'Best practice' gets invoked constantly in transformation programmes, usually as a justification for adopting a specific approach because other institutions have adopted something similar. In my experience, this reasoning frequently smuggles in someone else's constraints as though they were universal principles.
A practice becomes 'best practice' at another institution because it solved a specific problem, shaped by that institution's specific history, regulatory environment, and organisational politics. When a different institution adopts the same practice without examining whether its own constraints match, it's importing a solution to a problem it may not actually have — and inheriting the original institution's trade-offs without the original institution's reasons for accepting them.
I've watched institutions adopt an operating model structure because it was described as best practice in an industry benchmarking report, without asking whether the specific decision-rights problem that structure was designed to solve was actually present in their own organisation. The result is a structure that looks credible externally and solves nothing internally, because it was never actually addressing this institution's problem.
The useful question, whenever 'best practice' is invoked, is specific: whose constraint produced this practice, and do we share that constraint? If the honest answer is no, adopting the practice anyway is cargo-cult transformation — replicating the visible form of a solution without the underlying problem that gave it its logic.
Genuine transformation starts from an institution's own specific decision-rights problems, diagnosed directly, not from a benchmarking report describing what other institutions, facing different problems, happened to do.