Freeing creativity by understanding the role of best practices

Best practices are the encapsulation of experience that when repeated attempt to achieve similar outcomes. Many professions, including management, software engineering and user experience design, leverage best practices, their practitioners creating them as often as the professional landscape changes because of culture, business conditions or technology. While best practices offer the means for communicating known approaches to common challenges, they also tend toward boxing creativity-presuming the answer-which can inadvertently inhibit innovation. This paper describes best practices, offers two case studies illustrating where best practices go awry and offers the suggestion that following too close to the book can stifle creativity and innovation.