When "Best Practices" Produce the Worst Results
Guidelines on when to follow conventional wisdom vs. when to think like a contrarian
The Institute of Conventional Wisdom has a magnificent campus on the surface of Leadership Land. The Institute is home to Harvard Business School professors, McKinsey & Company thought leaders, and bestselling authors. You feel smarter just standing on the campus quad, surrounded by the intellectual elite.
The Institute of Conventional Wisdom does not teach secrets1, but it harbors a dark secret of its own: the Institute peddles knowledge, not superior results. The Institute takes great care to obscure this fact. It uses pomp and circumstance to cultivate a reputation for infallibility like a landfill cultivates flies.
The Institute won’t advertise its inadequacies to you, so we’ll do it for them.
Superpowers Ain’t What They Used To Be…
We’re fond of the saying:
Smart people learn from their mistakes.
Wise people learn from other people’s mistakes.
When we were young, we were very, very smart. This allowed us to surpass people who don’t learn from their mistakes at all. But as we grew older, the stakes became higher. Mistakes became costlier, and they began to set us back farther than our successes propelled us forward. Being smart had enabled us to crawl out of our parents’ basements and into the Employee Lowlands, but no further. Ironically, being smart did not prevent us from rising to the level of our own incompetence.
Then, we stumbled upon the Institute of Conventional Wisdom and discovered wisdom. We began following the Institute’s intelligentsia. We read their writings. We gobbled up their TED talks. We studied biographies of the eminent dead. It was empowering to learn that even legendary figures started out as regular people, just trying to do their best. Studying their early mistakes made their later success feel more accessible to mere mortals like us. Their flaws and fallibility made us feel like we, too, could one day become people worth venerating.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed (wo)man is a superhero. By absorbing the Institute’s conventional wisdom and implementing its “best practices,” we gained the superpower of sight. Instead of stumbling around blindly like smart people often do, we beheld obstacles from afar with our newfound vision – just like our wise role models. This enabled us to:
Prevent problems with the superpower of (fore)sight
Surmount problems by living vicariously through the mistakes of others
We used our new superpowers to cross the Interview Mountains and gain entry to Leadership Land. We fell in with the ranks of power-hungry MBAs and status-seekers, marching alongside them toward Executive Mountain. This was a side effect of studying and emulating our role models; it wasn’t because we set a goal to reach the C-suites atop the volcano. We didn’t share the ambition of our peers, but their fiery spirits and energy were contagious.
Also, it was fun learning from their mistakes along the way.
When everyone’s super…no one will be.
At some point along the journey, we noticed that the people around us were also becoming wiser. Our progress slowed. We began working longer hours, stressing more, and struggling more…just to stay afloat. It became increasingly common for us to implement a “best practice,” only to find our competitors had already done the same thing.
When everyone has the same superpowers, your competitors become supervillains2. Leaders and organizations compete against each other just like superheroes and supervillains in comic books and action movies – they clash in titanic battles that result in massive collateral damage, with skyscrapers (and balance sheets) crumbling to the ground and regular people (employees) fleeing in terror. But no matter the energy you expend, no matter the bystander body count, there’s only one reward for your struggle: more struggling. The void left behind by one fallen supervillain (competitor) will soon be filled by another.
Once again, we had risen to the level of our own incompetence. Being smart and wise had gotten us here, but they wouldn’t get us there. Thus, we learned how the Institute of Conventional Wisdom fails to translate competence into superior results:
The Institute provides no competitive advantage if everyone else is following the same conventional wisdom.
This isn’t to say that you should ignore all the Institute’s “best practices.” In non-competitive environments, best practices usually produce the best results (more on that later). But in competitive environments, where everyone implements the same strategies, these “best practices” produce the worst result: a costly war of attrition. As we wrote in our very first post:
If everyone is using the same strategy (that is, following conventional wisdom), there’s only one way to gain the upper hand: try harder. Even if you can summon superhuman stamina to outwork, outlast, and outperform your competitors, a war of attrition is rarely the best use of your time.
In an earlier post, we wrote that it’s important to escape the mental trap of conflating decision quality with decision outcome – hover over the footnote for a quick refresher ↗3. In a similar vein, it’s important to escape the mental trap of believing that the Institute of Conventional Wisdom’s “best practices” invariably produce “best results.” We must train ourselves to disconnect advice quality from advice outcome. The Institute of Conventional Wisdom’s “best practices” are often built on a solid foundation of time-tested wisdom, making it superior advice. But it’ll only achieve superior results in non-competitive scenarios. In competitive environments where everyone else is following “best practices,” the best you’ll ever get is mediocrity.
Spelunking in the Contrarian Caves
Despite being both smart and wise, we had risen to a level of respective incompetence.
Twice.
Like an entitled brat who has been denied what they (think they) deserve, we threw a tantrum. We blamed other people for our misfortunes. We fled into nostalgic memories of people complimenting our intelligence and predicting how successful we’ll be when we grow up. We clung to the American Dream, where you work hard and your dreams come true, the way a teenager clings to the ex who dumped them.
But after we extracted our craniums out of places where the sun doesn’t shine, we did some serious soul-searching and realized the damning truth: we weren’t truly leaders. We were followers who happened to sit in a position of authority. We had done zero trailblazing of our own; we had only followed the well-worn paths previously pioneered by legitimate leaders. We were regurgitators of wisdom, not producers of it. We were cowards pretending to be lions.
Look at the top of a Harvard Business Review guide and you’ll see a smug slogan that exemplifies the Institute of Conventional Wisdom’s conceit:
→ SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE GUIDE
We were suckers for this marketing. It made us feel important by encouraging us to treat our knowledge like ornaments. The Institute made us feel superior for having superpowers, without actually being superior to the supervillains we were trying to overcome.
When we finally saw through the Institute’s illusion of infallibility, we directed our attention elsewhere. We started asking insolent questions, and the squirming of our victims helped us locate the entrance to a Taboo Tunnel. We took the Tunnels underground through the Silent Graveyard and read the epitaphs of people who had been both smart and wise in life, but perished fighting a war of attrition. We continued downward until we reached the Contrarian Caves – the archnemesis to the Institute of Conventional Wisdom.
Today, we travel between the Institute and the Contrarian Caves depending on the situation we’re dealing with. For some problems, we’ll visit the Institute’s campus where we engage “follower mode” and parrot the wisdom of others. But for other situations, we’ll descend into the gloom of the Contrarian Caves and switch into “leader mode.” In this mindset, our behaviors are divergent. We think differently. We toil away in the Secret Grottos, searching for Cerebrium – crystallized secrets – that can break our stalemate with the supervillains.
When to be an Authoritative Follower vs. a True Leader
We created a table to help you make decisions:
Some prefatory notes before we get into concrete examples:
We put six clean, distinct categories on the table to help you grasp this slippery, amorphous concept. In real life, the categories are far messier. Your situation may fall into overlapping categories, and there are numerous exceptions that we can’t exhaustively cover in this blog.
Being a contrarian is much easier said than done.
Mining Cerebrium is dirty, difficult, and lonely work. If you take the road less traveled and suffer a bad outcome, you will be pilloried for your “poor judgment” or “quixotic quest” – even if you were right.
Nietzsche once wrote (paraphrased): “Madness is rare in individuals — but in crowds, it is the rule.” Leaders are not immune to being swept up in the madness of crowds, and may even be more prone to it than regular people4.
When to be a contrarian (upper-left)
Situations where everyone follows conventional wisdom or “best practices” and you’re competing against them:
All zero-sum games: Hiring, romance (assuming monogamy), market share5, anything from the financial sector, anything related to rank (e.g. promotion up a hierarchy, position in a search engine results page), most academic careers6
Dynamic systems where humans react to incentives: Playing whack-a-mole with legal loopholes. Any situation where adversaries will choose a different path of least resistance when you make a defensive move (security, competitive sports, cat-and-mouse games). “Best practices” become “not-so-best” as soon as they’re implemented.
When you’re a high-level employee in the Middle Management Foothills or Executive Mountain: the non-smart and non-wise employees have been filtered out by this point. The survivors are formidable internal rivals and stellar employees working for competing organizations.
When you first hear of impactful news in a major publication: by the time The Guardian and the WSJ break the news, any advantage you could’ve gained will have evaporated. Don’t join the hysteria of the crowd, unless:
You’re willing to pay an inflated price to protect your interests (like fleeing the advance of a hostile army)
You know secrets that allow you to predict second-order, indirect consequences (ripple effects) hidden from other people.
Update 12/6/23: This section has been refined with constructive criticism from a redditor.
For these situations, you’ll have to decide whether to:
Do the exact opposite of the crowd
Do things differently from the crowd
Think like a contrarian while doing the same thing as the crowd.
We can’t tell you what to do in each situation, because we don’t know your particular risk-vs-reward of being a contrarian. Being contrarian and wrong can cause way more damage than simply following the crowd – think of a high school kid who tries to gain popularity by being different for the sake of being different. Or a CEO who embarks on a quixotic quest to differentiate the company from competitors, but ends up steering the company into the gutter.
If you can’t be reasonably certain that you can be contrarian and right, then you might be better off with option 3: following the crowd, biding your time, while continually mining Cerebrium from the Secret Grottos…and building your secret weapon in darkness.
When to conform (bottom-left)
Situations where everyone follows conventional wisdom or “best practices,” but your actions don’t affect anyone else’s and theirs don’t affect yours:
Social etiquette: bathing regularly is not a competitive activity because it does not transfer your body odor to other people. Attending the board meeting in a business suit is preferable to showing up in your birthday suit.
Most processes that produce widgets: whether the widget is a sandwich or a stealth bomber, there is usually a “best practice” available to reliably produce it. If you don’t follow the best practice, you might end up with an inside-out sandwich (not exactly a “sandwich” anymore) or a very expensive, very stealthy heap of scrap metal.
Safety advice: Wear a condom over your high-visibility hard hat as you click your seatbelt into your steel-toed boots.
Pushing psychological buttons: Everyone’s brain comes equipped with a control panel full of buttons, along with a set of cognitive biases and blind spots. People (in aggregate, not individually) generally react in predictable ways to kindness, hostility, and vague instructions. You can safely apply persuasive methods and negotiation tactics you learned in school – just don’t expect consistent results.
Update 12/6/23: This section has been added due to constructive criticism from a redditor.
There’s a special case where conforming is the least crappy choice: in competitive environments where you face a structural disadvantage for deviancy. Take the investment arena, for instance. It’s worse than a zero-sum game; after you account for middlemen (fees and commissions) and governments (taxes), the arena is a net-negative game. To win as a contrarian, you have to overcome the people with insider knowledge. You have to beat the professional high-frequency (algorithmic) traders who build their supercomputers next to exchanges so that their orders arrive a few nanoseconds before the losers can place theirs.
In this type of environment, where the cost of being a contrarian is too high for most people, you’re often gain more by following the crowd while limiting your losses (e.g. by buying a low-cost index fund that’s managed passively by a computer).
When to stockpile an ace up your sleeve (upper middle)
When the “best practices” are widely known but few people are following them, you shouldn’t prematurely whip out your Cerebrium superweapon. Like any secret, Cerebrium becomes duller the more it’s beheld by other people. When a secret transforms into conventional wisdom, its Cerebrium becomes inert.
Examples of competitive environments where it’s best to follow conventional wisdom until you reach a stalemate, whereupon you switch into contrarian mode:
When you’re an entry-level employee or a first-line supervisor in the Boss Forest: you’ll be surrounded by people who are neither smart nor wise. Keep your secrets to yourself until you need to rely on your Cerebrium stockpiles to tip the balance of power in your favor.
When you only need to outrun the other guy: this applies literally if you’re fleeing a zombie, a bear, or a zombified bear. It applies figuratively if you’re the only one locking your doors or using encryption, while everyone else leaves their valuables out in plain sight or plain-text; the thieves will probably leave you alone. You could be the only one writing thank-you emails/cards after you close a sale or finish an interview; it’s a cheap and easy way to remain top-of-mind.
When to be Cyclops leading the blind (lower middle)
Non-competitive environments where most people don’t follow conventional wisdom can be classified as “simple, but not easy.” That is, the best practices are comprehensible and accessible, but difficult to implement. In these examples, you can lead the crowd simply by executing successfully when they cannot:
Personal goals: many people aspire to save money, get six-pack abs, and build better habits, all of which have established “best practices.” Yet, most New Year’s resolutions fail by February.
Organizational goals: Set SMART goals. Build trust. Nurture team culture. We’re all given the same “best practices” as part of leadership training, but few people can consistently pull it off.
We have a lot to write about the topic of “simple ≠ easy”, but it’ll have to come in future essays.
How to survive in the land of the blind (upper- and lower-right)
When there are no “best practices” to consider, you’ll have to create them yourself. Being a trailblazing “True Leader” is not as heroic or glamorous as it sounds – it consists of forced labor in the Cerebrium mines.
Competitive environments: new markets and bleeding-edge technologies create brave new worlds devoid of conventional wisdom and “best practices.” That means all participants must go to the Secret Grottos to mine Cerebrium. In these lawless frontiers, we prefer to focus on avoiding failure because competitors who are fixated on success are more likely to take imprudent risks. When they implode, we’ll be ready to scoop up their assets at fire-sale prices.
Non-competitive environments: scientific research (for pure discovery, not for publication) and nonprofits with unorthodox strategies fall into this category. Mine, mine, mine that Cerebrium! Revolutionary discoveries come from research no one has ever done before. Don’t be one of those researchers conducting uninspired studies because they’ve been trapped inside the publish-or-perish paradigm.
Is a War of Attrition Really the Worst Result?
Hopefully, we have successfully:
Convinced you about the Institute of Conventional Wisdom’s limitations and fallibility
Enlightened you about when to switch between:
“Authoritative follower” who applies best practices
—Vs—“True leader” who takes risks in the Contrarian Caves
There’s one final loose end: you might feel a bit swindled by the clickbait-y title “When ‘Best Practices’ Produce the Worst Results.” You may be wondering: is treading water/mediocrity really the worst result? Wouldn’t a war of attrition be preferable to abject failure?
In our minds, a war of attrition is the worst result. No exaggeration.
We believe it’s better to fail spectacularly and start spelunking in the Contrarian Caves than to fight a war of attrition on the surface of Leadership Land…forever7. Failure was a powerful wakeup call for us. Failure forced us to recognize that “being more competitive” is not a good thing – no matter how positive your coworkers and professors make it sound. Those who are “more competitive” can bash their heads against their desks harder and longer than the other guy. They’re adept at working harder, not smarter.
The war of attrition is the worst result because it forces you to fixate your attention on your competition. It forces you to spend all your time and energy running full speed just to stay in place. It rewards you little ribbons for winning corporate pissing contests.
So yes, a war of attrition is the worst result. We believe it’s better to become disillusioned as early as possible by a major failure than to become successfully mediocre for an entire career.
In short: we’re asking you to be wise and learn from our past failures.
By definition, a widely-known secret is no longer a secret – it transforms into conventional wisdom. The Institute of Conventional Wisdom was originally constructed with Cerebrium (crystallized secrets) mined from the Secret Grottos, but the Cerebrium lost its potency as awareness transformed secrets into conventional wisdom.
Even villains think they’re the protagonists of their own story. Your archnemesis probably thinks of themselves as the hero and you as the bad guy.
Thinking in Bets (by Annie Duke) introduced the fallacy of “resulting”: assuming that good decisions will result in favorable outcomes, and that poor decisions will result in you being hit by a flaming bus. Resulting is a fallacy because high-quality decisions can result in low-quality outcomes (unlucky), and vice versa. You can blindfold yourself and stumble across a busy six-lane highway (terribad decision), but you can survive unscathed while your archnemesis, distracted by your wanton disregard for human life and property, is hit by the flaming bus instead (lucky outcome – for you, not your rival).
Resulting is a mental trap. Reasons to avoid it:
Wrongly blaming other people (or ourselves) when good decisions have bad outcomes causes us to scapegoat good people or overreact to our own “mistakes.”
Glorifying people who merely got lucky makes us erroneously attribute their outcomes to skill. The entire body of success literature (which studies millionaires, successful companies, and longevity) is the result of industrial-grade resulting.
Resulting gets us in the habit of repeating bad decisions that turned out well. It leads us to play Russian Roulette with hidden low-probability, high-impact risks.
Leaders with high emotional intelligence are attuned to the zeitgeist of their organizations and the heartbeat of their industries. High-level leaders also face great uncertainty and tend to fixate on the behavior of their competitors. We have no data to support this, but we suspect that those high-level, high-EI leaders are more vulnerable to being swept up in the madness of the same crowds they watch so closely.
An exception is when you’re lucky enough to work for an entrenched organization with an economic moat (brand awareness), burdensome regulation (tobacco, utilities), a quasi-monopoly with intellectual property protections (tech, pharma), or a true monopoly (government). If the barriers to entry are high or impossible, then you can afford to fight a war of attrition with your competitors. Being a contrarian may even be a bad idea if it tempts you into straying from your core competencies. Think of that weird period in the 1980s when the Coca-Cola Company bought a movie studio.
Academic tenure and getting your publication into a high-impact journal is a zero-sum game. Trading citations like Pokémon cards and hoarding prestige is not exactly a zero-sum game (participants create social currency by citing others, so the sum is non-zero), but it’s still a competitive game.
Notable exceptions include what we wrote in footnote #5 above ↑ and cases where “best practices” lead to prison or death. As an extreme example, the “best practice” for nuclear deterrence is mutually-assured destruction.
But most of us will never deal with such extremes. Garden-variety “best practices” will, at worst, cause you to look for a new career. It’s a major setback, but it won’t lead you to utter ruin.
You win for most impressively extended metaphor.