There is another workplace phrase that always makes me a little curious:

“We’ve always done it this way.”

Sometimes that is actually useful information.

A process may exist because years of experience have shown that it works. There may be very good reasons behind a system, sequence or decision that are not immediately obvious to someone encountering it for the first time.

History has value.

But history and usefulness are not always the same thing.

Organisations change. People change. Technology changes. Client expectations change. Teams grow, responsibilities shift and processes that once fitted comfortably can slowly become awkward around the edges.

The strange thing is that we often become very good at adapting around those awkward edges.

Someone adds an extra spreadsheet because the original system no longer gives them what they need. Another person creates their own workaround. A step gets added because something went wrong once, and years later nobody is quite sure why it is still there.

Nothing necessarily breaks badly enough to force the question.

So everyone keeps going.

That is when “we’ve always done it this way” starts becoming interesting to me.

Not because everything old needs replacing, or because change for the sake of change is useful. Constantly reinventing functioning systems can create just as much friction as refusing to change them.

I am more interested in whether the process still makes sense for the work happening around it.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes the process is perfectly sound and the frustration is sitting somewhere else entirely.

But sometimes people have become so accustomed to compensating for the way something works that the compensation itself has started to look normal.

And normal is remarkably easy to stop noticing.

Perhaps that is why change conversations can become so uncomfortable.

One person sees a process that has worked for years. Another sees unnecessary steps. Someone else has built their entire routine around it and hears criticism of the process as criticism of the way they work.

Suddenly a conversation about how something gets done becomes a conversation about experience, ownership and identity.

That is usually where things become more interesting than the process itself.

Because “we’ve always done it this way” may mean many things.

It may mean this works.

It may mean I understand this.

It may mean the alternative feels uncertain.

Or it may simply mean nobody has asked the question for a very long time.

I don’t think every familiar process needs challenging.

But I do think familiarity deserves the occasional question.

Not “How can we change this?”

Simply:

“Does this still serve what we are trying to achieve?”

Sometimes the answer will be yes.

And sometimes that small question reveals that the organisation has quietly changed while the process stayed exactly where it was.

That gap can create more friction than anyone realises.

These are the kinds of workplace frictions that interest me most: the things that have become so familiar that we no longer notice how much effort people are putting into working around them.

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Organisational Friction Diagnostic

Helping organisations look beneath recurring workplace challenges and identify the patterns that may be keeping them in place.