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What Are Better Practices?

By Joe Slatter9 min read

I’ve spent years pushing back on the term “best practices.” Someone would offer a new idea, a different approach, or a better fit for the situation in front of us, and the response would snap back:

“That’s not best practice.”

That always bothered me because it’s incomplete.

One of the most durable practices in my own career came from a document that was literally framed as an "Essential Best Practice." It helped me think through consequential choices, compare real options, make tradeoffs visible, and support good decisions without pretending there was always one obvious answer.

That tension helped me finally name the difference.

Better practices start with what is already known and adapt it to fit the situation. They build on standards, evidence, and experience without treating them as complete answers. They are principled adaptations that keep the purpose clear, adjust the practice to fit the people and constraints involved, and improve through use.

Standards have a place

Some work really does need standards. Most of what people defend as “best practice” is really a standard. Standards matter. They protect quality, safety, consistency, and trust. But calling them “best” smuggles in finality. It makes a useful rule sound like the final answer.

You don't want your surgeon winging it. If you are operating on a patient, designing a bridge, manufacturing a medical device, or handling a safety-critical process, consistency matters. Engineering standards exist because precision, safety, consistency, and reliability matter. Evidence-based medicine works the same way: it uses the best current evidence along with clinical expertise to guide care.

Standards are useful when the important variables are stable enough that reliability matters more than novelty. Decision-making researchers draw a similar line between clear, complicated, and complex work. Standards fit best when cause and effect are clear enough that a known rule can help. When the situation is complex, the work changes. You have to pay attention, try something, learn, and adjust.

A standard tells us where variation is dangerous. A better practice helps us adapt where variation is necessary.

The trouble starts when “best practice” becomes the safe answer. In a stable environment, a strong standard can save time, reduce errors, and protect quality. In a living system, the same standard can become an unhelpful constraint.

There was a time when hiring Arthur Andersen, one of the Big Five accounting firms, felt like the safest possible choice. Then Enron exposed how fragile that kind of safety can be. Andersen effectively collapsed after its role in the scandal. The “safe” choice was not actually safe. It was just widely accepted.

This is the danger of “best practice.” It can shift the question from “What does this situation need?” to “What choice will be easiest to defend later?”

What makes some practices endure

Early in my career, I learned a method for writing decision papers from a senior colleague named Milt Hess.

His approach didn't hand me the answer to a hard decision. It gave me a disciplined way to think through one by making the tradeoffs among the options visible. The method encouraged clear thinking about the issue, the available options, the evaluation criteria, and the assumptions underneath the recommendation. It resulted in a focused tradeoff analysis for the decision maker.

It was simple in structure and demanding in use.

I still use it today, and a conversation with Milt while writing this piece helped me understand why. I asked him if he’d change anything about it now. He said he could imagine AI doing much of that work faster. When pressed, he agreed that while using AI might be a better implementation, it wouldn't change the underlying approach. The options still need to be surfaced, the criteria still need to be clear, the tradeoffs still need to be understood, and judgment remains with the decision maker.

The practices that endure tend to do a few things well. They create clarity, improve thinking, reduce common errors, and give people shared language for working across differences. They travel well across situations without pretending every situation is the same. Most of all, they support judgment instead of trying to eliminate it.

I’m less interested in practices that claim to be universally correct. I tend to trust practices that make people better at seeing, thinking, deciding, and working together. The strongest practices I know don't freeze the answer. They improve the quality of the conversation that leads to an answer.

Enduring practices don’t rely on exceptional people doing heroic work. They create conditions where anyone can surface what matters. Milt put this plainly when talking about project reviews:

“…a process is needed that doesn't depend on a super-reviewer. Instead, the process should enable other participants to bring up issues in an objective way.”

So he designed review processes that used structure well: scenarios, use cases, focused sessions, and shared walkthroughs. They gave people a way to look at the same thing together and expose problems without relying on heroics.

A better practice makes the important thing visible enough, safe enough, and objective enough that the people closest to the work can name what they see and do something useful with it.

A practice becomes durable when it helps ordinary people do extraordinary things together.

Better practice keeps the principle and adapts the practice

A better practice is a way of carrying wisdom forward without freezing it in place.

When we were testing some of our Better Practice material years ago, I taught it to a group of advanced 5th and 6th graders. One of our guiding principles is “simple good.” Another is “the truth is enough.” A student raised his hand and said, in effect, that those two contradict each other because the truth is not always simple. He was right.

I turned the question back to the room. After a few beats, another student said,

“I think you kind of have to hold them softly.”

Guiding principles are not rigid instructions that remove the need for judgment. They are sound ideas that help you navigate. Sometimes they reinforce each other. Sometimes they pull against each other. The tension is what makes them so useful.

Milt described a similar pattern from his time leading an ISO 9001 initiative in Europe. Once a standard exists, the temptation is to turn it into one process everyone must follow. He saw the risk in that. Their work required standards, but they were not manufacturing widgets. Different projects needed different ways of doing the work.

So they rewrote the quality manual. Instead of prescribing one project process, it named the topics each project needed to develop procedures for. Each project had to decide how it would handle those topics, write that down, follow it, and maintain records showing that it had followed its own procedure. The standard enabled each project to create their own better practices.

During one audit, someone had created a procedure that was better than the one currently documented. The auditor did not treat that as a failure. The response was, in effect: good, document it, then follow it.

That is a principled adaptation. The standard still mattered. The records still mattered. The discipline still mattered. What changed was the assumption that one procedure is the best. They kept the standard, but made room for better practice.

Better practices work the same way. They are principled adaptations. They start by asking what the work is trying to accomplish, what from past experience is worth keeping, what is different this time, what tradeoffs are real, and how the team will know whether the change helped.

How teams find better practices

Teams usually find better practices by getting clearer on the work itself. What will success look like? What is getting in the way? What matters most here? Where are the real tradeoffs?

Those questions sound simple. They are often harder than they look. A lot of teams skip over them because they are in a hurry. They jump straight to solutions. They borrow a process, adopt a template, copy a cadence, or bring in a tool. Sometimes that works. Often it only works partly, because the team has borrowed the visible practice without understanding the conditions that made it useful somewhere else.

Start with what is already known. That may include a standard, a past success, a method that has held up well, or a structure that has been useful before. Build on that.

Look at the actual situation in front of you. What kind of work is this? What constraints are real? What are people seeing from their different vantage points?

Figure out what matters together and make good decisions. Bring different perspectives into the conversation, make tradeoffs visible, and create enough shared language and structure to work across differences.

Better practices emerge from the interaction between what is known and what is true now.

One team I worked with was trying to make a major cross-functional change. A standard implementation playbook would have been tempting. It would also have missed the real challenge. Different leaders were carrying different views of how the business worked, where the dependencies were, and what kinds of friction their own area was creating for others.

The breakthrough came from helping them build a shared view of the work. Once they could see the system together, they could make better choices about what mattered most, what tradeoffs were real, and what would fit their situation better.

Teams test better practices in use. They try something, pay attention, keep what helps and change what doesn’t. They stay close to the purpose and honest about the tradeoffs. They keep the things that matter in front of them, not on a shelf beside them.

Better is a discipline

Some people hear the word "better" and assume it means looser. I mean almost the opposite.

Better is not just a direction of improvement. In this work, better is a discipline: a way of noticing what is happening, thinking clearly about success and tradeoffs, making room for other perspectives, and adapting without losing the thread.

The term better practices doesn’t claim finality. It leaves room for learning, fit, and improvement without letting go of rigor.

A team can follow a standard and still miss the point. A process can look disciplined from the outside and still fail to help the people doing the work make good decisions together.

Better practices are meant to close that gap. I don't hear “better” as weaker than “best.” I hear it as more alive. Better leaves room for judgment, fit, and improvement.

Better practices are what a team uses. Better practice is how a team keeps learning what fits here and now.

Standards help us preserve consistency. Better practice helps us improve over time.


Further Reading