“Every ‘best practice’ was once a bold experiment. It just forgot to retire.”

If there’s one phrase guaranteed to stop innovation in its tracks, it’s this: “That’s how we’ve always done it.”

It sounds harmless enough, even responsible. After all, “best practices” are supposed to represent proven wisdom, right? The reliable, safe, efficient way of doing things.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: many best practices are just old experiments we’ve stopped questioning. They were brilliant once. They made sense once. But time, markets, and technology have moved on and we forgot to update the habit.

The Comfort of Familiar Success

Businesses are built on repetition. Find what works, document it, replicate it. That’s how you scale. That’s how you build consistency.

The problem? What works stops working. Every process, tool, and framework have a shelf life.
What made you efficient yesterday might make you irrelevant tomorrow.

Yet, most organisations cling to legacy practices because they feel safe. There’s comfort in familiarity and fear in reinvention.

“Change feels risky until you realise what’s actually risky is standing still.”

The Trap of “Proven Methods”

When I consult with businesses struggling to modernise, I usually find the same pattern:

They’re not short on effort. They’re short on evolution. They have well-documented processes, highly structured teams, and detailed SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) that haven’t been truly reviewed in years.

Everyone’s following the rules but the rules were written for a world that no longer exists.

Here’s how it usually shows up:

• Legacy Tools: “We use this CRM because we always have.” (Meanwhile, half the features haven’t been touched since 2017.)
• Rigid Approvals: “That’s how compliance wants it.” (Except no one can explain why the approval chain needs eight signatures.)
• Customer Rituals: “Our clients expect this.” (Even when the clients stopped asking years ago.)
• Performance Metrics: “We track what we always tracked.” (Even if the metric no longer measures what matters.)

These aren’t failures. They’re leftovers. And leftovers, if left too long, go stale.

How Best Practices Become Bad Habits

It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a slow drift from innovation to institution.

Here’s the pattern:

1. A Smart Solution: Someone has a great idea that works beautifully.
2. Codification: The company formalises it: “This is now our best practice.”
3. Repetition: Teams replicate it everywhere. It becomes “how things are done.”
4. Detachment: New people inherit the process but not the reasoning.
5. Stagnation: The original context fades, but the rule survives.

Before long, no one remembers the problem that practice was meant to solve.
But heaven forbid anyone question it, after all, it’s a best practice!

The Price of Not Questioning

The danger of old best practices isn’t just inefficiency. It’s the opportunity cost.

They quietly steal:

• Time: Teams spend hours maintaining rituals that no longer add value.
• Energy: Innovation gets buried under the weight of “standard process.”
• Ownership: Employees stop thinking critically because “the manual says so.”
• Momentum: Growth stalls, but everyone’s too busy following procedures to notice.

I once worked with an international nonprofit that required five levels of sign-off for a single vendor payment, it was a a process designed years earlier after a one-off fraud case.

It was logical at the time. But decades later, it had become a bureaucratic marathon.
They weren’t preventing fraud anymore; they were preventing progress.

When we redesigned the approval system with better digital controls and accountability, turnaround time dropped from three weeks to three days, with no additional risk.

The team’s response? “We didn’t realise we were allowed to fix this.”

That’s how bad habits work, they convince you they’re immutable.

Why Smart People Defend Old Practices

Because they once worked. Because they were once your competitive edge. Because they carry emotional value, it could be success stories, old mentors, big wins.

In many organisations, best practices are almost sacred. To challenge them feels disrespectful to the legacy.

But legacies are meant to be built upon, not lived inside.

“What got you here won’t get you there, but it will fight like hell to stay.”

The leadership skill that separates modern, adaptive organisations from rigid ones isn’t the ability to create new processes. It’s the courage to retire the old ones.

When “Efficiency” Becomes a Museum

There’s a subtle irony in all this. The more mature an organisation becomes, the more likely it is to fossilise its early successes.

Those early practices were agile, creative responses to a specific challenge.
But success turns flexibility into formula.

You see it everywhere:

• Annual performance reviews designed for office-based teams still used in hybrid environments.
• Lengthy RFP processes built for procurement-heavy industries still applied to agile startups.
• 9-to-5 expectations surviving in a world that runs 24/7.

Each of these practices once represented innovation. Now, they’re constraints disguised as discipline.

How to Keep Best Practices from Going Bad

Here’s the thing, best practices aren’t the enemy. Unquestioned best practices are.

The goal isn’t to reject structure; it’s to refresh it. Think of it like updating software, same functionality, smarter performance.

Here’s a simple framework we use at Vani Malik Consulting when helping clients audit their practices:

1. Revisit the Origin: Ask: What problem was this designed to solve? Does that problem still exist?
2. Reassess the Impact: Is this practice still delivering value or just delivering work?
3. Review the Ownership: Who maintains this process now? Do they understand its “why,” or just its “how”?
4. Reframe the Rule: Can the same outcome be achieved faster, better, or more intuitively with today’s tools or structure?
5. Retire with Gratitude: Not every process needs to die dramatically. Sometimes, it just deserves a graceful exit and a thank you note.

We often find that once teams see they’re allowed to question long-standing rules, creativity floods back in.

They don’t want chaos, they want permission.

The Role of Leadership in Renewal

Leaders set the tone for whether curiosity thrives or dies. If every suggestion to improve an old process is met with “But compliance won’t allow it,” innovation disappears quietly.

But if a leader says, “Convince me there’s a better way,” you create a culture where improvement is continuous, not reactive.

Simplicity and adaptability start at the top. When leaders openly retire redundant practices, they model the confidence to evolve.

Because leadership isn’t about defending tradition, it’s about designing the future.

“Good leaders preserve knowledge. Great leaders prune it.”

A Client Story: The Case of the “Perfect” Report

A client in the B2B services sector once asked us to review their internal reporting. They produced a beautifully formatted weekly report summarising every project metric imaginable, 40 pages long.

It took three analysts two full days to prepare.

When I asked who read it, the answer was silence. Eventually, someone said, “We think the CFO does.”

When we checked, the CFO said, “I only look at the dashboard summary.”

That “best practice” report was a ritual, a legacy from when data wasn’t easily available online. It once provided value. It now provided comfort.

We replaced it with a live dashboard and a 2-page executive brief. Two analysts got their weeks back. The leadership got real-time insight.

Best practice retired. Sanity restored.

Final Thought

Best practices aren’t bad. But like old software, they need updates or they’ll start slowing down your system.

The problem isn’t tradition; it’s unquestioned tradition.

“Innovation isn’t about adding new things. It’s about knowing which old things to stop doing.”

At Vani Malik Consulting, we help organisations challenge what’s “normal” and rediscover what’s necessary. Because growth isn’t about doing everything better, it’s about doing the right things, smarter.

So the next time someone says, “That’s how we’ve always done it,” smile and ask,
“Why?”

You might just find your next big breakthrough hiding behind an old habit.