The Cowardice of Best Practices

There is a slide that has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every strategy deck produced over the last twenty years. You know it before it even reaches the screen. A two-by-two matrix. An X-axis and a Y-axis labelled with some pair of opposing virtues — Traditional versus Modern, Accessible versus Premium — and a scattering of competitor logos carefully arranged to leave one quadrant conspicuously empty. That empty quadrant is then unveiled, with a small flourish, as the "white space" — the promised land where the brand is meant to plant its flag. It is an enormously reassuring ritual. It feels rigorous. It feels safe. It is also, almost without exception, the moment a room full of intelligent people quietly agrees to stop thinking for themselves.

The benchmark becomes the boundary

The premise underneath the ritual sounds unimpeachable: to win in a market, you must first understand what everyone else in that market is doing. But something subtle happens the instant an organisation begins mapping its competitors with real diligence. The competitors stop being simply other players operating in the same field and become, almost without anyone noticing, the boundaries of the field itself. The question quietly shifts from what is possible to how do we get ten percent ahead of the company next door. A benchmark does not expand ambition. It anchors it — gently, respectably, with excellent typography — to the average of what already exists.

Walk through any mature, highly competitive category and the gravity of that anchor becomes visible everywhere. It is why almost every private bank's brochure features some version of the same sepia-toned grandfather walking a beach with his grandson, promising wealth across generations. It is why premium automotive commercials show the same car carving through the same empty mountain road at dawn, every single time, as though there were only one road left on earth. It is why technology manifestos, regardless of what the company actually sells, eventually converge on the same breathless vocabulary about unlocking human potential. None of these categories arrived at this particular sea of sameness by accident. They arrived there because everyone hired capable people to study everyone else, and — terrified of being the one voice outside the consensus — slowly calibrated their identities until they became, for all practical purposes, interchangeable.

Why safety keeps winning

What makes this worth naming so bluntly is not that the mistake is subtle. It is that everyone involved usually already knows, somewhere, that it is happening — and keeps doing it anyway. That persistence deserves a more honest explanation than simple oversight, because benchmarking is rarely the product of laziness. It is, far more often, the product of a very rational fear operating quietly beneath the surface of every boardroom. Best practices function, structurally, as an insurance policy for the people who approve them. If you recommend what the market leader is already doing and it fails, the market gets the blame; no board has ever fired a chief marketing officer for following the same path as the most successful company in the category. If you recommend something genuinely incomparable and it fails, there is nowhere left to hide — the decision, and the exposure, belong entirely to you. Corporate structures have been quietly built, over decades, to forgive conventional failure and punish original ambition. The benchmark deck is not really strategic analysis. It is the paperwork that makes that particular cowardice look like diligence.

Observation or imitation

None of this is an argument for ignoring the market, and the distinction matters enough to be stated plainly rather than assumed. A brand that studies its category closely enough to know exactly what it must never accidentally become is doing something genuinely useful. A brand that studies the same category and lets what it finds define the outer edge of its own ambition has quietly built itself a very comfortable prison. The difference sits in a single word most benchmark decks never bother to ask about: is this observation, or is this imitation? Observation asks what the competition's choices reveal about what they believe will work and where they feel constrained — a legitimately useful question. Imitation asks which of their choices we can safely absorb into our own story so we don't risk standing out. The first sharpens judgment. The second slowly erases it, one respectable slide at a time.

When the real competitor is elsewhere

We saw exactly where that erasure begins while working on the retail experience for one of the world's most storied luxury automotive marques. A standard competitive benchmark would have sent us touring other high-end dealerships, noting how they served coffee, how they arranged their waiting lounges, where the gaps against the best-performing competitor might sit. It would have returned, dutifully, with the recommendation for a slightly nicer waiting lounge. But a client capable of placing three hundred thousand euros on a table that afternoon was never comparing that moment to another car dealership. He was comparing it, whether he said so or not, to having a suit built on Savile Row, or standing in a room at auction watching a piece of art acquire its price in real time. The instant we set the automotive benchmark aside and studied how the world's great couture houses and auction houses actually orchestrate desire, the entire brief changed shape. The dealership stopped trying to be the best-run showroom in the region and became, instead, an embassy for a way of life. That distinction does not live anywhere on a competitor matrix, because the real competitor was never another car dealer. It was every other experience in that client's life that had ever made him feel understood.

The same pattern showed up, in an almost opposite register, inside a pan-African financial institution that had, on every conventional measure, already won its competitive set — a larger network than most of its peers, deeper local relationships, a longer history on the continent than any international bank operating alongside it. A standard benchmark would have confirmed the leadership position and recommended a handful of incremental refinements to stay ahead. The actual problem had nothing to do with the competition at all. It had to do with whether the institution's own people — from the executive committee down to a relationship manager in a regional branch — genuinely believed they were building something that belonged to the continent, rather than something merely operating within it. No competitive slide surfaces a question like that. It only surfaces once an organisation stops looking sideways long enough to look honestly inward, which is precisely the direction a benchmark is never built to point.

And when a real estate developer decided, in the middle of an entirely different mandate, to stop selling European buyers a return on investment and start selling them a return on life instead, that decision did not come from a study of what other Gulf developers were promising. The benchmark would only have confirmed, accurately, that every competitor was making the same aggressive claims about yield. Walking away from that entire vocabulary came from listening, patiently and repeatedly, to what a Parisian buyer actually missed in his own life — a category of insight no spreadsheet full of competitor pricing was ever designed to contain.

The average is now free

This is also where the arrival of artificial intelligence changes the calculation permanently, not by making benchmarking smarter, but by making it worthless as a paid service. Ask a general-purpose model to analyse a category and it will not return a breakthrough. It will return the mathematically perfect benchmark — an instant, tireless average of everything everyone in that category has ever said, smoothed into something that sounds confident and resembles nothing in particular. If a meaningful share of what our industry has sold for years as proprietary strategic thinking was, underneath the formatting, exactly that kind of synthesis, the machine has not stolen the work. It has simply finished exposing, at last, how little the work was ever worth. The middle of every market — the safe, respectable, best-practice middle — is being automated out of existence in real time, and no one currently paying for a benchmark deck should feel reassured by how quickly it can now be produced for free.

The one question no benchmark can answer

What survives that exposure is not a better benchmark. It is the willingness to ask the one question no competitive slide has ever been built to answer: if every reference to a rival were deleted from this deck, would what remained still be enough, on its own, to justify why this company should exist at all? Most organisations, tested against that question, discover they have spent years perfecting their position relative to everyone else and have almost nothing left to say about themselves in isolation. That is not a strategy problem. It is closer to a nerve problem — and it has never once been solved by looking, one more time, at what the company next door happens to be doing.

The nerve to exist alone

The floor of every category keeps rising as competitors copy each other into a tighter and tighter average. The brands that will still be worth discussing a decade from now will not be the ones who mapped that average with the greatest precision. They will be the ones who looked at the entire exercise, decided it was beneath them, and had the nerve to say so before anyone else in the room dared to.

Everything else is just a more expensive way of arriving second.