Best Practice - Is it always best?

There is a constant focus on aiming to follow best practice in many corporates at present. Best Practice means to many the best way of doing something, but is this reality.

Is best practice perhaps the most common way or excepted way of doing something - does the word best really serve us well here?

Best practice based on the normal way of doing something is really attempting to minimise risk by following what most people do on the basis of if most people do this and failure is rare then by definition this is the best practice way.

There are some issues with this: "insanity is doing things the same and expecting different results" Einstein I believe. So if you want to differentiate or achieve a step change in results is best practice really the way forward or will it limit your results and ambition.

My other point is that best practice way well have lots of waste in it as people move from one organisation to another and accumulate activity by wanting to create a position and a set of activities to sustain their existence; then that all becomes best practice; is this really agile or lean, probably not.

Is the adoption of so called best practices actually creating corporate overhead and management fad or does it give benefit? - most smaller businesses would not understand much of what goes on in large corporate because they are to busy serving customers and making ends meet to spend time engaging with corporate best practice. Is that in itself a clue to answering the question?

Best practice may well the safest way of doing something but is it the most effective way of achieving results and is perhaps a limit on creativity?

I think if we are continually striving towards best practice it is important to challenge and assess whether it really represents a good way forward because at the end of the day it may well a serious constraint to creativity and downstream performance.