Best Practices Are Not Strategy

Best Practices Are Not Strategy

By Sharcross Agyemang

Every industry has a set of best practices. The collected wisdom of what has worked before, refined, distributed, adopted. Best practices are how knowledge scales across a profession. They are also how mediocrity scales.

The problem is not that best practices are wrong. Most of them are correct. They produce functional results. They reduce risk. They make the average project better than it would have been without them.

The problem is that best practices are common. Strategy is not.

Best practices give you the same architecture as everyone else. The same tool stack. The same meeting cadence. The same reporting structure. The same design patterns. The same onboarding flow. The same analytics dashboard with the same metrics in the same order.

When everyone follows the same playbook, no one has an advantage. You have optimised for safety and eliminated differentiation. Your business looks like every other business in your category. Your website behaves like every other website. Your team operates like every other team.

This is what I call the best practice trap. It feels responsible. It feels professional. It is the institutional equivalent of copying the class topper's homework. You will pass the exam. You will not distinguish yourself.

Strategy is different. Strategy is the deliberate choice to do something differently because your context demands it. It is not the absence of best practice. It is the addition of a layer that best practice cannot provide: specificity.

Consider the company that builds a website following every UX best practice. Clean navigation, clear calls to action, state the value proposition. All correct. But the company that also understands how its specific customers make decisions, what language they use when describing their problem, what anxiety they feel before buying, what action they take after the sale. That company builds a website that does not just work. It converts.

The best practices gave them functional. The strategy gave them advantage.

Best practices are the floor. They are what you build on, not what you build with. They raise the minimum standard and lower the ceiling. The ceiling is where strategy lives.

Strong organisations do not skip best practices. They do not deliberately choose inefficiency. They adopt practices that make sense, they follow standards that reduce risk, and then they make six or seven decisions that no best practice document covers. Those decisions are where the organisation becomes itself.

The most dangerous phrase in systems design is "this is how it is done." When someone in a meeting says this, you have found the boundary of their thinking. Everything after that statement is inherited. Someone else decided this was the right approach. The question is whether it is the right approach for you.

The replacement question is not "what is best practice." It is "what does this system need to do that no best practice will answer."

Best practices build competence. Strategy builds identity. A firm that only follows best practices is competent and forgettable. A firm that adds strategy is competent and the one clients call first.

In design and technology, this distinction is everything. The standard approach to a school management system is the same whether you ask three vendors. The standard approach to a CRM integration is documented in every platform's help centre. The standard approach to a website is templated across agencies.

The advantage is not in the standard. It is in the part that comes after the standard. The decisions informed by the specific context, the specific users, the specific institution. The architecture that solves a problem the best practice did not see.

Best practices are not strategy. They are the starting point. If you stop there, you have built what everyone builds. Useful. Unremarkable.

Strategy is what happens when someone looks at the best practice and asks a better question. Not "is this right." But "is this right for us."

The firms that win do not skip best practices. They use them as the foundation and then build in the part that only they can provide: the thinking.

Best practices scale competence. Strategy scales identity. One is floor. The other is ceiling.

Build the floor. Then build the ceiling.

Read more at evuve.co.uk/journal.