What most people call “best practices” have nothing to do with practice, but with the concrete results of practices. A more accurate term would be “best examples”.

The practices followed by innovators — those who generate original, exemplary work —  differ entirely from the practices of those who like to build up solutions out of best examples. Let’s call them refining imitators.

Innovators take the necessary steps to redefine the problem they are solving, and only afterward dedicate themselves to solving it. They find a new problem space and then settle it, which is why innovation is spoken of in terms of pioneering. The solutions that emerge from this process are fresher, simpler, more focused, more purposeful, more exciting and more soulful than solutions that are pieced together from old solutions. This is why they are imitated.

Refining imitators do not revisit or redefine the problem. If the problem is thought about explicitly, it is accepted as given as the starting point for production of a solution. Thinking is for deciding what to make, planning how to make it, comparing and analyzing best examples, and inventing ways to recombine them and make something better. The focus is entirely on the production of tangible things. The fact that this approach never produces innovation is ignored.

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It’s a genotype/phenotype issue. Best practices are genotypically similar: set generative processes that reliably produce unprecedented forms. Best examples attempt to create phenotypical similarities: the focus is to reproduce a precedented form, by a process different from that which originally generated it, that is through imitation rather than innovation.

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Oddly, the word refining imitators use to describe themselves is “practical”, but that is a misnomer. A more accurate term would “thingly”. A practical person thinks in terms of practices, which necessarily differ according to the task at hand. A thingly person knows only one practice suited to one task: the building of things — assembled piece by piece, in a linear progressive manner. It is a classic case of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If the task is to produce ideas or understandings, the task is conceived in the terms of producing documentation, because that is the one aspect of the work that has the quality of a thing and lends itself to a thing-building approach. Ideas and understandings are abstract and they’re not built up in a linear piece by piece fashion, and so are treated as secondary.