Day #745 - Too Safe

Cultural norms and pressures

A busy day today. I am balancing my certainty, and my safety. I’m exploring ideas around leadership at the boundary, using the graffiti wall, and working with a large group. It’s safest for me to stick to structure, but better for them if I let them explore, so my decisions are always a balance.

We always work within a context, and that context imposes rules and expectations upon us. Simply the pressure to conform to established patterns of knowledge and understanding is significant, and can lead us to homogenise our talking, even when our thinking diverges. Even in contexts where we ‘seek’ divergence and new ideas, we can limit ourselves.

Use your sixty seconds today to consider the cultural rules, the unspoken ones, that act upon you today.

It may be simple: that you use certain acronyms, or always turn up early for meetings, or it could be harder, in how you sense you would be judged for challenging authority.

Cultural norms are what allows culture to work, but also they are the thing that constrains us.

Being safe is good. Being too safe is not.