Once we know something, it becomes hard to imagine what it feels like not to know it.
More quotes“Best practice” is often somebody else’s answer with the question rubbed off. The recovery position solved a precise danger for unconscious adults. Sleeping babies also looked helpless and also lay down, so the advice travelled. The resemblance was simple, the intentions were good and the consequences were appalling. The stakes lift this far beyond a cute management parable: logic can be locally right and catastrophically portable. Similarity supplies confidence faster than understanding supplies caution.
Business copies the visible action because context is harder to put in a keynote. An enterprise sales process wanders into a £20 self-serve product and starts asking for procurement calls. Controls designed for critical infrastructure spread until ordering sandwiches needs three approvals. A retailer sees software subscriptions and decides the public has been waiting to rent socks. We recognise the surface feature—position, process, payment model—and smuggle it home without the conditions that made it useful.
The useful knowledge was never just the action. It included the population, danger, mechanism, timing and trade-off. Lose those and benchmarking becomes photocopying the clever pupil’s answer onto a different exam. So ask a rude question when the case study arrives: what had to be true there? If those conditions are absent here, the famous result is decoration. Also ask who gets hurt if the analogy fails. It is rarely the consultant pointing at the benchmark slide. Are we borrowing a principle—or merely copying a pose?