Leading evaluation thinker Michael Quinn Patton has strong opinions on the terms ‘best practice’ and ’lessons learned’. In an article from 2001, he argued:
In the endlessly hyped knowledge age of the new millennium, evaluators are being asked to generate lessons learned and best practices … The demand for knowledge acquisition, which demonstrates membership in the elite ranks of learning organizations, has crescendoed into an organizational development and program evaluation mania. But just what is popularly meant by a best by a best practice*? What does it mean to* learn a lesson*? And what’s evaluation’s role in all this?*