Years ago, when I ran call center operations, we measured things. Of course we did. You cannot manage hundreds of people answering thousands of calls by wandering around the building asking everyone how they think things are going, so you measure average handle time, calls in queue, abandon rate, service level, customer satisfaction, productivity.

All perfectly reasonable things to know.

And then comes the customer who blows the whole tidy system to hell. Maybe she is older and confused. Maybe the problem is complicated. Maybe she has already been transferred twice. Or maybe, after a few minutes, you realize the problem she called about was resolved six minutes ago and she is still talking because she is lonely. You can hear it. If you have ever worked customer service, you know exactly what I mean: there is a moment when the employee knows that ending the call would improve the metric and make the service worse.

Well, that’s curious.

Wasn’t the metric created to help us provide better service? How did we end up serving the metric instead?

I started thinking about that after reading something Seth Godin wrote about Peter Drucker. Drucker famously argued that the purpose of a business lies outside the business itself, in society, and that the purpose of a business is to create a customer. Milton Friedman later made a very different argument about the social responsibility of business and increasing profits for shareholders. There are entire graduate-school arguments hiding in there, and I have no desire to drag us through all of them before lunch.

It was one simpler question that stayed with me: Who is this supposed to serve? Once I started asking it, the damn thing followed me everywhere.

When the Tool Starts Running the Place

We create systems because systems are useful. We hire experts because knowing everything ourselves would be both impossible and deeply annoying. We establish standards because starting from scratch every Tuesday is inefficient, and we develop metrics and protocols because accumulated information helps us see whether what we are doing is actually working. None of that is the problem.

The trouble begins when we forget what the thing was created to do. A customer-service metric becomes more important than serving the customer. A business adopts a “best practice” because successful businesses apparently do this, even though nobody has stopped to ask whether this business has the same customer, constraints, goals, resources, or problem. A health protocol becomes a set of commandments instead of a tool for helping an actual human being. A family keeps doing something because “that’s what we’ve always done,” even though everybody now dreads it and no living person can remember why it mattered in the first place.

And then there is the productivity system designed to make work easier that somehow requires seventeen categories, four apps, a Sunday planning ritual, color coding, and the administrative support of a medium-sized municipality. At some point, perhaps we should inquire whether the tool is still helping.

Humans seem to have a peculiar talent for creating something to serve a purpose and then slowly reorganizing ourselves around serving the thing we created.

That is the drift I am interested in.

We Don’t Just Fall Victim to This. Sometimes We Ask for It.

This is the part that makes the question more interesting, because it would be easy to blame corporations, institutions, healthcare systems, wellness companies, and consultants for telling us what to do. Except people frequently arrive asking to be told. I saw this in coaching all the time: tell me what to eat, which supplements to take, what time to eat, how much, which workout, which routine.

Just give me the plan.

And I understand the appeal better than I used to. My natural tendency is to ask seventeen additional questions and accidentally open six investigative subcommittees in my own head; not everybody considers that recreational activity.

Sometimes people are tired of thinking about the problem.

Sometimes they are scared.

Sometimes the subject requires knowledge they genuinely do not have.

Sometimes contradictory information has exhausted them to the point that certainty—almost any certainty—feels like relief.

There is real comfort in somebody handing you the plan and saying, Here. Do this. For the moment, at least, the decision is over. The trouble begins when that relief becomes the whole relationship, because if you never understand what the plan is trying to accomplish, why its pieces are there, which parts matter most, what assumptions were made, and how your circumstances affect it, you may be able to follow it very well without ever learning how to use it.

Following instructions and understanding a plan are not the same skill, and that difference matters far more than we tend to admit.

Compliance Works Beautifully Until Life Refuses to Comply

This may be the piece we miss when we talk about sustainability. We tend to treat sustainability as a character issue: can you stick with it, were you disciplined enough, did you follow the plan? Maybe. But another question belongs beside those: Did the plan ever become yours?

Suppose someone gives you a perfectly reasonable nutrition plan and you follow it faithfully. Then your work schedule changes, your budget changes, you travel, the foods in the plan make you miserable, one recommendation conflicts with another health concern, or the goal itself changes. If all you learned was obedience to the instructions, you need another set of instructions. And when those stop fitting, you need another.

The same thing happens in business.

Someone sells you a strategy that worked brilliantly somewhere else, and you reproduce the tactics faithfully without ever understanding the principle underneath them. You do the emails, the videos, the funnel, the posting schedule, the morning routine, the color-coded whatever because successful people apparently own an alarming number of markers. Then the market shifts, your resources change, your customer behaves differently, or you finally realize you are building a business you do not particularly want to run.

Now what? Back to the guru.

This is one reason I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the entire idea of being somebody’s health guru. I don’t want that job, and more importantly, I don’t think it ultimately serves the person sitting across from me.

I may know something you don’t. A physician certainly knows things about medicine that I don’t. An accountant had better know things about tax law that I don’t, or one of us has made an unfortunate hiring decision. A skilled coach, therapist, attorney, mechanic, contractor, trainer, strategist, or dietitian can bring years of education and pattern recognition to a problem.

We need other people, and expertise matters enormously. What I am increasingly unwilling to confuse, however, is expertise with ownership.

Borrow the Expertise. Keep the Ownership.

Healthcare gives us a particularly important version of this. Shared decision-making has received considerable attention in medicine because the patient and clinician bring different kinds of information to the same decision. The clinician brings medical knowledge, experience, evidence, treatment options, risks, and an understanding of disease that most patients reasonably do not possess. The patient brings something the clinician cannot manufacture with another degree: the patient’s life.

That means history, priorities, symptoms, preferences, responsibilities, risk tolerance, resources, what has already been tried, what happened afterward, what is realistic, and what matters enough to make a tradeoff worthwhile. Research around shared decision-making is not especially tidy. A recent umbrella review found the evidence for effects on health outcomes, healthcare quality, cost, and consultation time to be uncertain overall, with results generally ranging from neutral to positive in particular populations.

That is much less satisfying than a sweeping claim that “empowered patients get better outcomes,” but it is also more honest.

And I actually like that answer, because the argument does not need to be that participating in your decisions magically produces better health. The argument is that you remain a participant in decisions about your own life. That is a different claim, and an important one.

The professional does not disappear.

You do not replace medical training with intuition, accounting rules with a hunch, or structural engineering with the deeply held belief that the wall probably looks load-bearing.

You bring context to expertise, and the expert brings expertise to context.

That works a whole lot better than either of us pretending to know what the other knows.

My Velcro Is Not Your Velcro

While I was trying to explain this, I came up with an admittedly strange picture involving Velcro. Stay with me.

Advice is flying at us all day long: research, recommendations, best practices, protocols, podcasts, books, doctors, coaches, business consultants, friends, and people on the internet who bought a ring light last Thursday and have apparently since achieved omniscience.

Some of it is excellent, some of it is ridiculous, and most of it lives somewhere in the much less exciting middle category of this may be useful depending on the context.

The answer is not to become impermeable to outside information. Quite the opposite. I want access to good ideas. I want people who know more than I do to teach me things. I want evidence that challenges what I currently believe. I want somebody to point out the thing I completely missed. But I also need my own Velcro.

For a business, that Velcro might include purpose, customers, resources, values, financial realities, capacity, goals, and the kind of company its owners actually want to operate.

For a health decision, it might include medical history, current health, medications, symptoms, goals, evidence, tolerances, preferences, finances, family responsibilities, and professional guidance.

For a life decision, the hooks and loops may include things no expert could possibly rank for you: faith, relationships, obligations, peace, ambition, enough, freedom, time.

That context determines what sticks.

A recommendation can be excellent and still not belong on your Velcro. Another may stick for a season and come off when circumstances change. Something you dismissed five years ago may suddenly make sense now because you are not the same person living in the same circumstances anymore.

This is where sustainability becomes more interesting than compliance.

If I understand why something belongs on my Velcro, I can work with it. I can adjust it when circumstances change, recognize which parts are essential and which were simply one way of doing things, and notice when the thing stops producing the result it was supposed to produce. I do not have to throw out everything I know and start hunting for another authority every time life changes the rules.

That looks a whole lot more sustainable to me than perfect compliance.

Perhaps “Best Practice” Needs an Asterisk

I have come to distrust advice that begins with some variation of “everyone should,” not because generalized guidance has no value—it has enormous value—but because a starting point is not the same as a personal conclusion. We cannot conduct a private randomized controlled trial every time we choose breakfast or buy accounting software, so general knowledge gives us a sensible place to begin. The mistake is treating that beginning as though the thinking is finished.

That distinction matters enormously in wellness, where perfectly reasonable general advice can be transformed into doctrine faster than you can say morning routine.

Someone else fasted sixteen hours and felt fantastic.

Someone else built a seven-figure business by posting three videos a day.

Someone else cured the organizational chaos of her household with seventeen labeled bins and a laminated command center.

Wonderful.

Now ask the question that should have come first: what problem were they solving?

Do you actually have that problem?

What resources did they have, and what constraints did they not have?

What did the solution cost them—not merely in money, but in time, attention, flexibility, relationships, or tradeoffs?

What would success look like for you? What would make the recommendation a bad fit?

Which part is the underlying principle, and which part is simply the way they implemented it?

Those questions do not reject expertise; they make expertise usable. They also protect us from another common mistake: assuming that because something does not fit us, the advice itself must be bad. It may be excellent advice for somebody else’s Velcro.

That is context doing its job.

So Who Is This Supposed to Serve?

I keep coming back to that question because it exposes drift remarkably quickly. When a health protocol is making the protocol the center of your life, who is this supposed to serve?

When a business spends enormous energy satisfying a metric while customers become increasingly frustrated, who is this supposed to serve?

When a family tradition causes resentment every single year but is protected as though Moses brought it down from Sinai on a third tablet, who is this supposed to serve?

When you are faithfully following advice that no longer fits the problem you actually have, who is this supposed to serve?

And there is a second question that may matter even more: Is it still doing that?

Sometimes the answer will be yes. The treatment may be difficult, but you understand why you are doing it and the tradeoff makes sense. The business process may be annoying, but it prevents a much larger problem. A professional may recommend something you would not have chosen yourself, but the reasoning is sound, the evidence is good, and the recommendation still fits the goal.

Excellent.

Discernment does not mean everything has to feel convenient or affirm what we already wanted to do; sometimes the Velcro needs to catch information we would rather let sail directly into the neighbor’s yard.

But sometimes the investigation reveals drift. The metric has quietly become the mission, the protocol has become an identity instead of a tool, or a “best practice” is being defended long after anyone has examined whether it still works. The expert has become the owner of a decision that properly requires information from both sides, or the system itself has become so important that the human being it was created to serve quietly moves to the edge of the picture.

That is when I think we should notice.

Before You Hand Over the Keys

So what do we actually do with this? We do not become suspicious of every professional, reject every system, or insist on reinventing everything ourselves because nobody tells us what to do. That sounds exhausting, and also rather foolish.

Instead, when advice matters—especially when you desperately want somebody to relieve you of the decision—there are a few things worth understanding before you hand over the keys. Start with the problem: what are we actually trying to solve? This sounds embarrassingly obvious until you notice how often we skip it. A solution can work beautifully and still be irrelevant because it solves a problem you do not have.

Then ask what the recommendation was designed to accomplish and what assumptions sit underneath it. Does it assume time you do not have, money you do not have, a health history you do not share, a business model you are not building, or a risk tolerance you do not possess? Separate the principle from the implementation.

Perhaps the principle is increasing protein; the implementation is somebody else’s exact meal plan.

Perhaps the principle is consistent communication with customers; the implementation is somebody else’s three-video-a-day content machine.

Perhaps the principle is reducing unnecessary decisions; the implementation is a laminated household command center large enough to require its own zoning variance.

And finally, decide what you will watch. What would tell you this is helping? What would tell you it needs adjusting? What would make you stop? What information would change your mind? That last question may be one of the most useful pieces of Velcro we can build, because it keeps us from turning today’s good decision into tomorrow’s unquestionable doctrine.

You do not have to become the expert in everything. Good grief. We would never get anything else done. The goal is smaller, and I think much more powerful: know enough about what matters to you that good expertise has somewhere intelligent to land.

Build your own Velcro.

Borrow knowledge generously, ask for help when you need it, let people who know more than you teach you things, and change your mind when better information earns the right to change it. But remain the person in the room who remembers what all of it was supposed to serve in the first place.

A tool can be excellent, a professional can be brilliant, a system can be beautifully designed, and a recommendation can be completely reasonable. None of that eliminates the need to bring the actual human, business, family, body, purpose, or circumstance into the conversation.

Otherwise, we can become extraordinarily good at following a plan that was never really ours—and that is one hell of a lot of effort to spend going somewhere we never meant to go.

Quick Takeaways

• Systems, metrics, protocols, and professional expertise are useful. The question is whether they are still serving the purpose they were created to serve.
• Wanting someone to “just tell me what to do” is understandable, especially when we are overwhelmed or dealing with something outside our expertise. The risk comes when relief turns into surrendering the thinking altogether.
• Following a plan is different from understanding it. Understanding the principle underneath a recommendation makes adaptation possible when life changes.
• Expertise and ownership belong together. Professionals bring specialized knowledge; you bring context they cannot know without you.
• General advice can be excellent and still be wrong for your particular circumstances.
• Before adopting advice, understand the problem it solves, the assumptions underneath it, the principle behind it, and what you will watch to decide whether it is actually helping.
• Two questions are worth keeping nearby: Who is this supposed to serve? And is it still doing that?

FAQ

Begin by understanding what problem the recommendation is intended to solve and what assumptions it makes. Then compare those assumptions with your actual circumstances, goals, resources, risks, and constraints. Good advice can still be a poor fit when the context changes.

No. Expertise and personal ownership are not opposites. A professional may have education, experience, evidence, and pattern recognition that you do not have. You possess context about your own body, business, family, priorities, and circumstances that the professional cannot know unless you bring it into the conversation. The goal is not to replace expertise; it is to participate intelligently in using it.

“Best practice” usually means something has worked well under particular conditions. Those conditions matter. Different goals, resources, risks, customers, health histories, environments, or constraints may change whether the same approach makes sense elsewhere.

Shared decision-making is an approach in which clinicians and patients participate together in healthcare decisions. The clinician contributes medical expertise, evidence, treatment options, and risks; the patient contributes personal history, priorities, preferences, circumstances, and what matters in the decision. Research on its effects is not uniformly conclusive, which is why this Case File does not claim that shared decision-making automatically produces better health outcomes.

Look for drift. Is improving the measurement making the actual result worse? Has following the protocol become more important than the outcome it was designed to produce? Are people defending a process without being able to explain what problem it currently solves? That is a good time to ask: Who is this supposed to serve? And is it still doing that?