Ditch ‘Best Practices’ In Favor Of ‘Next Practices’

It was more than seven years before LinkedIn hit 100 million users. For ChatGPT, reaching the same milestone took just two months. Welcome to a world of sudden upheaval and change, where only the future-relevant will thrive. 

Within this ever-changing landscape, leaders are forced to face unpredictable and unprecedented disruption. While they go to bed in the present, they wake up in the future. And they have to navigate abrupt shifts from all angles with confidence. It’s an arduous task, especially for those clinging to yesterday’s best practices. 

What’s wrong with tried-and-true best practices? They are static. A best practice focuses on the here and now. That’s not good enough for a world that can pivot overnight. In contrast, a “next practice” has the inherent dynamism needed to help navigate the constant flux of tomorrow with greater adaptability and resilience. 

Put simply, best practices don’t go far enough. Next practices do. Based on our research into organizational health and future-readiness and our work with large-scale enterprises across industries, we recommend you adopt six new ways of thinking, doing, and excelling to remain future relevant.  

1. From setting direction to adapting direction.

Your job as a leader may include setting and approving plans, but great leaders never view any plan as final. Great leaders recognize that while every good plan has a clear vision and goals, it must also have built-in flexibility to take advantage of emerging opportunities and sidestep potential risks. This is the act of planning itself, the ability to be adaptive and iterative and recognize and mitigate potential risks, which is a greater predictor of success than the plan you have written down. To ensure your plans are adaptable without losing a clear sense of direction, keep your vision in mind. Having a guiding North Star assures that your plans stay agile but don’t deviate from your overall purpose. 

Take the well-worn but still very instructive example of Netflix’s DVD delivery service, which brought the video rental industry onto the web and simplified the customer experience by reducing the need for laborious searches and storefront business models. Passed over by Blockbuster for acquisition, Netflix went on to roll out its streaming services nearly a decade later, and while it was not the first to do so, the venture’s success shifted an entire industry to pursue the web-based distribution model.  

Netflix continues to be a powerful example of a company that was able to continuously adapt to meet the changing technological landscape and customer needs. In contrast, Blockbuster serves as an example of how the inability to adapt to market disruption leads to a loss of market share and capacity to remain competitive over time.

2. From leading others to leading with others.

To be future relevant is to create conditions for employees to do their best work unfettered by conventional hierarchies. This shift doesn’t necessarily require moving to a completely flat organization. It does mean that as a leader, it’s your job to create the conditions so that employees at all levels—not just your directs—are empowered to contribute ideas based on their views, thus seeing themselves as leaders regardless of title or role.  

Microsoft, for instance, has softened its hierarchy-related employee experiences by putting stock in what it calls a “thrive” score. The software giant measures how well its employees are thriving by how energized and engaged they are. When you start expecting everyone to have an influence within your company, you gain more functionality (and flexibility) as an organization.

3. From pushing down decisions to building shared commitments.

Does every team member understand their decision-making authority, or do decisions tend to flow from the top down? Democratizing decision-making—with the right information and guardrails—allows your company to move fast and do the right things for the business. Future relevant organizations lean into the power of data and insights to empower decision-making while creating accountability.  

Before team members can effectively collaborate and make informed decisions, it’s crucial to establish clear strategic constraints. This clarity helps ensure that all decisions align with the organization’s goals and operational boundaries. Additionally, providing employees with access to necessary and relevant data empowers them to make informed decisions and, when required, justify them effectively. By setting a clear framework for where decision-making power lies and holding team members accountable for their decisions, your organization can achieve a balance of speed and precision that drives business success. 

4. From teaming to collaborating in the ecosystem.

Forrester found that 79% of teams are siloed. If your workforce falls into this group, you’ll have trouble functioning efficiently or becoming future-relevant. Think of your organization as a body of loosely connected networks. For the organization to be healthy, all systems must be able to work in tandem. In other words, you must tear down barriers to communication between people and departments, internally and externally, while building the conditions for trust. 

As trust grows across your ecosystem, you should begin to see partnerships form in uncommon places. These relationships will help your workforce shift to a larger network rather than as small team units. 

A powerful example of collaborating with the external ecosystem is electric vehicle manufacturers universally adopting Tesla’s battery charging stations. By aligning one way to charge EVs across the country, car companies can focus on car manufacturing without worrying about how to charge the vehicles in a distributed network. This is a positive for Tesla, but it also allows other manufacturers to avoid the challenges of establishing a competing charging network.

5. From developing talent to accelerating talent.

Professional development is now table stakes for competitive employers, particularly since 70% of professionals admit they’re unprepared for the future of work. Beyond routinely upskilling and reskilling your employees, you must consider other ways to prioritize their personal goals and humanity. This means providing fair talent processes, flexible career maps, and the assertion that employees don’t need to sacrifice their well-being to be successful. In exchange, you’ll see lower turnover intentions and higher job satisfaction, motivation, and engagement. Employees know they are valued for their diverse perspectives and backgrounds instead of having to “fit in” or assimilate into a career path or culture.  

Such practices also lead to significant organizational outcomes, including high motivation and engagement among team members, which naturally enhance efficiency and productivity. Moreover, by promoting a culture that values each individual’s contributions and well-being, organizations are likely to experience lower attrition rates and a heightened sense of psychological safety, fostering a more resilient and adaptive workforce. 

Patagonia has taken this approach by offering benefits such as a 9/80 work schedule and paid time off for volunteer work. For years, Patagonia’s leaders have illustrated that talent development is a constant journey toward finding what works and what doesn’t. 

6. From integrating systems to simplifying systems.

Business is complex enough. Why muddy the waters with complicated processes? General Electric (GE) is a prime example of how business structures can hinder or support success. By dividing into GE Aerospace, GE Vernova, and GE HealthCare, the company streamlined its operations, demonstrating that embracing simplified, minimally viable systems can prevent the debilitating effects of having too many moving parts. Simplification can also lead to more focused and effective business strategies. 

Remember that simple isn’t synonymous with simplistic. Simplifying systems involves a continuous cycle of evaluating, investing, sunsetting, and reevaluating the systems and technologies you use. Like every forward-leaning approach, it’s never really finished.  

The best practices have gotten you this far as a leader. Yet they may not bring you the adaptability and resilience you and your organization need to meet the demands, shake-ups, and surprises of what’s on the horizon. To meet the future head-on, you must retire old-school practices for these forward-looking strategies instead.