There is nearly always a jar in our fridge that Stella would like removed.
It contains my homemade bone broth.
Whenever I cook a roast, the carcass goes into a large pan and simmers for two days, extracting every last bit of flavour and goodness to create a rich liquid that smells wonderful.
That is my description.
Stella’s is “disgusting.”
Once cooled, it congeals into a fatty jelly resembling the creature from The Blob, the 1950s science fiction film. I see this as proof that I have made it properly. Stella sees it as proof that it is planning to escape.
Its shelf life is debatable. It does not come with a helpful date because I made it, and labelling jars feels unnecessarily bureaucratic when I can rely on smell, instinct and a dangerously optimistic memory.
But it enriches sauces, makes wonderful gravy and transforms my favourite ramen. So, despite its appearance and uncertain age, it earns its place in the fridge.
Amber suggested the fridge for this series because it is where we keep things long after they have expired. She was thinking about beliefs.
Stella assumed she finally had professional support for throwing away my bone broth.
They sit quietly at the back of our minds and are brought out whenever we need to explain why something must, or cannot, be done.
“We have always done it this way.”
“Our customers expect it.”
“People don’t like change.”
“That’s just how it has to work.”
I once worked with a large, long established organisation in a heavily regulated industry. It had survived for generations by taking rules and processes extremely seriously.
Every quarter, around 25 senior leaders from across the business spent the best part of a week gathering information for a report. It cost countless thousands of pounds to produce and ran to 190 pages.
Then an intern asked a question.
“Why do we produce this report every quarter?”
Because we always produce it every quarter.
“Who reads it?”
Our senior leaders.
“What do they get from it?”
We don’t know.
She was clearly not yet experienced enough to understand that sensible questions can be career limiting, so she went and asked them.
The report had been created after a serious event 25 years earlier. At the time, that event had cost the organisation millions. Producing a detailed quarterly report to understand what had happened, monitor the risks and prevent it happening again made complete sense.
The cost of the report was tiny compared with the cost of the problem.
But 25 years had passed. The original problem had long since been addressed, the organisation had changed and most of the report no longer served any useful purpose.
Of its 190 pages, the senior team regularly read one.
One page.
The other 189 were still being assembled every quarter because nobody had stopped to ask whether the reason for producing them still existed.
Once they confirmed those pages served no current operational, regulatory, risk management or decision making purpose, the report was stopped. The useful page remained. Everything else disappeared.
There is an important point here. This organisation had survived for a very long time partly because it respected rules and processes. In an industry where mistakes carry serious consequences, that matters.
The report was not foolish when it was created. It was a rational response to an expensive and serious problem.
It simply stayed in the fridge after its purpose had expired.
Nobody deliberately decides to waste thousands of hours. People inherit a process, follow it diligently and assume somebody, somewhere, must still need it.
Eventually, questioning the rule feels more dangerous than continuing to obey it.
It did not take artificial intelligence, a transformation programme or a team of consultants to uncover this particular waste. It took an intern asking three painfully simple questions.
Old does not automatically mean useless. My bone broth proves that, at least in my opinion. Experience, established processes and organisational memory can be enormously valuable.
But familiarity is not evidence of freshness.
The useful question is not, “How long have we done this?”
It is, “What purpose does this still serve?”
If nobody can answer without referring to history, hierarchy or habit, it may be time to open the jar and have a proper look.
Next week, I am leaving the fridge and heading to the front door, where the doorbell raises another uncomfortable question: just because something demands our attention, why do we assume we have to answer it?
Stella has just asked when I made the current batch of bone broth.
I explained that the absence of a label does not mean it has expired.
She said neither does writing a blog prove that it hasn’t.
