most best practices are just someone else's local solution

Best practice is one of the most trusted phrases in operations, and one of the most misleading. The logic seems unassailable: someone else solved this problem well, so adopt what they did. Conferences, benchmarking studies, and consultants all traffic in best practices, and organizations copy them constantly. But a practice that worked brilliantly somewhere else usually worked because of that particular place's specific conditions, its people, its constraints, its whole context. Lift it out of that context and drop it into yours, and a surprising amount of the time it solves nothing, because what you copied was the solution and not the problem it was solving.

the solution is not the reason it worked

When a practice succeeds somewhere, what you see from the outside is the practice itself, the visible thing they do. What you cannot see is everything about their situation that made that particular practice the right answer. The constraints they were working within, the specific problem they were solving, the culture that made it stick, the other things they had in place that it depended on. The practice is the tip of an iceberg of context, and when it gets written up as a best practice, the context gets stripped away, leaving a naked recommendation that looks universal but was actually a precise fit for a situation that is not yours. You copy the visible practice and inherit none of the conditions that made it work.

why the transplant so often fails

This is why so many best-practice implementations disappoint. A company sees another operation running some approach with great results, adopts it faithfully, and gets mediocre or negative outcomes, then concludes they must have implemented it wrong. Often they implemented it perfectly. The practice simply was not suited to their different conditions, and a perfect copy of a solution to someone else's problem is not a solution to yours. The failure was not in the execution. It was in the assumption that a practice could be separated from the context that made it a good idea and still carry its value across.

the practices that do transfer

Some things genuinely do transfer, and it is worth being precise about what. Principles transfer. The underlying reasoning transfers. Understanding why a practice worked, what problem it solved and how, gives you something you can actually apply to your own situation, adapting it to your conditions rather than copying it blindly. What does not transfer well is the specific practice as a recipe, applied without understanding the reasoning behind it. The useful question is never what did they do, but why did it work for them, and does that reasoning apply to my situation. The first question gives you a recipe that may not fit. The second gives you understanding you can adapt.

best practice can stop you thinking

There is a subtler harm in the best-practice mindset. Reaching for an established best practice can substitute for actually understanding your own problem. Instead of diagnosing your specific situation and designing a fit-for-purpose solution, you go looking for what others have done and adopt it, which feels efficient and is often lazy. The best practice becomes a way to avoid the harder work of understanding your own conditions deeply enough to know what you actually need. And an organization that always reaches for others' solutions never develops the capability to solve its own problems, which is a far more valuable thing to have than a collection of borrowed recipes.

adapt the reasoning, not the recipe

None of this means ignore what others have done, which would be foolish. Learning from others is valuable, and studying how a good operation solved a problem can teach you a great deal. The discipline is to study it for the reasoning, not the recipe, to understand deeply why it worked and then decide, based on your own conditions, what the right answer is for you. Sometimes that will look similar to what they did. Sometimes it will look completely different, because your conditions are different. Either way, you will have designed a solution that fits your problem, rather than transplanted one that fit someone else's.

The next time someone proposes adopting a best practice, is the case for it that it worked somewhere else, or that the reasoning behind it actually fits your situation? Those are very different justifications, and only one of them tends to hold up.