Experienced professionals tend to recognize a particular kind of discomfort during decision-making. Not disagreement, not alarm — something subtler.
A well-known best practice is proposed. It’s a good one. Familiar, widely accepted, proven in many contexts. It fits the problem on the surface, and applying it would be easy, even reassuring.
And yet, as the decision takes shape, something doesn’t settle.
Nothing is obviously wrong. The reasoning checks out. The practice aligns with the stated goal. Still, there’s a faint sense of resistance — as if introducing this element slightly disrupts how the system is meant to move. Progress feels less direct. The structure becomes harder to reason about, not easier.
Senior people often notice this immediately, even if they don’t articulate it. The signal is there.
The usual response is to distrust the signal rather than the practice. Best practices exist for a reason. They encode experience and reduce risk. Questioning them can feel like unnecessary friction, or like personal preference masquerading as judgment. So the decision proceeds, and the discomfort is set aside.
A more useful move is to turn attention to the best practice itself — not to reject it, but to examine it.
Every best practice originates in real problems and real failures. It represents a solution that worked often enough, under similar enough conditions, to be worth repeating. Over time, that solution becomes guidance that can be applied without reconstructing the reasoning each time. That compression is its strength.
But it also hides structure.
A best practice does not merely say what to do. It assumes certain properties of the environment, optimizes for a particular outcome, and accepts specific trade-offs. Once the practice becomes widespread, those assumptions tend to fade, leaving only the instruction behind.
When a best practice feels slightly misaligned, that loss of context is often the reason.
The practice hasn’t changed. The situation has.
At this point, a useful reframing clarifies what’s happening: best practices are like models.
A model is a simplified representation of reality, designed to be useful within a certain range. It highlights what mattered most in the situations that produced it and leaves other factors out on purpose. That omission is what makes the model practical — and what gives it limits.
Newton’s laws of motion are a familiar example. Within their domain, they work extremely well and are often preferable because of their simplicity. More general models extend applicability, not correctness. The mistake is not using a simpler model — it’s using it where its assumptions no longer hold.
Best practices work the same way. They are solutions shaped by a particular reality. When that reality shifts, the practice does not suddenly become bad; it goes out of scope. Applied without examining its assumptions, it can distort the system rather than support it, even while appearing correct.
This is why the misfit is often sensed before it can be articulated. Experienced practitioners are not reacting emotionally or instinctively in a vague sense. They are noticing that a solution which works locally does not reinforce the system as a whole.
Treating best practices as dogma erases this distinction. It turns accumulated experience into ritual and replaces judgment with compliance, hiding model–context mismatch behind familiarity and authority.
Overcoming this does not require inventing new rules. It requires recovering the reasoning the best practice compressed, and understanding how its assumptions and restrictions led to the outcome it recommends. When those assumptions no longer hold, the same reasoning will lead to a different result — one that still serves the original intent and preserves the collective experience the practice embodies, while fitting the current system. Used this way, a best practice becomes guidance and inspiration, not an instruction to be followed unchanged.
Judgment does not begin by rejecting models. It begins at their boundaries.