I received a couple personal emails in response to my earlier article on the topic of best practices, and the Community of Practice group at Yahoo has been discussing it as well. The terms "better practice" and even the trademarked "Next Practice" were thrown into the mix. In all cases, the over-arching goal seems to be the same: continuous improvement.
Dennis Kennedy mentioned his own take on the topic in his Legal Technology Primer: The Best is the Enemy of the Good. Here's a sample quote, decidedly on the Voltaire side of the equation:
The greater the push for the perfect plan or result, the more chance what we will instead find is delay. Beckwith says that a "paralysis" sets in from the "fear that executing the plan will show that the plan was not perfect." As he says, "too often, the path to perfection leads to procrastination."
As people who have been reading in this area for a while know, the topic of best practice and railing against it has been going on for several years. Plenty of reading and thinking is available on both sides of the fence.