Why “We’ve Always Done It This Way” Is Dangerous
In a world moving faster than ever, familiarity can quietly become risk. This article explores why “we’ve always done it this way” limits growth in estate agency, and how adapting how you allocate time and tasks creates clarity, capacity, and better client conversations
There are few sentences more revealing in a business than this one.
“We’ve always done it this way.”
It is rarely said with arrogance, more often, it is said with comfort, familiarity or even pride but in today’s environment, familiarity is not neutral. It is a position and increasingly, it is a vulnerable one.
The world does not pause while businesses preserve habit. It moves forward daily, reshaping how people work, think, communicate, and make decisions. Estate agency is not exempt from this pace of change. If anything, it is directly exposed to it.
Technology is advancing aggressively. Client expectations are evolving. Workflows that once felt essential are being replaced by smarter, faster, and more effective alternatives. The danger is not that things change, the danger is assuming your current way of operating is immune to that change.
As Charles Darwin is often quoted as saying, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
That principle applies directly to estate agency leadership. Adaptation is no longer a competitive advantage. It is a baseline requirement.
In many estate agencies, resistance to change does not appear in strategy meetings. It appears in how leaders allocate their time. Tasks become protected not because they are valuable, but because they are familiar. Activities are labelled as “vital” because they have always been done by the same person, in the same way, for years.
Over time, this creates a leadership bottleneck.
Leaders become consumed by administration, process oversight, and low leverage tasks, while the activities that genuinely move the business forward, such as prospecting conversations, relationship building, strategic thinking, and client care, receive less time and energy.
In early 2025, during one of our performance workshops, we sat down with a client leadership team to review how time was actually being spent across the week. Rather than starting with ambition or goals, we began with reality. Using the Eisenhower Matrix, we mapped tasks into four categories: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither.
What became immediately clear was uncomfortable. A significant portion of the leader’s time was being consumed by administrative tasks. Tasks they viewed as essential, yet tasks that could clearly be handled elsewhere.
The irony was simple.
They already had an administrative team in place.
Through that process, responsibility was realigned. Administrative work was reassigned, clear boundaries were set and systems or technology were introduced where manual processes had been left untouched.
The outcome was not just efficiency. It was clarity.
That leader gained time to work on the business rather than constantly in it.
Technology does not exist to replace leadership. It exists to protect it. Automation, AI supported systems, and modern workflows allow repetitive, low judgement tasks to be handled consistently without consuming leadership attention. When leaders cling to outdated processes out of habit, they sacrifice cognitive bandwidth. When they adapt, they reclaim it.
This reclaimed time is not a luxury. It is where higher quality conversations happen. Longer discussions with clients. Better preparation. More thoughtful prospecting. Deeper relationships.
In a service driven industry, that matters more than speed alone.
A Practical Framework to Challenge Habit
If “we’ve always done it this way” feels familiar, here is a grounded process to challenge it.
First, audit your week honestly.
List everything you do, not what you believe you should be doing.
Second, classify tasks by value, not urgency.
Urgent does not mean important. Ask what genuinely requires your judgement.
Third, question ownership.
Just because you can do something does not mean you should.
Fourth, explore alternatives.
Could technology, systems, or team capability handle this differently?
Finally, reinvest reclaimed time deliberately.
Use it for conversations, strategy, and leadership activities that compound long term value.
Adaptation is not abandoning experience. It is applying it more intelligently. It is recognising that leadership today requires different leverage than leadership ten years ago. The agents who thrive will not be those who work the hardest, but those who allocate their time most deliberately.
This is how businesses stay relevant without losing their identity.
Identify one recurring task you handle personally that could be reassigned, automated, or restructured, and change it this month.
Progress rarely asks for permission.
It rewards those willing to move with it.