The Trouble With Best Practice

Last week the archery video of Lars Andersen went viral. His bow & arrow skills look superhuman! Plus, it is a great example why ‘best practice’ is fundamentally flawed. Best practice and benchmarking are wide-spread phenomena in business. The do serve a purpose, but can also give the mediocre an excuse to justify why Level X is good enough or less bad enough (“Oh, so and so even has a leadership effectiveness score of only 54…” So? Are the companies you refer to actually a role model for yours? What makes you sure ‘they’ have found the best way to do something? Just because it’s ten of them? What if there is an unknown practice that dwarfs all known practice by the power of ten? Watch this video and appreciate the power of inquisitive investigation, experimentation and Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice.