Do We Still Need to Boil the Water?

If you’ve ever visited the southern part of the United States, you’ve no doubt heard of our famous sweet tea.

For those who haven’t, it’s a tiny little shot of black tea in your sugar water.

Liquid dessert.

Growing up, my mom always, ALWAYS had a pitcher in the refrigerator. It was a staple at every meal.

It’s a wonder our teeth didn’t rot.

Anyway, she made it just like her mom, grandma, great-grandma, and so on, back to the discovery of tea leaves, apparently.

And, of course, she taught me their recipe as well.

One day, she dropped by while I was making a pitcher. We were standing in the kitchen talking when I poured the brewed tea into the container and filled the rest with tap water.

She gasped.

When I turned around, her face was pale and her hand was over her heart.

“What are you doing?!” she demanded.

I looked between her and the tea, thinking it was fairly obvious.

“Why didn’t you boil the rest of the water?!”

It was as if I’d just poured mud into the pitcher.

For years, I’d been making it that way.

I’d boil a small amount of water, steep the tea, add the sugar, and fill the rest of the container with tap water.

It cut out the extra step of boiling another pot of water, which had never made much sense to me.

It also cut down on the cooling time since we always drank it cold anyway.

I confessed that I’d revised the family recipe years ago.

No one had ever noticed the difference.

Turns out, my mom couldn’t tell me why it was necessary to boil the additional water either.

It was simply the way the women in her family had always done it.

So we started talking about it.

And eventually, we realized there probably had been a very good reason.

Generations ago, our family would have drawn water from an open well. Boiling it before drinking it would have been necessary for safety.

The step made perfect sense for the time.

The thing was, times had changed.

But the recipe hadn’t.

We had a good laugh about it, and from that day forward, my mom happily adopted my more streamlined approach to making our family’s version of Southern sweet tea.

I’ve thought about that conversation many times since.

Because there’s something reassuring about consistency.

We find a way that works, repeat it, and eventually stop having to think very much about it.

That’s often a good thing.

Consistency is how good habits become routines.

It’s how good processes become reliable.

It’s how other people learn they can count on us.

But there’s a difference between doing something consistently because it continues to serve us and doing it repeatedly because we’ve simply stopped asking why.

Businesses accumulate their own versions of boiled water.

A report created years ago because someone needed information a certain way.

An extra approval added after one mistake.

A meeting placed on the calendar for a reason no one quite remembers.

A manual step that once connected two systems that now communicate perfectly well on their own.

None of those things were necessarily bad ideas.

In fact, they may have been exactly the right ideas at the time.

But circumstances change.

Technology changes.

Businesses change.

What we need changes.

And sometimes the processes we built to solve yesterday’s problems quietly follow us into tomorrow.

Not because we made a conscious decision to keep them.

Simply because we never made a conscious decision to reconsider them.

I don’t think the answer is to constantly tinker with everything that works.

There’s value in leaving a good process alone.

But every once in a while, it may be worth looking at something we’ve done the same way for years and asking a very simple question.

Why?

Maybe the answer reminds us exactly why the process matters.

Maybe we discover an opportunity to make it better.

And every now and then, we may discover we’re still solving a problem that no longer exists.

My mother wasn’t wrong to boil the water.

Neither were her mother, her grandmother, or the generations of women who came before them.

They were faithfully repeating a process that had once served an important purpose.

They just hadn’t noticed when the purpose disappeared.

Consistency has tremendous value.

But every once in a while, it’s worth asking whether we still need to boil the water.