Best Practices - an admission of Failure

Somewhere in my past life, in a technology corporation, I came across claim that - Best practices is admission of failure. The author said that when we start documenting best practices so that people can live and act by these, we are unwittingly admitting that the system has failed. The system has failed to foster environment where creative people deliver quality on their own, using their individual approaches. Now we don't trust them, so we refer them to the Best practice. It made some sense to me then.

But since I started working in schools, I have come to realize how true this is. Schools have perfected the art of documenting best practices. There are formats to be adhered, log-books to be filled, profiles to be discussed, reports to be made. There seems only one accepted way to do things correctly. On the surface, it looks like an effort to bring objectivity in teaching and evaluation process. However, its more like we don't trust people to do the job. We don't want to risk any other approach to teaching or evaluation. This is sad because, of all the professions, education requires diverse and creative teaching approaches and many ways of evaluation. Once best practices are defined, nothing less or different would do.

So, indeed Best Practices is an admission of failure to foster diverse and creative environment.