There was a firehouse in rural Australia. The junior firefighters were made to clean the front of the station house every morning.
As with many teams, there are hazing rituals or rites of passage that the newer members must endure.
To be in the tribe, you have to show loyalty to the tribe.
To improve efficiency, some consultants were hired to look at various fire stations to see if they could improve the operation.
They were confused by the morning cleaning ritual for this particular fire station and asked the team why they were doing this. No one had an answer.
They looked into the station’s history to see if they could uncover any insight into why, every morning, the juniors would clean an already clean fire station.
What they discovered is originally, the fire trucks were pulled by horses. These horses lived in the front of the station. They happened to defecate overnight and the juniors would have to clean it up before the morning shift.
Tradition Is For Suckers
The junior firefighters were doing something because someone had done something long ago. They weren’t doing something to add value or improve things.
It was a situation of doing what we always did because we have always done it. The cyclic logic can get you in trouble.
Understanding Tradition
Tradition is a fine reason to do something if you understand the thought process around why you do it.
Doing it because it is how it is always been done is not one of those fine reasons.
An accountant writing every calculation on a page and updating everything by hand is ridiculous now that there is Excel.
Understanding the why behind the process is very important to know if the outcome is worth the effort. This also helps you refine, update, or remove the process for your team workload.
Sometimes you can do it better with new equipment or technology. You could update the process to cut out meaningless steps. Or perhaps, you can outright get rid of doing it all if it no longer serves a purpose.
Don’t stand on someone else’s thinking that you don’t know and don’t know the reason why they thought that way.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 