Routines make a company fast. The routine you never question is the one that quietly stops working, and nobody notices. I learned that on a school run with my six-year-old daughter.
My wife was traveling, running sales for a new genetics laboratory, building something from scratch. I was running an Inc. 5000 company and holding on for dear life. Between the two of us, we had more plates spinning than we could count.
So on the Monday after Easter, when the alarm went off, I did what I always did. Got my daughter ready. Packed her bag. Buckled her in. Drove across town to school, and pulled up to a locked gate.
She started laughing: a six-year-old who’d just realized she’d been handed a surprise day off. I laughed too, for a different reason. I’d rushed across town to a school that wasn’t open, and now I had an office mate for the day. My daughter got a better day than I did.
What stuck with me was that I never questioned it. I didn’t check the calendar. I didn’t look at the school schedule on the fridge. I didn’t register that it was the week after Easter. I just went. And then I realized I was doing the same thing in my business.
Why do the routines that built your company stop working?
Because they were built for a company that no longer exists. A routine is a decision you made once and then stopped making. The business keeps changing around it, with more people and a different market. The routine stays the same, and because it still runs smoothly, nobody notices it has stopped serving the outcome it was built for.
Psychologists have measured how much of an ordinary day runs this way. In two diary studies of college students, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2002, Wendy Wood, Jeffrey Quinn and Deborah Kashy found that between a third and nearly half of the behaviors people logged were habits: done almost every day, in the same place, often while their minds were on something else. That’s what habits are for. They free your attention. It’s also how a grown man drives his daughter to a closed school.
Now look at how you run your company. Your Monday leadership meeting. Your hiring process. The way you review financials. The standing call that’s been on the calendar since Q2 of last year. How many of those did you design for the business you’re running now, and how many are leftovers from a version of the company that doesn’t exist anymore?
Routines create speed, and the old ones go invisible
I believe in routines. A strong morning routine creates an unfair advantage. The CEO who has dialed in how they run the week and how they make decisions under pressure has a real edge over the one who’s winging it.
So this is a pro-routine argument with one condition: your routines have to be examined and managed, so they keep serving you and the outcomes you’re chasing.
When they aren’t, the standing meeting that made sense with twelve employees is still on the calendar at sixty. The sales process you built for your first market is still running in the market you sell into now. The cadence of your one-on-ones, the report you ask for every Friday: each was designed for a moment, and the moment may have passed without anyone raising a hand. If your weekly leadership meeting is one of them, an operating rhythm for a leadership team gives every recurring meeting one question it exists to answer, which makes a stale one much easier to spot.
Big companies show the same pattern at scale. In “When Growth Stalls” (Harvard Business Review, 2008), Olson, van Bever and Verry of the Corporate Executive Board studied the Fortune 100 and Global 100 from 1955 to 2006. They found that 87 percent had suffered at least one serious growth stall, and external factors accounted for only 13 percent of the causes they traced. Their advice was to name the assumptions underneath the strategy and test them, on purpose, for whether they still hold.
Those were giant companies. The mechanism is the same at fifty people. When something works long enough, it turns into “the way we do things.” It goes invisible, and invisible things don’t get questioned.
In my coaching, the CEOs who plateau tend to be running a version of the business built for a previous chapter. The playbook that took a company from $2M to $10M can be the same playbook that’s choking it at $15M. It was right once, and nobody went back to check whether it still is. A routine pointed in yesterday’s direction is just expensive motion.
Is this still working? How to know if a routine has outlived its purpose
Ask whether it’s still working, not whether it’s working. “Is this working?” gets an easy yes, because the routine has been running, and that’s why it’s still there. “Is this still working?” forces you to compare the conditions when you built it with the conditions now.
The company you’re running in April has moved on from the one you were running in January. Mark Bonchek made a related argument in Harvard Business Review in 2016 (“Why the Problem with Learning Is Unlearning”): businesses run on mental models that have gone out of date, and letting go of an old model is harder than learning a new one.
Try this: a one-hour audit of one routine
Block one hour this week. Pick one thing you do every week that you’ve never questioned: a meeting, a report, the way you start your Monday. If you can’t think of one, open last week’s calendar and look at what repeats. Calendar Control asks how much of your week you placed there on purpose; this audit asks the same question of one recurring block.
Write the routine at the top of a page, then answer three questions in writing:
- Why did we start this? One sentence on the original reason. If nobody remembers, write that down; that’s an answer too.
- What’s changed since then? List what’s different now: headcount, customers, market, who’s in the room, what the numbers say.
- Would we start this today if it didn’t already exist? Yes, no, or yes but differently.
Then apply the rule. If the answer to question three is yes, keep it and move on. If it’s “yes, but differently,” write the different version and run that instead. If it’s no, you’ve found your blind spot: decide whether to change it or stop it, and put the date you’ll do it on the calendar. If stopping or changing it is a big call, run it through a decision-making framework for leaders before you act. The danger was never the routine itself. The danger was not knowing it had stopped serving you.
Then put question three to your leadership team about the one meeting all of you attend.
The gate is somewhere in your calendar
My daughter got a surprise day off that morning, and she was thrilled. I got a reminder that the things I did without thinking were the things most worth thinking about.
Your business has a locked gate somewhere: a meeting that no longer moves anything, a process built for a team you don’t have anymore, a habit that has outlived the reason you started it. Find it, question it, and if it wouldn’t survive that third question, replace it with something that earns its place on your calendar. Bigger and freer is the goal, and you won’t get there on autopilot.
A planning offsite is where this audit belongs at company scale. In Strategic Planning, every leader arrives with an honest assessment of how their area performed last quarter, and the two days onsite ($12,500 plus travel) are where a leadership team ends comfortable habits on purpose. It’s not for a founder who wants to plan alone.