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A smoke alarm can be painfully loud. Sometimes there is a fire. Sometimes someone burnt the toast.
Either way, switching it off tells us very little about why it went off.
Perhaps behaviour deserves the same curiosity.
Someone checks every detail. We experience them as controlling. Someone reacts badly to a question. We experience them as defensive. Someone stays quiet when a conversation matters. We assume they don’t care.
We naturally respond to what we can see.
But behaviour rarely appears from nowhere.
Someone may check everything because experience taught them that mistakes are costly. Someone may hesitate to speak because speaking up hasn’t always worked well. Someone may seek certainty because uncertainty has carried consequences before.
We may never know the real reason. But there is a difference between judging a behaviour and becoming curious about how it came to make sense.
The same may be true in organizations.
Ways of working accumulate over time. Responsibilities evolve. Teams develop habits. What looks unnecessary today may once have been a reasonable response to a problem, a constraint or something the organization learned along the way.
That doesn’t mean everything should remain. Some things genuinely outlive their usefulness.
But perhaps the fact that something exists is information too.
Before changing it, there may be value in understanding what problem it solved, what need it served, or what experience made it necessary.
Otherwise, we may successfully remove what is visible while leaving the reason for it untouched.
Perhaps meaningful change needs both the courage to question what exists and the curiosity to understand why it exists.
Before deciding something needs to change, how often do we become curious about why it is there in the first place?
