Best practices: are we missing the mark?

The sustainability community is obsessed with the concept of “best practices.” Conferences promise to teach them; social media platforms encourage us to share them; and consultants are hired to impart knowledge of them.

Our tendency to focus on best practices is useful and necessary, in part. It saves considerable time and energy by narrowing the ever-evolving world of sustainability into bite-sized lessons from which practitioners can pick and choose.

At the same time, I can’t help but think that our fixation on best practices is short-sighted. Best-practice examples too often identify and celebrate outcomes while ignoring the processes that deliver said results.

This is troublesome because results are difficult to replicate when the circumstances change. Processes, on the other hand, can be transferred and adapted across industries, corporate cultures, and so on and so forth.

I am reminded of the well-known Chinese proverb: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The premise of sustainability—in my opinion, to take a long-term view of key challenges and raise the awareness of others— is aligned more with the latter than the former.

So shouldn’t we also practice what we preach?