Definition

The calendar-driven discipline that schedules mandatory refresh of operating assumptions — menu, pricing, labor model, vendor terms, daypart strategy, schedule shape. Forces the look-back before stale becomes terminal. Corrective on the stale branch of [Static Thinking]: where [Cross-Domain Thinking] breaks the closed loop of [Inbred Thinking], [Reality Check] breaks the no-look-back habit of [Stale Thinking].

Explanation

The discipline is calendar-driven on purpose, not break-driven. Waiting for something to visibly break before revisiting an operating assumption means the assumption has already been costing money quietly for months, maybe years. [Reality Check] forces the review on a schedule regardless of whether anything looks broken yet, because [Stale Thinking] doesn’t announce itself — it just sits there, unexamined, until the gap between assumption and reality gets wide enough to hurt.

This is admin-side work, not stage-side work, and it pairs directly with [Question Dumb Shit] — the interrogative version of the same corrective. Where [Reality Check] is the scheduled container, [Question Dumb Shit] is the actual question asked inside it. Run the calendar without the question and you get a review meeting that changes nothing. Run the question without the calendar and it only fires when something already hurts enough to prompt it.