When “How We’ve Always Done It” Becomes the Only Reason

I joined the executive committee of my Toastmasters club a few years ago. Everything had a process. There was a specific order for evaluations. A particular sign-up sheet, laid out a particular way. A script for how meetings opened and closed, down to the phrasing.

I asked why we did it that way. Nobody could tell me. The person who’d set it all up had left the club years before I joined. Whatever problem it had solved back then, nobody could remember what it was. We were just still doing it, the same way, because that was the way it had always been done.

Some of it genuinely didn’t work anymore. The sign-up process created bottlenecks nobody needed. The evaluation order made sense for a club half the size it was now. But when a few of the newer members suggested changing it, the resistance was immediate — and it wasn’t really about whether the new way was better. It was about the fact that the old way was familiar, and familiar felt safe, even when familiar was quietly getting in everyone’s way.

That’s the bit I keep coming back to. We talk about communication norms as if someone sits down and designs them. Almost nobody does. Someone builds something once, for a reason that made sense at the time, and then it just… continues. Nobody re-decides it. Nobody checks whether the original reason is still true. It becomes “how things are done” purely by outliving the person who did it.

The habit outlives the reason for it every single time. And the longer it runs unchallenged, the more it starts to feel like a rule instead of what it actually is — a decision someone made once, that nobody’s revisited since.

I see the same pattern in businesses constantly. A way of updating clients that made sense with three clients and doesn’t with fifteen. A weekly check-in that started for a reason nobody working there today could explain. Nobody’s attached to the process itself. They’re attached to not having to ask why it exists, and to the mild discomfort of being the one who changes something that’s “always” been fine.

The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable. Pick one communication habit in your business — a recurring update, a meeting, a way you check in with clients — and ask the question nobody in that Toastmasters room wanted to ask out loud: if we were starting from nothing today, would we build it this way?

Your turn: what’s a communication habit in your business that’s still running purely on inheritance — and what would you build instead, if you were starting today?