For reasons largely unknown, I have a fascination with the concern for best practices. Perhaps it is my slight perfectionistic tendencies along with a fascination for quality, but I have long enjoyed pondering and reading and reflecting on the best way to do things. Once, for a how-to speech, I gave a six minute speech on how to fold a towel, giving the story of my grandmother (a woman who is rather particular about how she likes things done). Since most of the audience knew my grandmother personally, they enjoyed the speech a great deal, as the apple does not fall far from the proverbial tree as far as my personality is concerned. Today, rather than dealing with specific best practices, I would like to examine some of the issues that best practices are related to on a broader scale.

For one, there are two ways that best practices can develop: either from revealed knowledge or enforced habit (top-down) or from empirical observation (bottom up). In many cases, people do things a certain way because their parents or teachers did things a certain way and they teach others to do things a certain way, turning habits into traditions and teaching them top-down as the best way of doing things. Although we might associate the Bible with top-down best practices, there are at least a few cases where it would appear that the practices of early people led to the development of moral laws as “best practices” were fleshed out. For example, the patriarch Jacob married two sisters–Rachel and Leah, and it did not exactly work out very for his family, to put it mildly. Lo and behold, several hundred years later, a specific law was given in Leviticus 18:18 that forbade someone from marrying sisters because it would provoke rivalry between the two women. It is at quite possible that Jacob’s disastrous family experience provided the empirical evidence for this law, showing that even in societies where polygamy (a deviation from the biblical norm of one man and one woman) was tolerated, that there were limits to what was acceptable based on the experience of others and the lessons learned from those experiences. It would therefore appear that God is a being who learns from our experiences at least somewhat as to what works and what does not work given our human nature. Whatever the source of best practices, though, they tend to be spread and perpetuated from the top down, by experienced people modeling for less experienced people, by formal instruction, or by codifying practices into a written form.

It is not surprising in the least that this should be the case, because best practices are something that is vastly easier to learn in the first place than it is to unlearn bad habits and learn good ones. There are a lot of advantages to learning the right way without having to suffer because of painful mistakes. That said, those who have learned best practices and to whom best practices appear normal may not always be aware of the other options or their appeal. Often the teaching of best practices therefore has a task beyond teaching the practices themselves, but also either explicitly or implicitly dealing with alternatives that would or could come to mind, showing why those practices that might appear superior are actually inferior. This practice often involves the issue of constraints, and showing how the best practice fulfills the constrained optimization of our lives and existence, rather than optimizing one factor to the harm of many others. This requires a wholistic view of what we are doing in a larger context, rather than looking only at aspects such as initial cost or time. The more constraints we are dealing with, the more complicated the problems of finding best practices, and the more vital it is to recognize the importance of design and foresight and planning to successful outcomes.

Often in life there are cases where there is a tension between different elements, and that constrained optimization is not as simple as looking at one factor and then solving for it alone. For example, as a student of the politics of labor practices, I have seen a growing amount of hostility among low-wage workers at the impossibility of living on part-time and minimum wage, and the willingness of workers to unionize and strike even in an atmosphere of high unemployment to protest the strategies that businesses have in reducing the work hours of their employees and avoid paying benefits to low-wage employees. While a business might look at employee costs and see them as a factor to be minimized without any thought to the existence of other constraints, the growing bad press about the fate of workers at mcjobs and threats of boycotts to employers who try to avoid their impending legal mandate to provide health insurance to employees may add other economic constraints that might make it difficult for companies to continue their profits given their existing business models that focus on gaining profits by keeping overhead low. What is a “best practice” or an “acceptable practice” may change given the recognition or existence of additional constraints, and we have to be sensitive to the sort of constraints we are dealing with in our environment.

We must also remember that best practices are often caught up in an arms race between different competing groups. What works at one point may not work in the future once the practice is known and once rivals or competitors counteract that practice. Best practices are often a static picture of a dynamic situation that is fluid and flexible. The lesser the knowledge or competitive advantage of a best practice, the better it is able to be kept up for the long-term. The more competitive the situation and the more widespread knowledge of a best practice, the more potential repercussions there are. Too much of an advantage may cause such an imbalance that it harms the species or business or being with an advantage, whether through a disruption of competitive balance or through political hostility towards the would-be monopolist. In addition, too much size and influence makes one more rigid and less able to adapt to changes, allowing for the loss of position and dominance to more nimble and flexible rivals. We have to recognize that what won us victory at one time may not always work in changed circumstances, which requires constant learning and constant growth in order to stay young and stay fresh. Obviously, we would like to succeed and then cease our labors, but our toil under the sun is full of vanity, and best practices are merely one aspect of the ceaseless and futile toil of our existence. The more we realize this fact, the better we are able to deal with it and accept it.