Ask why a task is done a certain way, and the honest answer is often “that's just how we've always done it.” It sounds harmless. It usually isn't. It's a sign the process was never designed for the business you have now, only inherited from the business you used to be.
nnA step that made perfect sense for a five-person team, an extra approval, a manual double-check, a report compiled by hand, often becomes pure friction at twenty-five people. Nobody consciously decided to keep it. It just never got revisited once the team outgrew the reason it existed.
nnThe person who introduced a step usually had a good reason at the time. By the time that person has moved roles or left the business, the reasoning is gone, but the step remains, now followed out of habit rather than purpose. Nobody actively defends it. Nobody actively questions it either.
nnThis kind of cost rarely shows up as one dramatic failure. It shows up as a dozen small ones: an approval step nobody remembers the reason for, data entered manually into two systems because “that's how it's done,” a report generated every week that nobody actually reads anymore. Individually, each one looks too small to fix. Collectively, they're often the biggest source of wasted time in the business.
nnA step that adds ten minutes of unnecessary work per transaction is barely noticeable at ten transactions a week. At five hundred, it's over 80 hours a week of avoidable work, spread across the team in a way that never shows up as a single line item anyone questions.
nnAsk “why” three times about a routine task. If the third answer is still some version of “that's just how we've always done it,” it's worth a closer look. This is also, honestly, why an outside review tends to catch what internal teams miss: people who do a task every day stop seeing the parts of it that don't make sense anymore. It's not a knowledge gap. It's just very hard to spot friction you've walked past for years.