I am reminded of the story I used to tell in my consulting days.
A woman was cooking Sunday dinner. She took the Roast Beef and cut off an inch on each end before putting it in the oven.
Her daughter asked her why. The mom responded that it was how she was taught by her mother. The next Sunday, the daughter asked her grandmother why she cut the ends off from the roast. She said that her mother taught he that way.
So, they got on the phone to call the girls great grandmother to ask her why she cut the ends off the roast.
She laughed about it for a minute. Then she told them that when she was first married, they were poor. So they only had one pan, and the Sunday roast was too big for the pan, so she cut off a little bit so it would fit.
The moral of the story is that in a lot of processes it is important to understand why they are done that way—because you will find the reasons don’t exist any more.
As an aside, we also found that if our employees just followed the rules as they were originally written, things would work fine.
Kind of like the Constitution.
When I was stationed in Korea, I ended up extending my tour twice to serve a total of three years there. In the ROK, where the single soldier tour is only one year, and command sponsored, accompanied tours are two years, that made me a vertiable institution. My tour overlapped three brigade commanders and three batallion commanders. What was funny is that I saw a whole lot of stuff changed, only to be returned to the way it was when I arrived.
Some people implemented changes simply to "leave their mark." In other areas, it became highly evident why some things, "had always been done that way," and needed to remain so.