A successful routine can become so familiar that people stop asking whether it still fits.
Imagine a founder once approved every customer quote to protect margins. As the business grows, the same routine delays straightforward orders while the founder handles larger decisions. A practice that once protected the company now slows it down.
Harvard Business School professor Donald Sull called this active inertia. It is not simply refusal to change. People are moving, but their movement follows an inherited script. That makes the problem easy to miss: the team can look busy while responding to yesterday’s conditions.
A practical reset is to ask, “What is hindering us?” before asking, “What should we do next?” Look for assumptions that no longer hold, routines that delay a response, or relationships that make a necessary change feel impossible. Then choose one small test that can reveal whether the old formula still helps.
The founder could try letting the team approve routine quotes within agreed limits for a month, then review margins and turnaround time. That small experiment tests whether the old safeguard still earns its cost.
Source: Why Good Companies Go Bad