What Are People Still Doing in 2026 That Makes No Sense?
What Are People Still Doing in 2026 That Makes No Sense?
Technological progress can happen quickly. Institutional change usually does not. New software can be released overnight, but changing the procedures, incentives, relationships, and habits surrounding a system can take years.
This helps explain why obviously dated practices remain part of ordinary life in 2026.
Hospitals Still Use Fax Machines
Modern healthcare contains extraordinary technology. Hospitals use advanced imaging systems, electronic health records, robotic surgery, digital laboratories, and increasingly capable AI tools.
Yet many healthcare organizations still send records by mail or fax.
Federal health IT data cited in the source article found substantial continued use of these methods among hospitals surveyed in 2025.
The contradiction becomes easier to understand when healthcare is viewed as a network rather than a single organization.
One Hospital Cannot Modernize the Entire Network
A hospital exchanges information with physicians, specialists, laboratories, insurers, pharmacies, and other institutions.
Those organizations may use different software and different workflows.
A hospital can replace its internal fax process, but it still needs a method its external partners can receive.
If the receiving organization continues to depend on fax, abandoning the method can create a new coordination problem.
Each organization has an incentive to remain compatible with the others.
Coordination Can Preserve an Inferior System
This is a general problem.
Imagine that every participant would benefit if all organizations adopted the same newer system simultaneously.
Moving first still requires time, money, technical work, and risk.
The organization pays the transition cost immediately while receiving only part of the eventual benefit.
Waiting becomes individually reasonable.
When everyone waits, the old system survives.
The collective outcome can therefore be inefficient even when each local decision makes sense.
Paper Checks Have the Same Advantage: They Already Work
Businesses have many alternatives to paper checks.
Electronic bank transfers, automated accounting systems, and instant-payment networks can reduce manual processing.
Yet paper checks remain part of business-to-business payments.
Why?
Because suppliers already accept them. Accounting systems already process them. Employees already understand the workflow. Internal controls already accommodate them.
The old system has infrastructure behind it.
Changing an Inefficient Process Creates a Project
Recurring inefficiency can be surprisingly easy to tolerate.
Replacing it is more visible.
Someone has to research alternatives, propose the change, secure approval, allocate funds, change procedures, update software, coordinate with partners, train employees, and deal with exceptions.
The benefits may arrive gradually.
The disruption arrives immediately.
This gives old systems an advantage that has nothing to do with technical superiority.
They require no implementation.
Meetings Reveal Misaligned Incentives
Not every inefficient practice is primarily a coordination problem.
Some survive because the benefits and costs fall on different people.
Consider a weekly status meeting involving eight employees.
If each person spends an hour attending and fifteen minutes preparing, the meeting consumes ten hours of labor.
Over fifty weeks, that becomes 500 hours.
If the purpose is primarily information transfer, the organization may be spending hundreds of hours solving a problem that could have been addressed more efficiently.
The Organizer Receives Concentrated Benefits
A meeting organizer receives immediate access to everyone.
Questions can be answered in real time.
Attendance confirms that people heard the information.
The benefit is easy to see.
The cost is fragmented across eight calendars.
Each participant loses only part of a day, and that opportunity cost may never appear in a budget.
This makes unnecessary meetings easier to preserve than their total cost would suggest.
Attendance Can Be Mistaken for Collaboration
Meetings are not inherently inefficient.
Some problems require synchronous discussion, negotiation, debate, or rapid coordination.
The problem appears when attendance becomes evidence that collaboration occurred.
Eight people sharing a room does not guarantee that eight people needed to share the room.
A useful test is whether the meeting changes a decision, resolves an issue, or enables interaction that could not be handled effectively another way.
If it merely distributes information, the cost deserves scrutiny.
Job Applications Shift the Work to Applicants
Repetitive job applications provide another example of misaligned incentives.
A candidate uploads a résumé containing employment history, education, skills, and contact information.
Then the application asks for much of the same information again.
The duplication seems absurd from the candidate's perspective.
From the employer's perspective, structured fields provide something useful.
They create standardized information that an applicant-tracking system can search, compare, filter, and route more easily.
The Employer Receives the Benefit
The employer benefits from clean, structured data.
The applicant performs the additional work needed to create it.
That arrangement can persist because the person suffering the inconvenience does not control the process.
Employers could invest in better parsing, reusable profiles, or streamlined verification.
Doing so costs the employer money.
The resulting time savings largely accrue to applicants.
Unless application friction begins damaging recruiting outcomes, the incentive to fix the experience may remain weak.
Inefficiency Can Live Outside the Organization's Accounting
This pattern appears in many customer and employee experiences.
A company can shift work onto another participant without recording that work as a cost.
Long forms, complicated return procedures, confusing customer-service systems, and repetitive compliance requirements can all operate this way.
The overall system consumes more time.
The organization's internal metrics may show little of it.
Processes are more likely to change when the organization begins experiencing the external cost through lower conversion, weaker candidate pools, complaints, or lost customers.
Until then, inefficiency can remain someone else's problem.
Subscriptions Turn Inertia Into Revenue
Subscriptions introduce a different mechanism.
A normal purchase requires action.
Someone chooses to buy.
A subscription changes the default after that first decision.
Payments continue unless the customer actively stops them.
The customer does not need to decide every month that the service remains valuable.
They only need to fail to cancel.
Doing Nothing Has an Economic Direction
This makes inertia valuable.
A customer may intend to cancel later.
They may expect to resume using the service.
The monthly charge may be small enough to ignore.
They may simply forget.
Each month of inaction produces another payment.
From the company's perspective, the system works exactly as designed.
The mismatch is between continued payment and continued deliberate choice.
Familiarity Gives Old Processes Another Defense
Processes become easier to tolerate once people know how to navigate them.
Employees learn the workaround.
Customers learn what steps are required.
The temporary fix becomes the permanent procedure.
Eventually people stop asking why the process exists.
They simply teach new participants how to follow it.
At that point, familiarity itself becomes protection against change.
The Original Reason May Have Vanished
Some processes remain long after their purpose disappears.
A report may have been created for a leader who left years ago.
An approval may have been introduced because of an old regulatory requirement.
A workaround may have compensated for software that has since been replaced.
If nobody periodically revisits the reason behind the process, the behavior can outlive the problem that created it.
That is how temporary solutions become institutional habits.
AI Can Automate Outdated Work
Artificial intelligence creates an additional complication.
Organizations can automate increasingly large amounts of repetitive administrative work.
That sounds like progress.
Sometimes it is.
But faster execution does not establish that the process should continue.
AI can summarize the meeting nobody needs.
It can prepare the report nobody reads.
It can extract information into the application field that should not exist.
The process becomes less painful without becoming more necessary.
Ask Whether the Process Should Exist Before Making It Faster
This creates a useful order of operations.
First ask why the process exists.
Then decide whether it still serves a necessary purpose.
Only after that should the organization optimize or automate it.
Otherwise, technology can make obsolete work more efficient instead of eliminating it.
The distinction is important because automation tends to preserve the structure it is given.
Judgment determines whether that structure deserves preservation.
Three Forces Explain Many Outdated Practices
The examples in this article point toward three recurring mechanisms.
The first is coordination.
Everyone would benefit from change, but the benefits require several participants to move together.
The second is misaligned incentives.
One person receives the benefit while another bears much of the cost.
The third is inertia.
The existing system continues automatically while changing it requires attention and effort.
These mechanisms often reinforce one another.
An Inefficient System Can Still Be Stable
Stability does not imply efficiency.
A system can waste substantial time while remaining difficult to replace.
It can frustrate almost everyone while still serving the party with the authority to preserve it.
It can remain technologically obsolete while fitting perfectly into established workflows.
Calling the practice irrational can therefore prevent us from understanding why it survives.
The better question concerns the incentives protecting it.
Follow the Work, Benefit, and Authority
When a process seems unnecessarily complicated, map three things.
Who performs the work?
Who receives the benefit?
Who has the authority to change the process?
If one person performs the work, another receives the benefit, and a third controls the decision, reform becomes difficult.
The people experiencing the problem may lack the authority to solve it.
The people with authority may lack sufficient reason to care.
Ask Why the Process Was Created
A second useful question is historical.
Why did this process begin?
The answer may reveal that the original logic was reasonable.
Perhaps an older technology required it.
Perhaps a regulation created it.
Perhaps a major failure led to an additional approval step.
Understanding the original purpose makes it easier to determine whether the process remains necessary.
The goal is not to assume old practices are foolish.
It is to determine whether old reasons are still current reasons.
The Most Useful Question Is About Incentives
When something obviously inefficient survives despite widely available alternatives, ask:
Who benefits from keeping it?
That question does not imply malicious intent.
The benefit may simply be convenience, reduced risk, cleaner data, predictable workflow, or avoiding the immediate cost of change.
But identifying the benefit reveals what a successful replacement needs to overcome.
A technically superior alternative may fail if it ignores the incentives supporting the current system.
Progress Requires More Than Better Tools
Technology creates possibilities.
Institutions decide whether those possibilities replace existing behavior.
That transition depends on costs, incentives, coordination, defaults, authority, and habits.
This is why technological progress can race forward while ordinary processes remain stubbornly familiar.
The obstacle is often not ignorance of the better alternative.
It is that the old system still distributes costs and benefits in a way that protects itself.
When a practice survives despite better alternatives, don't only ask why it still exists. Ask who benefits from keeping it that way.
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