A best practice such as ITIL may be approached in various ways. The traditional approach is to plan, design and implement practices based on a notion that we can control reality. However, experience tells us that this approach often fails. Another more agile approach is to adopt and adapt ITIL through small incremental improvements based on the insights from among other Lean IT. A third approach is to let processes emerge in a setting that encourages the preferred behaviour and inhibits undesirable behaviour. We will gain insight into the three perspectives through examples and discuss the different approaches for successfully adopting and adapting ITIL in various settings.