It starts in the breakroom. Or maybe it’s a Zoom call where someone suggests a new way to track inventory, and there’s that heavy, silent pause. Then, someone says it. The five most expensive words in business: we’ve always done it this way. It sounds like a reason, but it’s actually a white flag. It’s the sound of a company deciding to stop thinking.
Grace Hopper, the legendary computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral, famously called this phrase the most dangerous one in the English language. She wasn't just being dramatic. In her world—the world of early computing and COBOL—staying static meant your hardware became a paperweight within months. Business isn't much different now. When you lean on "the way things are," you aren't actually standing on a solid foundation. You're standing on a treadmill that’s slowly moving backward while your competitors are sprinting.
Honestly, we do it because it’s easy. Our brains love a shortcut. It's called the "status quo bias," a cognitive preference for the current state of affairs. We perceive any change from that baseline as a loss. Even if the current system is clunky, slow, or downright broken, it’s predictable. You know exactly how it’s going to fail. A new system? That’s a wildcard. And humans, especially those responsible for quarterly budgets, generally hate wildcards.
Why We’ve Always Done It This Way Kills Innovation
Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. That sounds counterintuitive, right? But think about it. If you spend ten years perfecting a specific manufacturing process, you become incredibly efficient at it. You've trimmed every second of waste. But you've also built a cage. You’re so optimized for one way of working that when the market shifts—like, say, a global supply chain collapse or a sudden shift in consumer tech—you can't pivot. You’re too "efficient" to change.
The Kodak story is the classic example, though people often get the details wrong. It wasn't that Kodak didn't know about digital cameras. Steve Sasson, a Kodak engineer, actually invented the first self-contained digital camera in 1975. The problem was the business model. Management looked at the digital prototype and saw a threat to their high-margin film business. They chose the comfort of their existing revenue stream. They chose the path of we’ve always done it this way because selling film was a gold mine. They weren't stupid; they were just trapped by their own past success.
It's a psychological trap called "functional fixedness." It's a fancy way of saying we can only see an object or a process working in the way it’s always worked. A hammer is for nails. A brick is for building. A spreadsheet is for accounting. Breaking out of that requires a level of mental effort that most corporate cultures accidentally discourage. When you reward people for hitting "consistent" numbers, you are inadvertently rewarding them for never trying anything new.
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The Institutional Memory Problem
Ever heard the story about the five monkeys and the ladder? It’s often used in management training, and while it might be an urban legend/allegory based on real primate studies by G.R. Stephenson in 1967, the lesson is chillingly accurate. You put monkeys in a cage with a ladder and bananas. Every time a monkey climbs the ladder, the whole group gets sprayed with cold water. Eventually, they stop climbing. Then, you replace one monkey. The new one tries to climb, and the others beat him up to avoid the spray. Eventually, you’ve replaced all the original monkeys. None of them have ever been sprayed with water, yet they will all attack any monkey who tries to climb the ladder. If you asked them why, they’d say—well, if they could talk—we’ve always done it this way.
This happens in offices every single day.
"Why do we use this software?"
"I don't know, it's what we used when I started."
"Why is this report 50 pages long?"
"Because the last VP liked it that way."
The VP left five years ago. Nobody cares about the report. But the labor continues.
Identifying the Red Flags in Your Culture
You can smell this attitude before you see it. It shows up in the language people use during meetings. If you hear "that's not how we do things here" or "we tried that in 2012 and it didn't work," you’re dealing with a stagnant culture. The 2012 excuse is a personal favorite of mine. As if the entire technological and social landscape hasn't shifted a dozen times since then.
- The "Expert" Trap: Sometimes the person most resistant to change is the one who knows the current system best. Their value is tied to their mastery of the old way.
- The Sunk Cost Fallacy: "We spent $2 million on this server architecture, we have to make it work." No, you don't. That money is gone.
- Fear of Accountability: If you do what's always been done and it fails, you're safe. You followed protocol. If you try something new and it fails, it's your fault.
It’s about safety. Most people would rather fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally. If you follow the manual and the company goes under, hey, you did your job. But if you throw the manual away and try a radical new delivery model and it flops? You’re the person who broke the company. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a mid-level manager just trying to pay their mortgage.
How to Break the Cycle
Changing this isn't about "disruption" for the sake of disruption. That's just chaos. It's about creating a culture where "Why?" is a valid question, not an act of aggression.
First, you need to conduct what I call a "Process Audit." Take your three most time-consuming tasks and trace them back to their origin. You’ll be shocked at how many are based on constraints that no longer exist. Maybe you’re still printing physical copies because ten years ago a specific auditor preferred paper. Is that auditor still there? No. Does the new one want PDFs? Yes. But the printers are still humming.
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Second, embrace the "First Principles" thinking made famous by people like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. Instead of looking at how the industry does things, look at the physics of the problem. What are the absolute truths? If you’re building a car, the absolute truth is you need a chassis, a power source, and wheels. You don't necessarily need a dealership network or a gas tank. When you strip away the "way it's always been," you're left with the actual components of a solution.
Moving Past the Status Quo
It's uncomfortable. Let's be real. Change feels like work, and most of us are already tired. But the alternative is irrelevance. Look at the retail industry. For decades, the "way we do it" involved massive floor spaces and aggressive seasonal stocking. Then a few companies decided to look at data differently, prioritize logistics over storefronts, and suddenly the giants of the 90s were filing for Chapter 11.
You have to give your team "permission to fail." That’s a corny corporate phrase, but it has to be real. If you punish every mistake, you are literally training your employees to say we’ve always done it this way. You are training them to be invisible. You are training them to be the monkeys who don't climb the ladder.
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Actionable Steps for Tomorrow
Stop trying to overhaul the entire company on Monday morning. That's how you get a revolt. Start small and prove that "the old way" isn't the "only way."
- Kill one "Legacy" Meeting: Find the meeting that everyone hates and no one remembers why it exists. Cancel it for two weeks. See if anything breaks. If it doesn't, it's gone for good.
- Reverse Mentoring: Pair a senior leader with a new hire who hasn't been "indoctrinated" yet. Let the new hire question every process. The senior leader has to explain why it exists without using the forbidden phrase.
- The "Pre-Mortem": Before starting a project, pretend it has already failed. Ask the team: "What killed it?" Often, they’ll point to a "way we’ve always done things" that they knew was a weakness but were too afraid to mention.
- Reward "Process Improvements," Not Just "Results": If an employee finds a way to automate a task that used to take four hours, celebrate that more than someone who just worked four hours of overtime.
The goal isn't to change for the sake of change. It's to ensure that every action you take is intentional. If you do something the same way for ten years, let it be because it's still the absolute best way to do it, not because you forgot you had the option to do it differently.
Examine your habits. Look at your daily workflow. Ask yourself: "Am I doing this because it works, or am I just used to the friction?" The moment you find the friction, you find the opportunity. Don't let your past success become the anchor that sinks your future.