Best Practice — or Just Common Practice?

It’s a deceptively simple question…

And one that sparks conflict between executives and technical leaders all the time.

Why?

Because when executives ask, “Are we following best practices?” — what they’re usually asking is:

👉 “Are we doing what everyone else is doing?”

That’s common practice.

It’s defensible. It’s easy to hire for. It’s safe.

(To borrow from an old truism: “Nobody ever got fired for following common practices.”)

But maybe they should.

Common practices aren’t best practices…

Unless you know:

• What makes the practice “best” in the first place
• And when that no longer holds true

I’ve had my share of heated debates with execs who were shocked we put business logic in the database layer — a cardinal sin, right?

Except…

That logic generated millions of rows per execution, and round-tripping each one over a network call would have been a performance nightmare.

A small stored procedure cut that overhead to nearly zero.

So: was that “bad practice”? Or just “uncommon practice” with uncommon benefits?

Here’s the takeaway:

📌 If you’re a technical leader, be ready to answer this:

“Are we deviating from common practices — and if so, why?”

If the answer is well-reasoned, that “why not” might be your competitive edge.

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Want to go deeper?

At ArkTech Perspectives, we help technical leaders and execs navigate conversations just like these in our Communication Perspectives Workshops.