American View: Is your boss capable of recognising the “new normal”?

Responsible Business05 Aug 2025

I’ve long suspected that leaders cement their understanding of the rules, mores, and expectations of the workspace during their first leadership experience. These foundational experiences sculpt the default lens through which leaders parse their reality for the rest of their working lives. From that point on, every change in their workplace in interpreted as an act of rebellion against their understanding of universal norms. That is to say, as spiteful variances against their inflexible mental model of How Things Are™.

This is why, I believe, senior leaders are dangerously vulnerable to mistaking nautal cultural evolution for wilful deviance. I saw this constantly during the second Dot Com Boom when 50- and 60-year-old senior leaders would constantly grouse about their IT workers’ failure to dress “properly” in the office. Real businesspeople wear suits! (they raged) That’s how it’s always been! The reality – that the dress code for coders had changed from suits to sweats during the first Dot Com Boom – had either passed these old men by or had simply never registered for them. Their workers weren’t in the wrong on this issue; those senior leaders were.

Trying to push your outdated personal expectations on the people below you is, at best, a waste of everyone’s time. Worse, trying to force your workers to conform to obsolete social practices leads to resentment, ridicule, and outright rebellion. Imagine demanding that all your male-presenting workers all wear hats to and from work, while that all your female-presenting workers never go outside without hose, hair covers, and long gloves. Sure, that was the accepted norm for middle- and upper-class white American adults in the mid 20th Century.

More importantly, those dress expectations were never universal. They were demands; to be accepted into a desirable slice of society, one must conform to the arbitrary demands of the culture they were trying to fit into. Just wearing a suit on its own wasn’t sufficient to “pass” … you also had to conform to the grooming standards, posture rules, social dynamics, and class signals or else you’d be rejected as a poseur or a failure. It was always a game; darned near a hazing ritual depending on how you felt about it.

For those people that were subject to the standard, though, both of those arbitrary and strictly performative workplace fealty rituals trends fizzled out by the end of the 1960s. Sure, it hung on in a few sectors like a wasting disease. We still had to wear suits when I joined a Big Six consulting firm but that was a curious remnant of a dying culture. Wearing a business suit to an IT company got you laughed at.

The last time I worked in a Dot Com, only sales weasels ever wore suits. It was like a snake’s colouration: the cheap polyester suit was nature’s warning not to trust this creature with your money.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because there’s more going on right now in the evolution of social expectations than just the gradual transmogrification of cultural norms. These changes are, to be honest, evolving faster than ever thanks to the internet. New trends, styles, ideas, catch phrases, touchstones, and pressures form out of the chaos faster than most people can notice (let alone assimilate). The cultural Delta-V can be overwhelming and, therefore, trigger overreaction. If you want an example, may it please the court to consider the silly overreaction to the Gen Z Skibidi Toilet clip. I argue that it’s easy to become unmoored from “the” culture when elements and artifacts of the culture are changing too rapidly to keep up. The reaction, for many people, is to reject change solely because they can’t accommodate it, not because they understand or disagree with it.

Making things worse (!) more elements of our daily lives are changing than have ever changed before. We’ve always dealt with steady evolution of music, literature, and the like. Now there’s more content blasting past us than we can take in. So, too, fashion changes from all over planet, all available to us with a click on a browser link. There’s more to it disconnection than just a firehose of new cultural touchpoints, though. The planet has joined the Zoom and has a few of its own things to say.

For perspective, I first got to know Texas in the summer of 1988 when I came down here for Combat Medic school at Fort Sam Houston. I’d experienced blistering summer heat growing up in the Midwest, so Texas’s triple-digit days weren’t a surprise. The duration of summer, though, came as a shock. In Kansas, Autumn started in late September … like a normal state. My first years living down here, though, reset all my expectations for what weather should be. Texas has four ironclad seasons:

Texas winter lasts from the end of November to mid-March. It’s mostly rainy; any snow or ice you get will paralyze the city for day then go away.
Spring lasts from late March to June (if you’re very lucky). It’s famous for heavy rains, storms, and the return of murder pollen.
Summer usually starts at the end of June. The year’s first 100° F days begin in July and run through early September, highs staying in the 90s thereafter. Don’t expect to see clouds, rain, or adequately hydrated people for the duration. Aircon is a necessity.
Autum is – at most – four days long and usually passes you by the last week of October.

It is for this – and this alone! – that I envy my mates who live in New England. Real autumn is bloody gorgeous. Texas Autumn is barely a footnote.

After your first few years living in Texas the rhythm became predictable: Tornados manifest in the spring, while hurricanes form in the late summer. You can tell the season by the stocking of the beer shelves: the arrival of fruit beers and saisons mean tornadoes are imminent. When the Mexican lagers start getting replaced with German lagers it means watch out for Gulf hurricanes. For decades the cycle was as reliable as a well-maintained tractor.

Not so much anymore. The “climate crisis” that our current government swears doesn’t exist is, defiantly, making itself known like a rampaging biker gang formed by meth-addled orcs. The Guadalupe River floods a month ago killed over a hundred people and caught everyone by surprise. That is to say, it surprised everyone who was mentally and emotionally stuck in the past; the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounded the alarm on the increase in frequency for both severe storms and “rare” storms back in 2021. People who’ve responsibly kept up with the changing science and took the analysis seriously have been demanding changes to alerting, preparedness, and disaster response capabilities.

Meanwhile, far too many powerful people whose mental model of weather events in Texas ended in the Reagan presidency couldn’t accept that there was any increased risk involved in camping next to a river that’s well known for flooding during severe storms. After all, such disastrous flash floods hadn’t affected them when they’d visited the region in the 1960s or 1970s or 1980s … therefore it couldn’t ever change. Impossible!

But then it did, and the powerful people’s refusal to prepare directly led to drowned children. These fools’ natural blind spot – the delusion that how the world worked when a person first became a leader is how the world will continue to work forever after – can be incredibly dangerous. The world does change, has changed, and will continue to change regardless of how we might feel about it. If we don’t keep up, our inability to perceive the world as it really is will continue to manifest in preventable tragedy. Damned fools.

I was reminded of this issue when I sat down to draft this column Sunday afternoon. A little before 1 pm, I heard distant rolling thunder. After ten minutes, the thunder got much closer, louder, and more intense. Less than five minutes later, the skies let loose with a punishing barrage. Only a few minutes after the rain started, we lost all visibility; I couldn’t see our street from my window, let alone the homes on the other side of it.

So … this happened. I took this well after the main squall had passed through.

The rain ripped branches off our neighbourhood’s trees and scattered debris all down our street. That was before the hail started; when the heavy rain moved east, the ground looked like it had been half-covered in snow. The streets where surging with runoff deep and fast enough to pick a kid up and carry them away like something out of a Grimm fairy tale.

When I got out to survey the damage, I discovered a two-metre tree limb had been torn off the tree that grows right outside my office window. Had the wind or rain carried it ~15cm south, it would have landed on the roof directly over my desk. I later learned that my wife and her friends had to take shelter in a fast-food place. Their shelter lost power. On leaving, they discovered torn power lines lying in the street. Had they tried to press on through the squall, they might have been in that intersection when the live wires fell.

This Sunday’s kind of violent summer storm was exceedingly rare back when I first moved to Texas. Sure, folks always took weather forecasts seriously, but more for the “Ozone Alerts” than storm predictions. These sorts of storms just didn’t happen in the middle of summer back then … and now they do. This is A Thing™ now.

Sunday’s storm reminded me about my original plan for this week’s column. I’m frustrated with leaders who can’t break out of their dangerously obsolete worldviews. Good leaders deal with the world as it is, not how it was back when they first started leading people. I understand how and why this happens, but that doesn’t mean I can excuse it. Pretending to live in the past is a luxury that few can afford. If that’s your kink, join a reenactors’ guild. Don’t indulge your vices at the office.