# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #21: Kill Your Sacred Traditions
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I've been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I've discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next. "Your long-standing traditions are likely the very enemy of your efforts at innovation." I've come back to this idea repeatedly in my work because the mindset behind innovation usually changes before the results do. What people notice, question, challenge, and act on determines how ready they are for what comes next. Tradition can encode wisdom. It can also encode inertia. Every organization has practices that survive because they are familiar, not because they are useful. The longer they survive, the harder they become to question. Eventually people defend the ritual instead of the result. Innovators learn to separate values from methods. A value may be timeless. The process used to express it may be decades out of date. The question is not whether a tradition is old. The question is whether it is still earning its place. So what does that mean in practice? It means challenging the assumption, habit, or hesitation that is keeping you anchored to the present. Here are three places to start. Action Items: List three practices defended with the phrase "we've always done it this way." Ask what outcome each practice is supposed to produce. Keep the outcome and redesign the method. Explore the full How Innovation Happens series. Real-World Examples These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world. IKEA: Retiring the catalogue that helped build the brand For seventy years, the IKEA catalogue was more than a marketing brochure. It was a recognizable part of the company's identity, distributed in dozens of versions and languages. At its peak in 2016, IKEA reported distributing roughly 200 million copies. Few corporate traditions were as visible, or as closely associated with the way customers imagined their future homes. By 2020, customer behavior had changed. People increasingly discovered products and planned purchases through digital channels, and catalogue readership was declining. IKEA announced that the familiar printed catalogue would end after the 2021 edition, despite the emotional importance it held for employees and customers. The company was not abandoning the purpose of the catalogue, which was to help people imagine useful, affordable home furnishings. It was abandoning an increasingly outdated delivery method. IKEA pointed to growing online sales, billions of website visits and new digital tools as evidence that inspiration had moved beyond one annual printed artifact. The leadership decision required separating the enduring value from the treasured ritual. IKEA's catalogue had helped create the company that existed. Keeping the same catalogue indefinitely would not necessarily help create the company customers needed next. Why it matters: A tradition earns its place by serving a purpose, not by surviving for decades. Sources: New York Public Library: When the fine meant fewer readers Library overdue fines once seemed like an obvious enforcement mechanism: charge borrowers for late books, and they will return them promptly. The New York Public Library had used that logic for generations. But a library's deepest purpose is not to collect penalties. It is to make books, learning and public resources available to the community. Over time, the library found that the traditional rule had a damaging side effect. Fines were not especially effective at improving returns, but they could discourage people with outstanding balances from borrowing again. The people most affected were often those who could least afford to lose access. On October 5, 2021, NYPL eliminated late fines and cleared outstanding late fines and replacement fees. Its leadership framed the move as a removal of barriers, not an abandonment of accountability. Materials still had to be returned; the organization was changing the incentive it had assumed was essential. This is what killing a sacred tradition looks like in practice. It requires asking whether a longstanding rule helps the mission or merely protects an inherited way of operating. The answer can force leaders to stop doing something that once seemed self-evidently responsible. Why it matters: Measure traditions against the outcome they were invented to achieve, including unintended harms. Sources: ---

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/10/how-innovation-happens-lesson-021/