniquely positioned to do?"
The organizations that create lasting relevance rarely win by becoming the best copy of somebody else's success story. They win by understanding their own context better than competitors understand theirs. This often requires resisting the pressure to follow prevailing trends. It may involve declining fashionable initiatives, challenging accepted assumptions, or pursuing opportunities that initially appear less obvious.
In strategy, the safest choice is not always the least risky one. Sometimes it is the most dangerous.
Something to remember
Best practices play an important role. They can improve efficiency, accelerate learning, and help organizations avoid predictable mistakes. But they should be treated as reference points, not destinations. The purpose of strategy is not to replicate what has already worked. It is to identify what will work in a particular context, at a particular moment, for a particular organization. That requires judgment, curiosity, and a willingness to question even the most celebrated examples of success.
The next time someone recommends a best practice, consider asking a different question: If everyone follows it, where exactly will our advantage come from? Because strategy is not about becoming similar to successful organizations; it is about becoming meaningfully different from them.
Read more from Oksana Didyk
Oksana Didyk, Strategist, PhD in Political Branding, Author
Oksana Didyk is a strategist and researcher in political branding, customer insights, and the curious ways people choose everything from leaders to lattes. With a PhD in political branding, she has spent years examining how power, trust, and image are manifested in the Middle East and across global markets. Author of The Master Watching Over – The Strange Comfort of Strongmen, she blends sharp analysis with storytelling to reveal why people long for certain kinds of leaders, even when logic suggests otherwise. She is also the founder of The Didyk Consultancy, where she advises organizations on global strategy, market entry, and branding, guided by her mission that no decision should go unexplored, because behind every “yes” is a reason worth knowing.
