What If Tradition Isn’t Serving the People It’s Supposed to Serve?
The hardest traditions to change are the ones everyone can see but nobody questions.
We have both been to a funeral that felt wrong.
Not wrong because someone had died. Wrong because the service had almost nothing to do with the person who passed. The music was not their music. The words were not their words. The format followed a template that had been used a hundred times before, for a hundred different people, and it showed. The family sat in the front row watching a ceremony that honored a tradition more than it honored the person the tradition was supposed to be for.
And then we have both been to a funeral that felt right.
One where the program was built around who that person actually was. Their humor. Their music. Their contradictions. The room felt lighter, not because grief was absent, but because the person at the center was present in every choice. The tradition had been reshaped to serve the people it was for, and the result was a room full of people who felt like they could grieve and had actually said goodbye.
Same format. Same type of event. Completely different experience. The difference was whether the tradition served the people or the people served the tradition.
That question is at the center of everything we are writing about in this season of the Culture of Convening.
The Tradition Trap
In our last piece before our reflection conversation video, we wrote about shadow contracts, the unspoken rules that run a room without anyone naming them. But there is another layer that is, in some ways, even harder to address: the spoken traditions that everyone can see or feel, that everyone follows, and that nobody questions.
These are the ones that come with history. With emotional weight. With the sentence that most of us have heard before: “We’ve always done it this way.”
The annual gala that no one enjoys and requires too much capacity but no one will cancel. The all-staff meeting format that has not changed in a decade even though the staff has turned over three times. The icebreaker that makes half the room cringe and the other half disengage. The conference plenary that runs 90 minutes because it always has, not because anyone has ever checked whether 90 minutes is what the room needs.
These traditions persist for a specific reason: they are familiar. And familiarity feels safe. Even when it is not working, it is known. And for the people responsible for convening, known is easier than new or how some may describe as uncertain.
But here is the question we keep coming back to: Who is the tradition actually serving?
If the answer is the institution, the convener, the funder, the board, or “the way we’ve always done it,” then the tradition is not serving the people it claims to center. It is serving itself.
Three Signs a Tradition Has Stopped Serving the Room
Traditions do not announce when they stop working. They just keep happening while the room quietly adjusts around them. Here are three signs we have learned to watch for:
1. The tradition centers the convener instead of the convened. We wrote in an earlier piece about the birthday party that stops being a convening the moment it becomes about the parents instead of the child. The same thing happens in organizational settings all the time. The Executive Director or CEO’s opening remarks that run 45 minutes. The retreat format designed around what leadership wants to communicate, not what the team needs to process. The annual dinner where the program is built for donors and sponsors, not the community being celebrated. When you notice that the tradition is oriented toward the people running the room rather than the people in it, that is your signal.
2. People comply with the tradition but do not connect through it. There is a difference between participation and presence. If people are going through the motions (sitting through the plenary, raising their hand during the icebreaker, clapping at the end) but the energy in the room says something else entirely, the tradition has become a performance. The real convening is happening somewhere else: in the hallway, at the coffee station, on the walk to the parking lot or back to the hotel rooms. We wrote about this in our very first piece. The non-conference spaces are often where people are actually authentic. That should tell us something about the conference spaces.
3. The tradition has not been revisited since the people changed. This is the most common one and the most forgivable. A tradition gets established when a particular group of people is in the room. It works for them. Time passes. The people change. But the tradition does not. And because nobody wants to be the person who questions something that “has always worked,” it keeps going, serving a room that no longer exists.
Redefining Is Not Discarding
We want to be clear about something: we are not anti-tradition. Traditions hold communities together. They create rhythm. They carry meaning across time. Carmen’s church community, which she wrote about earlier in this series, is built on traditions: the welcome song, the prayer list, the different ambassadors who create multiple entry points for belonging. Those traditions work because they are alive. They are practiced by many people. They evolve as the community evolves. They center the people who come through the door.
The problem is not tradition itself. The problem is when a tradition becomes static. When it stops being a living practice and starts being a locked format. When “we’ve always done it this way” becomes a reason to keep doing something that no longer serves the people it was created for.
Redefining a tradition means asking: who are the people in this room today, and does this practice still serve them? It means being willing to keep what works, revise what does not, and let go of what has become more about comfort than care.
It means involving the people being centered in the process and decision.
A Practice for Interrogating Tradition
The next time you are planning a convening that includes a tradition, whether that is an annual event, a recurring meeting format, a standard opening ritual, or anything that carries the weight of “we’ve always done this,” try sitting with four questions:
1. When was this tradition created, and for whom? Understanding the origin helps you understand whether the original purpose still applies. A tradition created for a team of 12 may not serve a team of 60. A format designed for one generation of leaders may not land with the next.
2. Who benefits from this tradition today? Be honest. Is it the participants? The leadership? The institution’s sense of continuity? The person who designed it and does not want to let it go? Sometimes the answer is all of the above, and that is fine. But sometimes the honest answer reveals that the tradition is serving a much smaller group than the room it occupies, and that is not enough to build an impactful convening.
3. If you were designing this from scratch for the people in the room today, would it look like this? This is the question that unlocks everything. If the answer is no, you do not have to throw the tradition away. But you do have to be willing to redesign it and evolve. And ideally, you redesign it with the people it is supposed to serve, not for them.
4. What would it cost to change this, and what is it costing not to? Change has a cost. It takes energy. It risks pushback. It can feel like disloyalty to the people who built what came before. But keeping a tradition that no longer serves the room also has a cost. It is just quieter. It shows up in disengagement, in turnover, in the gap between what people say in the meeting and what they say after it, and in some cases, if they will engage and be present in the future.
The tradition of coming together is worth fighting for. That is why we started the Culture of Convening. But fighting for it means being willing to look honestly at the traditions we have inherited, to ask whether they are still serving the people they were built for, and to redefine them when they are not.
Because a tradition that centers the institution instead of the people is not a tradition. It is inertia. And the people in the room deserve better.
This conversation is better with more people in the room. If this piece sparked something for you, forward it to a colleague, a fellow facilitator, or that friend who’s always the one holding the space. And if someone sent this to you, welcome. Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next.
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