The Problem with Best Practices
This article discusses the problem of “best practices”, which are practices or ideas that we come to think of as the “best” primarily because everyone else uses them. For example, bankers refused to invest in soft cookies in the late 70’s, because the very successful “Chips Ahoy!” only sold hard cookies. Today, both soft and hard cookies are sold in abundance. In another case, many newspapers continue to be printed on large “broadsheets” even though consumers preferred them smaller, simply because that’s how newspapers have always been printed. There are numerous instances where the “best practice” wasn’t best at all, and in retrospect, it all seems rather silly that people in these instances were so stuck in their old ways. However, as we learned in class, this idea of crowd mentality can have rational undertones.
In both of the cases mentioned above, one main motivation behind the choice to reject the new ideas was the belief that the existing idea was better. This falls into the first category of rational reasons to follow the crowd, which is that there may be truth in the majority. In the cookies example, it would have been quite reasonable at the time to assume that soft cookies just wouldn’t sell since everyone seemed to prefer hard cookies. While not the correct assumption in this case, this sort of thinking often does lead to correct results. For example, one could generally be safe in assuming that a highly-rated and popular item on Amazon is better than a less popular and more lowly-rated one. The large amount of recommendations by others would be enough to guess that one is better than the other, even without looking through the details of each item.
The idea of direct benefit also applies for both the cookies and newspaper cases. In both cases, both groups of producers continued to produce the same product, simply because that was what consumers were seeking. What both groups failed to consider was the fact that the consumers sought those products only because they were the only ones available, and not necessarily because they were the best. The failure here came from the fact that the producers did not know the true benefits that their consumers wanted. For example, if the producers had known for a fact that consumers preferred hard cookies over soft ones, or large newspapers over small ones, then their choice would have been very easy — continue producing their usual products. The choice would have been best simply because it was the best, and not because of anything to do with the majority. However, since the sellers are not the buyers, this choice becomes more of a dilemma in the real world.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3052222/hit-the-ground-running/the-problem-with-best-practices