How did we get here?

In a a previous job, my team was given guidance to use a specific set of categories to group our customers which would then inform several upcoming and important business decisions.

Since these categories preceded our time, we asked more tenured people how these categories were determined in an effort to better understand their origins.

Their responses: we made it up.

There was no robust, rigorous process that informed the framework’s creation. There was no certainty or foundation to lean on to suggest that it was the right way to think about our customers. No — all it was was a group of people, at some point in the past, thinking it felt right.

This isn’t to critique decisions that were made long ago, sometimes we have to make things up and try them out — particularly when we don’t have access to a lot of information.

The real issue lies in the continued usage or practice of something because that’s what we did yesterday and last month and last year and the year before that.

I think this applies just as well to our personal lives as it does in our professional lives.

Of course in some cases, how long something has been in existence can be a good proxy for usefulness. The famous investor Naval Ravikant encourages the reading of books that have endured for thousands of years, making a compelling argument that “[they have] been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct.”

However other times, like in my example, where an idea has persisted for many years but hasn’t exactly withstood the test of thousands of them, it behooves us to at least pose the question: how did we get here?

In the end, you’ll either find that it all makes sense and you can feel good about continuing to do what you’re doing or you’ll uncover a wonderful opportunity to do, to build, or to become something better.