Personality Poker®

E18: Best Practices are Stupid

Episode Summary

When looking for solutions to your problems, it seems logical to turn to best practices for answers. But what if best practices are stupid? What if they are not the key to innovation or problem-solving and may lead you down the wrong path?

Episode Notes

When looking for solutions to your problems, it seems logical to turn to best practices for answers. But what if best practices are stupid? What if they are not the key to innovation or problem-solving and may lead you down the wrong path?

In this episode, we explore three reasons why best practices may be a bad idea:

1. Replication is not innovation - copying someone else will not help you differentiate
2. Context matters - just because it worked for someone else, doesn't mean it is right for you
3. Undersampling of failure - was the best practice really the cause of success, or is it a correlation or (even worse) a coincidence)?

We also explore lens #6: ANALOGY. Although it may appear that this lens suggest we use best practices, it actually means something quite different.

You will never hear the term "best practice" the same way ever again!

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Learn more about the "Best Practices are Stupid" book