The Pot Roast Story

This story is an allegory. You’ve lived it. We all have.

A young woman hosts a dinner party for friends, serving a delicious pot roast she prepared based on her mother’s recipe. One friend enjoyed it so much that she asked for the recipe, and the young woman wrote it down for her, including an interesting step: cutting off the ends of the roast.

“Why do you cut both ends off the roast before you put in the pan?” her friend asked.

“I don’t know. That’s the way my mother taught me. That’s how she always did it," replies the young woman.

The next day, the young woman reflected on the previous evening’s question that she had never considered. She called her mother to find out: “Mom, why do we cut the ends off the roast in our family recipe?”

Her mother paused, also realizing she had never considered this question. “I don’t know. That’s how your grandmother taught me, when I was little. Ask her.” That’s all she could manage to conjure up.

So the young woman called her grandmother.

“Hello?”

“Hi Grandma! I have an odd question for you: why do we cut the ends off the pot roast in the recipe you taught Mom?”

Grandma paused, then let out a chuckle. “Because we only had a small oven and small pot! I had to cut roasts to make them fit!”

#Allegory Explained

We’ve all experienced ages-old processes with long forgotten reasons behind them. It’s often frustrating when we discover the original reason behind the steps we’ve endured, often now for seemingly no good reason.

Early in my career, for example, I recall a process that required printing out 5 copies of a sales reports on green-bar paper. One copy went to the sales department, naturally. Another to the fulfillment team, of course. A third copy to the finance team, so they could update the books (also makes some sense). A fourth copy to the marketing team, for qualifying the outcome of their leads. And a fifth copy for … nobody remembered where it went. So into the trash the fifth copy went. In the early 2000s, the process improved: into the recycling bin for that 5th copy instead.

#Application to Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is still relatively new, at about 25ish years, give or take, but there are plenty of places where I see echoes of The Pot Roast Story, and I bet you do, too.

Learn why a process exists. Then challenge if it still should. Wirespeed is based on this premise!