Current Best Practice

A Current Best Practice is a recommended way of doing something, held humbly: the finest way we presently know, offered for use, and revised the moment lived experience reveals a better one.

It completes a family of three, each the enactable, shareable, or graspable rendering of something greater than itself:

• Current Best Understanding — what we presently grasp; it falls short of the Reality it perceives.
• Current Best Articulation — what we have presently rendered into form; it falls short of the Understanding it expresses.
• Current Best Practice — how we presently act; it falls short of the Ideal Practice it reaches toward.

At the top of every holarchy of practice stands an ineffable referent (Essences, Renderings, And Ineffable Referents): the perfect Way of doing the thing, which — like the Meta level of every concept and category — lies beyond definition, beyond our Current Best Understanding, and further beyond anything we can articulate or codify. We do not pretend to possess it. What we hold instead is a recommendation at the top of the holarchy: the Current Best Practice, which every practitioner then adapts to their own domain, just as every Instantiation adapts The Prototype to local reality.

This is The Creative Cascade applied to practices. The ineffable Way descends through our best conception of it into a recommended practice, which is adapted in a thousand local domains — and the learnings of every adaptation flow back up, refining the recommendation for all who come after. A practice that cannot learn from its practitioners is not a practice; it is a dogma.

The word current carries the humility. A Current Best Practice never claims the top of the holarchy; it claims only to be the best we presently know, and it expects to be surpassed. For many things we track the top two or three good practices side by side, each with what it serves best and where it falls short, and we recommend one: a continuously improving Current Best Understanding of the matter, and the Current Best Practice that goes with it. The others stay in view, so that when the context changes or a better way proves truer, the body can move without starting over. The humility is not decoration; it is what keeps the practice alive and the Way open.

The Discipline

• Hold every practice as a recommendation, never a law — binding only until a better way proves truer.
• Adapt honestly to the local domain; the adaptation is not deviance, it is the practice working.
• Send the learnings home, so the recommendation improves for All.
• Never let a practice harden into identity or dogma; the moment "how we do things" becomes untouchable, it has become an idol (The Creative Cascade's discipline).
• Honor the gap between the practice and the ineffable Way it serves.