In Order To
The Two Word Test#
Every practice your team follows exists for a reason. Or at least it should. The simplest way to discover whether a practice is serving you or simply occupying space is to complete one sentence: “We do X in order to Y.”
This isn’t a trick question or a gotcha. It’s a genuine inquiry into purpose. When you can articulate what a practice accomplishes, you understand why it exists. When you can’t, you’ve discovered something worth examining.
The uncomfortable truth is that many teams would struggle to complete this sentence for practices they follow every single day. Not because the practices are inherently bad, but because the reasoning behind them has been lost to time, inherited without examination, or never existed in the first place.
Purpose Versus Ritual#
There’s a meaningful difference between doing something in order to achieve an outcome and doing something for its own sake. The first is purpose driven. The second is ritual.
Rituals aren’t inherently bad. They can build culture, create rhythm, and reinforce identity. But when rituals masquerade as practices, when they consume time and energy without delivering corresponding value, they become a form of organizational theater. The team performs the motions of productivity without capturing its substance.
Consider how your team might describe its daily standup. “We hold a daily standup in order to surface blockers quickly and coordinate the day’s work” reflects clear purpose. The team understands what the meeting accomplishes and can evaluate whether it’s working. They can ask themselves: are blockers actually getting surfaced? Is coordination happening? If not, they know something needs to change.
Contrast this with a team that holds standup because that’s what teams do. They gather each morning, report what they did yesterday and what they’ll do today, and disperse. If you asked them why, they might say “it’s just how we start the day” or “we’ve always done it.” These answers reveal that the practice has detached from its purpose. The ritual continues, but nobody can say what it’s actually for.
Inherited Practices#
Most teams don’t invent their practices from scratch. They inherit them. A new company forms and the founders bring practices from their previous jobs. A new hire joins and adopts whatever the team already does. A consultant introduces a framework and moves on. A manager reads a book and implements what it describes.
There’s nothing wrong with borrowing practices that work elsewhere. Standing on the shoulders of giants is how our industry advances. The problem arises when practices transfer without their rationale. The practice arrives, but the “in order to” stays behind.
I’ve seen teams running retrospectives without ever improving anything. They gather, discuss what went well and what didn’t, and generate action items that never get addressed. The original purpose, to enable continuous improvement through reflection and experimentation, has been replaced by compliance with a process.
The same pattern appears everywhere. Code reviews without clear criteria for what reviewers should look for. Architecture diagrams that nobody references. Documentation that nobody reads. Each practice once served a purpose. Somewhere along the way, the purpose faded while the practice persisted.
Asking the Question#
The fix is simple but requires courage: ask the question. Pick any practice your team follows and complete the sentence. “We do X in order to Y.”
We write unit tests in order to catch regressions before they reach production. We pair program in order to spread knowledge and catch defects in real time. We estimate stories in order to forecast when work might complete. We limit work in progress in order to reduce context switching and finish things faster.
Each of these statements is testable. You can ask whether the practice is actually achieving its stated purpose. Are your unit tests catching regressions? Is knowledge actually spreading through pairing? Are your estimates improving forecasts? Is limiting WIP helping you finish faster?
When a practice isn’t achieving its purpose, you have useful information. Maybe the practice needs adjustment. Maybe it needs more investment. Maybe it needs to be replaced with something that actually works. But you can only have this conversation once you’ve made the purpose explicit.
The practices that resist this framing are the ones worth scrutinizing most closely. When the best answer your team can produce is “we do it because we’re supposed to” or “that’s just how we work,” you’ve found dead weight masquerading as process.
Reclaiming Purpose#
When you find a practice that has lost its purpose, you have three options.
Reconnect to the original purpose. This means understanding why the practice was invented, what problem it was designed to solve, and whether that problem exists in your context. If it does, you can recommit to the practice with intention, adjusting how you execute it to actually achieve the stated goal.
Connect to a different purpose. Maybe the original reason doesn’t apply to your team, but the practice could serve a purpose you do care about. Your daily standup might not surface blockers effectively, but it might build team cohesion and shared awareness. If that’s valuable enough, make it the explicit purpose and optimize for it.
Stop doing it. This is often the right answer, and almost always the most frightening one. Practices have inertia. They feel safe. Removing them feels risky even when they’re accomplishing nothing. But a purposeless practice costs time and attention without delivering value. Eliminating it frees resources for things that matter.
The key is to make an explicit choice rather than drifting along. Once you’ve articulated what a practice is for, you can decide whether to keep it, change it, or stop it. What you can’t do is pretend that continuing without purpose is neutral. Every hour spent on purposeless process is an hour not spent on work that matters.
A Team Exercise#
If this resonates, here’s a practical way to apply it. In your next retrospective, pick three practices your team follows regularly. Have each person independently complete the sentence “we do X in order to Y” for each practice. Then compare answers.
Agreement suggests shared understanding. You know why you do what you do, and you agree on whether it’s working. Disagreement surfaces something important: your team has different mental models about what the practice is for. This isn’t failure. It’s useful information that you can now address explicitly.
The most telling outcome is when nobody can articulate a compelling purpose at all. When the room goes quiet because the honest answer is “I don’t know why we do this,” you’ve found something worth changing.
Over time, this question becomes a habit. When someone proposes a new practice, you ask what it’s for. When an existing practice feels cumbersome, you ask whether it’s achieving its purpose. When you inherit a process from somewhere else, you ask whether the purpose transfers to your context.
The goal isn’t to eliminate all practices. It’s to ensure that every practice earns its place. Teams that do things in order to achieve specific outcomes operate with intention. Teams that do things for their own sake operate on autopilot. The difference compounds over months and years into fundamentally different ways of working.
In Order To What?#
The next time you find yourself in a meeting that feels unproductive, following a process that feels heavy, or maintaining a practice that feels like theater, ask yourself: in order to what?
If you can answer clearly, you can evaluate whether the practice is working and improve it. If you can’t answer at all, you’ve discovered something that might not need to exist.
Your team’s time is finite. Your attention is precious. Every practice you follow is a choice to spend both on something specific. Make sure you know what that something is.