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✒️🟦 IAS Mains 2021 — Essay 7
“There are better practices to ‘best practices’.”
Opening Tagline:
Why rigidity in excellence kills progress, and learning beats perfection.
🟧 1. Fodder Seeds — Strategic Brainstorm Points 💡
- “Best practices” imply finality; progress demands fluidity
- Context matters more than copying success models
- What worked once may not work again
- Innovation begins where “best” is questioned
- Blind replication causes policy failure
- Learning organisations outperform rule-following ones
- Excellence is dynamic, not static
- Adaptability > standardisation
- Feedback loops > fixed manuals
- Continuous improvement mindset (Kaizen)
🟦 2. Indian Philosophical Seeds 🇮🇳
- Indian pluralism — no one-size-fits-all solutions
- Gita — Swadharma over borrowed dharma
- Chanakya — Strategy varies by time, place, enemy
- Buddha — Avoid dogma; test through experience
- Indian administration — District-specific solutions
- Traditional crafts — Adaptive skill over rigid method
🟥 3. Western Philosophical & Intellectual Seeds 🌍
- Peter Drucker — Best practices are temporary
- Karl Popper — Learning through error correction
- Taleb — Fragility of rigid systems
- Deming — Continuous improvement culture
- Mintzberg — Strategy emerges, not imposed
- Agile thinking — Iteration over perfection
🟩 4. Governance, Society & GS Seeds 🏛️
- Policy transfer failures across states/countries
- Copy-paste urban models failing rural realities
- Evidence-based governance requires local adaptation
- Innovation in public service delivery
- Rigid SOPs vs ground realities
- Mission-mode flexibility yields results
- Start-up governance culture vs red-tape mindset
🟪 5. Quick UPSC Revision Seeds 📌
- Context > prescription
- Learning > locking
- Adaptation > imitation
- Process > perfection
- Evolution > standardisation
🌳 ESSAY TREE — UPSC STRUCTURE MAP
I. Introduction
Problem with obsession over “best practices”.
II. Meaning of the Statement
Why “best” is illusionary.
III. Philosophical Lens
Dynamic truth vs fixed truth.
IV. Indian Context
Plurality and adaptive wisdom.
V. Western Management Thought
Learning organisations.
VI. Governance & Policy
Danger of policy cloning.
VII. Technology & Innovation
Agile vs rigid frameworks.
VIII. Contemporary Challenges
Globalisation of templates.
IX. Way Forward
Embrace better practices.
X. Conclusion
Excellence as journey, not destination.
✒️🟦 IAS Mains 2021 — Essay 7
“There are better practices to ‘best practices’.”
Opening Tagline:
Why rigidity in excellence kills progress, and learning beats perfection.
Modern discourse in management, governance, education, and public administration is saturated with the phrase “best practices.” It is presented as a seal of perfection, a benchmark achieved after rigorous experimentation, and a safe shortcut to success. Yet the very comfort that “best practices” provide often conceals a deeper danger: stagnation. The statement “there are better practices to ‘best practices’” challenges this illusion of finality. It reminds us that excellence is not a destination but an evolving process, shaped continuously by context, experience, and learning.
At its core, the idea of “best practices” assumes that a solution discovered in one place or time can be transplanted universally. This assumption may work in controlled environments, but human societies are neither laboratories nor machines. They are dynamic, complex, and deeply contextual. What is “best” in one socio-economic, cultural, or institutional setting may become ineffective or even harmful in another. When best practices harden into dogma, they discourage questioning, suppress creativity, and reduce institutions to rule-following entities rather than learning organisms.
Indian philosophical traditions offer a powerful lens to understand this limitation. The Bhagavad Gita emphasises swadharma — one’s own contextual duty — over borrowed ideals. Krishna does not prescribe a universal code of action; instead, he urges Arjuna to act according to his role, circumstances, and inner understanding. This wisdom directly challenges the blind replication of best practices. Similarly, Buddhism cautions against rigid doctrines, encouraging experiential validation rather than unquestioned adherence. Indian civilisation itself has survived for millennia not by rigid uniformity but by adaptive pluralism — a quiet endorsement of “better practices” shaped by context.
Western intellectual traditions echo this insight in modern terms. Management thinkers like Peter Drucker warned that best practices are temporary answers to past problems. Karl Popper viewed progress as a process of trial, error, and correction, not the discovery of permanent truths. In contemporary systems thinking, organisations that survive are not those that perfect a single model, but those that continuously learn, unlearn, and adapt. The rise of agile frameworks in technology exemplifies this reality: iterative improvement consistently outperforms rigid perfection.
Governance provides some of the clearest examples of the dangers of worshipping best practices. Development models copied wholesale from other countries often fail when transplanted without regard to local realities. Urban planning templates that succeed in European cities falter in Indian towns that have different population densities, livelihoods, and informal economies. Educational systems imported without cultural alignment produce credentialed graduates but not necessarily skilled or thoughtful citizens. Even within India, schemes successful in one state require modification before they deliver results elsewhere. Administrative success lies less in copying the “best” and more in cultivating the ability to listen, adapt, and evolve.
In public administration, rigid standard operating procedures often clash with ground realities. A frontline bureaucrat dealing with disaster management, public health, or social conflict cannot always rely on manuals written for ideal conditions. COVID-19 provided a stark lesson: countries and states that adapted policies dynamically — revising protocols based on emerging evidence — fared better than those that treated early best practices as immutable commandments. Excellence in governance thus demands flexibility, ethical judgment, and contextual intelligence — qualities absent in mechanical replication.
The private sector further reinforces this lesson. Companies that defined themselves too narrowly by their once-successful best practices often collapsed in the face of change. Kodak perfected film photography but failed to adapt to digital imaging. Nokia mastered hardware efficiency but underestimated software-driven ecosystems. In contrast, organisations that questioned their own success narratives and embraced continuous experimentation reinvented themselves repeatedly. Here again, better practices emerged not by preserving the best, but by transcending it.
At the societal level, obsession with best practices discourages diversity in thinking. When institutions elevate one method as unquestionably superior, alternative voices are marginalised. Innovation thrives at the edges — where assumptions are challenged and accepted truths are tested. Education systems that emphasise rote replication of “proven” answers produce conformity, not creativity. A society aspiring to progress must therefore value the courage to deviate, reflect, and improve.
Ethically, the idea of better practices over best practices aligns with humility. Claiming possession of the “best” often reflects intellectual arrogance — the belief that learning has ended. Better practices, by contrast, acknowledge incompleteness. They accept that reality evolves faster than rules, and that moral reasoning requires judgment, not checklists. For administrators, this humility becomes essential. Ethical governance is not about mechanically applying rules, but about balancing competing values with empathy and foresight.
In an era defined by rapid technological change, this philosophy becomes unavoidable. Artificial intelligence, climate change, biotechnology, and social media evolve faster than regulatory frameworks. Best practices quickly become obsolete. Policymaking must therefore focus on building adaptive capacity rather than perfect prescriptions. Systems should be designed to learn, fail safely, and recalibrate. This shift from static excellence to dynamic improvement marks the real path to sustainable progress.
Ultimately, the statement “there are better practices to ‘best practices’” is not an attack on excellence, but a redefinition of it. Excellence is not the perfection of a method but the perfection of a mindset — one that remains curious, responsive, and self-correcting. The truly best practice, paradoxically, is refusing to believe that the best has already been found. Societies, institutions, and individuals advance not by freezing success, but by treating every success as unfinished.
In this continuous journey of becoming better, wisdom lies not in following the best path laid by others, but in forging adaptive paths informed by reflection, experience, and ethical judgment. Progress belongs not to those who blindly replicate excellence, but to those who dare to improve it.
🌙 Spin-Off Essay
“When Perfection Becomes a Cage, Growth Chooses Imperfection.”
Civilizations rarely collapse because they fail too often; they collapse because they stop questioning their successes. The moment a society, institution, or individual declares, “This is the best way,” it quietly closes the door on discovery. What was once a ladder to climb higher becomes a cage that restricts movement. The idea that there are better practices beyond best practices is not a managerial slogan; it is a civilizational truth.
Human progress has never followed a straight line of perfected methods. It has grown instead through restless dissatisfaction with what already works. The wheel did not stop evolving once it rolled smoothly. Democracy did not freeze at its earliest form. Language, medicine, art, and governance matured precisely because humans refused to treat existing solutions as final. Perfection, when worshipped, breeds complacency; improvement, when embraced, nurtures life.
In Indian intellectual traditions, wisdom is seen not as possession but as pursuit. The Upanishads repeatedly insist that truth is approached, not owned. A teacher does not hand over finished knowledge; the seeker must churn experience through inquiry. Even dharma is portrayed as subtle and contextual, changing with time, place, and role. The Mahabharata itself warns that rigid virtue, applied without discrimination, can produce injustice. This civilizational memory teaches us that fixed correctness often fails where dynamic understanding succeeds.
Modern society, however, suffers from a peculiar anxiety: the fear of uncertainty. Best practices offer psychological comfort. They promise predictability in an unpredictable world. Governments adopt them to reduce risk, corporations follow them to reassure investors, and institutions circulate them to appear professional. But comfort is not the same as wisdom. History shows that societies which cling too tightly to certainty often shatter when reality shifts.
Technology illustrates this paradox with brutal clarity. Algorithms optimise efficiency based on past data, yet the future refuses to behave like the past. Artificial intelligence systems trained only on “best” known outcomes often reproduce bias, exclusion, and blind spots. Without continuous correction, these systems harden into digital dogma. What saves them is not perfection, but feedback — the willingness to accept error and redesign. In this sense, better practices are acts of courage, while best practices are often acts of fear.
Education systems reveal the same pattern. Curricula hailed as world-class frequently fail to equip students for real-world ambiguity. Students trained to reproduce model answers hesitate when confronted with novel problems. True education should cultivate adaptive intelligence — the capacity to reason ethically when scripts run out. That capacity grows not from following best practices mechanically, but from engaging with evolving practices reflectively.
In governance, the danger is even graver. Policies designed as best practices may succeed initially, only to fail spectacularly when circumstances change. Welfare models copied without consideration of demographics, culture, and institutional capacity collapse under their own assumptions. Administrators who follow manuals blindly may obey rules while betraying justice. The greatest public servants are not those who cling to precedent, but those who reinterpret principle in light of emerging realities.
Ethically, rigid best practices can dull moral responsibility. When decisions are justified by procedure rather than conscience, accountability evaporates. “I followed the protocol” becomes an excuse for inhuman outcomes. Better practices, by contrast, keep ethics alive. They force decision-makers to ask not only “Is this authorised?” but “Is this right — here and now?” Moral growth depends on this uncomfortable questioning.
Creativity, too, withers under excessive reverence for the best. Artistic movements stagnate when forms are canonised beyond challenge. Literature thrives when writers dare to break structures that once defined excellence. Music evolves when dissonance is allowed to question harmony. Every renaissance begins as a rebellion against the perfected past.
Even personal growth mirrors this pattern. Individuals stagnate when they define themselves by past success. The belief “this works for me” slowly becomes “this is all I can be.” Growth resumes only when humility returns — the humility to admit that tomorrow may demand different strengths than yesterday. Life, after all, is not a competition to preserve achievement, but a journey to refine understanding.
The greatest irony of best practices is that they often emerge from better practices that once challenged older norms. What begins as innovation slowly transforms into orthodoxy. Recognising this cycle is the first step toward wisdom. Societies must institutionalise the ability to question themselves. Excellence must be measured not by adherence to standards, but by openness to improvement.
In the final reckoning, the highest practice is not perfection but learning. The future belongs not to those who perfect systems, but to those who make systems capable of self-correction. Growth chooses imperfection because imperfection invites movement. Progress remains alive only where certainty is held lightly and curiosity fiercely.
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