I'm on a Boeing 757-300 headed to San Diego. First flight, October 1, 2002. Not the newest plane. Not the oldest.

Almost every part of a plane gets replaced over its life. Carpet. Seats. Windows. Cushions. Doors.

But the ashtray in the lavatory door is still there.

I always enjoy this leftover from a bygone era. Countless no-smoking announcements, and there sits this little chrome relic, whispering to smokers, "hey there, I remember your hay day."

As it turns out, I had it backwards.

The ashtray is required. The FAA mandates one on or near every lavatory door, whether or not smoking is allowed anywhere else on the plane. In 1974, lavatory fires were starting because people were putting cigarettes in the trash. Operators later asked to pull the ashtrays out. The FAA said no. Ashtrays serve a safety function. They were then and still are required equipment.

The requirements assumes that people won’t follow the rule.

The ashtray isn't a holdover from when smoking was allowed. It's an admission that a ban is a policy, but not a guarantee.

I think about the things in our industry that look like ashtrays.

The annual review meeting on everyone's calendar. The Investment Policy Statement nobody has opened since onboarding. The risk tolerance questionnaire that ran once at account opening and still quietly sets the allocation. The quarterly performance report that goes out on paper.

Some of those are genuinely dead. The fax machine mostly qualifies. It survived because nobody owned removing it, and every year it costs you a little speed.

Of course, some of these are load-bearing. The records retention that feels like hoarding is the thing that makes an exam survivable, and the quarterly report you were about to kill because it makes clients fixate on performance may be the one thing telling a client you're still paying attention.

They look like theater right up until the day somebody lights up in the lavatory.

The work isn't clearing out everything that looks old. The work is knowing which is which.

Most firms can't tell, because the answer is scattered across a dozen systems that don't talk.

That's the work we get to do now. Centralize the data, and a firm can finally hold two questions up next to each other. What are we actually doing today? And what should we be doing, given this business, this niche, this advisor team, these goals?

The second question is the one that matters. It's also the one you can't ask until the first one has a real answer.

Before you rip something out, go find out why it was put in.