When a product or team starts drifting, the instinct is to add — more process, more metrics, more meetings, more roadmap clarity. But the drift is rarely caused by too little structure. The 14th-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun noticed something sharp about institutions: in their early, scrappy phase, groups cohere around shared necessity and informal solidarity ('asabiyyah — roughly, collective esprit). As they succeed and formalize, they layer on apparatus designed to preserve what they built. The apparatus eventually becomes the thing that prevents them from being what made them great. This maps unsettlingly well onto product organizations: the rituals meant to scale the original velocity become the friction that slows it. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, father of American Pragmatism, argued something adjacent in logic — that the most dangerous beliefs are not the ones we argue about but the ones we've stopped noticing we hold. Together, they point at a specific blindspot: the organizational habits that feel like load-bearing walls are often just wallpaper that nobody's peeled back in years. One useful Friday move: look at whatever slows your team down most and ask not 'how do we do this better' but 'when did we decide this was necessary at all?'

What is one recurring team ritual or process you have never personally seen evaluated — only inherited?

Drawing from Islamic Historical Sociology / Classical Pragmatism — Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 1377) and Charles Sanders Peirce (The Fixation of Belief, 1877)