Removing the Second Striking Strip: What Matchboxes Taught Me About Systems That No Longer Serve

An illustration of system overload of policy, programmes and processes

In the 1960s, an entrepreneur approached Swan Vesta, which was then Britain’s biggest matchbox manufacturer, with a bold claim. He could save them 15% in manufacturing costs and boost production without touching sales.

His idea? Remove one of the two striking strips from each matchbox.

No one had questioned why there were two. It was just the way things had always been done. But this small, simple change had massive ripple effects, not just for Swan Vesta, but for the whole industry. Today, most matchboxes only have one striking strip. One tweak. Millions saved.

I saw this story recently, Steven Daniels a fellow #Anthropust shared it on his feed and it stuck with me, because in my world, supporting young people, activating communities, and reshaping broken systems, I see a lot of second striking strips.

We build programmes, policies, and institutions that get passed down through time. They make sense at the moment they’re created. But over the years, things change. People change and communities evolve.

What doesn’t always change is the system that they are built on.

We’ve layered so many things on top of each other that we’ve ended up with a complicated legacy layer. A tangle of outdated processes, requirements, rules, and rituals that don’t serve today’s needs, but we carry them forward because they’re familiar. No one’s stopping to ask if they still make sense.

And let’s be honest, sometimes it’s easier not to ask.

Where I see the second striking strips today:

Forms that don’t reflect real lives. A young person applies for support and has to tick boxes that don’t apply to them. Or worse, that excludes them.

Training budgets that ignore real-world experience. We say we want skilled workers, but we undervalue lived experience and hands-on learning in a quite shocking way!

Career advice is still built for the 90s. In a world of AI, gig work, and self-employment, many are still using pathways designed before smartphones existed, let alone the fact that the social contracts being sold to the next generation are well over expiry.

Endless pilots with no scale consideration. We keep experimenting, but are scared to commit to what works. Growth comes from scale and there are hundreds of services that are consistently working, effort and budgets should be given to those that have shown their mission is scalable.

Digital exclusion still being an afterthought. In a tech-driven economy, we still have public services assuming everyone has a laptop and stable Wi-Fi.

And here’s the kicker, the people closest to the problems, the ones who live this stuff every day spot the second striking strip straight away.

It’s the young person in a workshop who asks, “Why do we have to apply like this?”

It’s the community leader saying, “That funding process blocks the people who need it most.”

It’s the single mum juggling night shifts who tells us, “I want to train, but the course timings don’t work with my life.”

We don’t need to guess where to look. We just need to start listening.

There’s a bias in our world toward adding. More policies. More tools. More boxes to tick. More services are layered on top of old ones.

But sometimes progress comes from removing.

The second striking strip, the extra step, the jargon. The rule that doesn’t fit anymore.

We need to build a culture that encourages asking:

- Who is this still serving?

- What would happen if we didn’t do it?

- If we were starting today, would we build this the same way?

Because the truth is, systems that no longer serve don’t just cost money. They cost trust, energy, dignity, and opportunity.

Start looking for your second striking strip.

In your business, in your organisation and in your community.

Don’t just look for what’s broken, look for what’s outdated, what’s excessive, what no longer fits. Ask the hard questions. Invite in the voices we don’t usually hear and when you find something that’s not needed anymore, have the courage to remove it.

Because in that space? That’s where change lives.

Look at the Citizen Hub model, our focus is largely on culture rather than services, having a safe space for people to help themselves, regardless of how they describe that need or what boxes they tick for funded support. It is stripping skills and employment back to its roots, social mobility then becomes the engine for socioeconomic outcomes in our community. It is defined as a conduit for conversation, encouragement and connection. Layers extracted, cost barriers to community infrastructure reduced dramatically and the simplicity of driving economic outcomes is the proof we need that it works.

Latest Business Leaders Gathering, simple conversations lead to transformational change

I’m sharing this as someone who’s spent the last decade working alongside communities, young people, and social impact organisations. The biggest breakthroughs haven’t come from innovation for innovation’s sake. They’ve come from subtraction. From simplifying. From listening.

Let’s normalise that.

If you’ve found your own “second striking strip,” I’d love to hear about it.

Let’s learn from each other and build better systems that actually fit the world we live in now.