That’s the way we’ve always done it!

A new bride cooked the most delicious pot roast one evening. As the couple were doing the dishes, her husband asked what the secret was. She explained that before putting it in the oven she always cut off the ends of the meat. When he asked why, she said that was simply how her mother had taught her.

Curious, he called his mother-in-law. Same answer. He called the grandmother. Same answer again. Eventually, all three generations made the trip to the nursing home to ask the 102-year-old great-grandmother directly. They gathered around her bed, raised their voices so she could hear, and asked the question that had been passed down through four generations of Sunday dinners.

She looked at them, baffled.

"Because my oven was too small to fit the whole thing."

Now, most versions of this story stop there, with the laugh and the lesson neatly packaged. But that is the easy part. The harder part is what comes after: creating the conditions in a dental practice where your team actually feels safe enough to say "I think we might be cutting the ends off the roast here."

Most practices have at least a handful of these. Systems, protocols, and habits that have outlived the problem they were originally designed to solve. They persist not because anyone actively defends them, but because nobody has been given the time, the permission, or a structured moment to question them.

What This Looks Like in Practice

In one practice I worked with, the receptionist sent paper recall cards by post to every patient due a check-up, because that was what the previous owner had done and the system was already set up. It took roughly four hours of reception time per week. The practice had mobile numbers for 87 percent of those patients. An automated digital reminder would have been faster, cheaper, and produced a measurably higher response rate. Nobody had changed it because nobody had stopped to ask why it was still being done that way.

In another practice, the morning huddle had been running at 8:30am every day for 7 years. By the time I started working with the principal, it lasted four minutes and covered the same three items regardless of what was happening in the practice that day. The team sat through it dutifully. Nobody found it useful. Nobody had said so because it had always been part of the routine. Stronger effective communication within the practice would likely have surfaced those concerns much earlier.

These are not dramatic examples of dysfunction. They are the ordinary accumulation of unchallenged habit, and they exist in some form in almost every practice I have visited. The cost is rarely catastrophic. It is a slow drain: of time, of team energy, and of the attention that could be directed somewhere that actually moves things forward.

Why It Happens, and Why It Is Not Anyone's Fault

Practices are busy. Principals are stretched. When the diary is full and the team is at capacity, the path of least resistance is to keep doing what has always been done, because stopping to redesign a process requires time that does not feel available.

There is also something subtler at work. Many of the habits that need questioning were put in place by the current principal, or by someone they respected. Questioning them can feel, even unconsciously, like criticism. So the team does not raise it, the principal does not invite them to, and the roast keeps getting trimmed year after year.

Creating an environment where this feedback is welcomed is a hallmark of transformational leadership, where team members feel empowered to contribute ideas and challenge assumptions constructively.

A More Useful Version of the Team Meeting Exercise

Telling the pot roast story at a team meeting is a genuinely good start, and I would encourage it. But what tends to produce real change is following the story with a structured question rather than an open invitation.

Ask each team member, in the week before the meeting, to identify one thing they do regularly that they do not fully understand the reason for. Not to criticise, not to find fault, but simply to notice. Then bring those answers to the meeting and work through them together.

You will likely find two categories. The first is the genuine pot roast: something that made sense in a different context and has simply never been updated. Fix it. The second is something that does have a sound reason behind it, but nobody has ever explained that reason to the team. Explain it. That clarity alone tends to improve how the process is executed. Many of these outdated processes can be uncovered through regular reviews of your practice's business systems, ensuring that procedures evolve alongside the needs of the practice and patients.

Both outcomes are useful. Neither is possible without first creating the space to ask the question.

The most progressive practices I have worked with are not the ones that never develop outdated habits. Every practice does. They are the ones where questioning those habits is a normal and expected part of how the team operates, not an act of disloyalty. Practices that actively encourage feedback and invest in team motivation often find that continuous improvement becomes part of their culture rather than a one-off initiative.