I once worked in an organization where “DoD” had become a verb. People would ask, “Has the Product Owner DoD’ed it yet?” What they meant was whether the Product Owner had performed acceptance testing.
Nobody seemed particularly bothered by the wording. It had simply become part of the local language. At first I treated it as harmless shorthand, but the more I thought about it, the more revealing it became. Definition of Done had not merely been interpreted loosely. Its meaning had drifted far enough that the name of one practice had become attached to a different activity altogether.
The activity had survived, in name only. The original reasoning had not. That made me wonder whether this is how practices become rituals.
Practices Perform Functions
Professional practices rarely exist for their own sake. Code reviews, architecture reviews, retrospectives, readiness checks, governance forums and countless other mechanisms exist because someone believed they performed an important function within a larger system. The meeting, checklist, template or ceremony is therefore not the purpose. It is one way of realizing the purpose.
A code review may exist to reduce defects, spread knowledge, challenge design decisions or strengthen collective ownership. An architecture review may exist to expose risks before they become expensive to reverse. A retrospective may exist to create structured learning from recent experience. The visible activity matters because of what it enables.
The difficulty is that organizations often preserve activities more successfully than they preserve the reasoning behind them.
When the Why Fades
Recurring meetings remain in calendars. Templates are copied forward. Checklists stay embedded in workflows. Governance gates survive reorganizations. New employees quickly learn which steps must be followed and which approvals must be collected.
The rationale is more fragile. Over time, people may become very good at performing a practice while becoming increasingly uncertain about what the practice is supposed to achieve. Eventually the organization no longer asks what outcome the activity is intended to create. It asks whether the activity has been completed. That is when a practice begins to resemble a ritual.
This does not necessarily mean that the ritual has become useless. It may still perform its original function reasonably well. A weekly meeting may continue to coordinate work. A review may still expose important risks. A checklist may still prevent mistakes. The problem is subtler: the organization no longer knows with confidence why the practice works, what part of it matters, or what would happen if it changed.
Rituals Can Look Healthy
This can make ritualization surprisingly difficult to detect. A ritualized practice may look perfectly healthy from the outside. The meeting happens every week. The checklist is completed. The approval is recorded. The template is filled in correctly. Compliance can remain high even while understanding becomes weak. The organization becomes good at doing something it can no longer explain.
And once that happens, the continued existence of the practice can begin to justify itself. We do this because this is what we do. The realization becomes its own reference. Eventually frustration appears, and the discussion often moves directly to removal.
Do we still need this meeting?
Can we simplify this checklist?
Can we eliminate this approval?
Can we automate this gate?
Those may all be reasonable questions, but they begin one step too late.
Recover the Function
Before deciding what to do with a practice, we need to understand what function it was intended to perform.
Perhaps the function remains important and the current practice still performs it well. Perhaps the function remains important but the practice has become a poor way of realizing it. Perhaps several practices now duplicate the same function. Perhaps another mechanism has made the original practice unnecessary. Or perhaps the function itself no longer matters.
These are very different situations. They cannot be distinguished by looking only at the visible activity.
This matters because organizational evolution does not require preserving practices unchanged. Quite the opposite. A practice may need to change considerably in order for its underlying function to remain healthy.
Evolution Does Not Mean Preservation
A review meeting might become asynchronous. A checklist might become automated evidence. A central governance forum might be replaced by distributed decision-making. A formal approval might disappear because the confidence it once created is now produced continuously through better controls.
If the important function survives, the organization may have evolved successfully even though the original practice has disappeared. Preserving the activity is therefore not the same as preserving what matters.
The opposite problem also occurs. Organizations sometimes retain practices long after their function has ceased to be relevant. The meeting remains because cancelling a recurring meeting feels more consequential than letting it continue. The report survives because someone might still need it. The approval stays in place because nobody is quite certain what would happen without it.
Practices accumulate much like old systems. Each one may once have had a perfectly good reason to exist. Over time, the artifact survives more easily than the understanding behind it. Eventually the organization inherits a landscape of ceremonies whose origins are difficult to reconstruct.
But the loss of rationale can also push in the other direction. A practice whose function is no longer understood can appear pointless precisely because the organization has forgotten what value it once created.
People see the meeting but not the coordination it enabled. They see the review but not the risk it was intended to expose. They see the documentation but not the decisions it helped preserve. A practice may therefore be preserved for the wrong reason or removed for the wrong reason. In both cases, the deeper problem is the same: the organization no longer understands the function well enough to make a deliberate choice.
From Practice to Realization
This suggests a simple principle. Before changing a practice, recover the function.
What problem was it intended to solve? What risk was it meant to control? What understanding was it supposed to create? What decision did it support? What evidence did it produce? What coordination did it make possible?
Once those questions can be answered, the organization has choices.
The practice may remain.
It may change.
It may be replaced.
It may disappear.
What matters is that the decision concerns the function rather than merely the artifact.
Seen this way, a practice is one realization of an organizational need. The need describes what the organization must somehow accomplish. The practice describes one way of accomplishing it.
That distinction makes deliberate evolution possible. If the practice is confused with the function, any change to the practice can appear threatening because it seems to endanger the need itself. If the two remain distinct, the organization can experiment with different realizations while preserving what actually matters.
A Continuity Problem
This is also why the problem belongs naturally to Continuity.
When a practice becomes ritualized, the organization has preserved the visible artifact of an earlier decision while losing part of the understanding that made the decision meaningful.
The meeting survived.
The checklist survived.
The approval survived.
The process survived.
The why did not.
Once that happens, the organization may still change the practice, but change becomes guesswork. It may still retain the practice, but retention becomes habit. It may still remove the practice, but removal becomes an experiment whose consequences are difficult to predict.
Continuity therefore does not mean preserving practices. It means preserving enough understanding to know what may safely change.
Reflection
Perhaps practices do not become rituals because people stop following them. Perhaps they become rituals when people continue following them after the reasoning behind them has faded. The activity remains visible, familiar and repeatable. The function becomes harder to articulate. Eventually someone asks the deceptively simple question:
Why are we doing this?
That question should not automatically be treated as evidence that the practice is useless. It may instead be evidence that something more important has already been lost.
The practice can always be changed. The harder task is preserving enough understanding to know what the change must not accidentally destroy.
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