I was in a meeting recently when someone made a comment that landed badly. Not dramatically – just one of those moments where the energy in the room shifts slightly, a brief awkwardness, then everyone moves on. What struck me wasn’t the comment itself, but the speed at which we all absorbed it and carried on. No pause. No acknowledgment. Just… acceptance.
And I found myself wondering: ‘when did this become okay?‘
Not the specific comment – the pattern. The way something can happen once, then twice, then regularly, and somewhere along the way it stops being an exception and becomes just how things are. We don’t consciously decide to accept it. We just… stop noticing.
There’s a name for this: the normalisation of deviance.
It comes from Diane Vaughan‘s analysis of the Challenger disaster. NASA engineers knew the O-rings were problematic. They had seen warning signs before. But each time a shuttle launched successfully despite the issue, the deviation became a little more acceptable. The boundary of what counted as ‘safe enough’ quietly shifted. Eventually, what started as a known risk became treated as routine.
Until it wasn’t.
This isn’t just about engineering disasters or catastrophic failures. It’s about how any system – organisational, social, personal – can drift away from its stated values through the accumulation of small exceptions.
The shortcut that saved time becomes standard practice. The difficult conversation avoided becomes a pattern of silence. The behaviour tolerated ‘just this once’ becomes the culture. And because nothing visibly breaks in the moment, we take each successful repetition as evidence that it’s fine.
If you’ve come across the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, this dynamic will sound familiar. In his writing on systemic fragility and fat-tailed risk, he describes how systems can appear stable while quietly accumulating hidden exposure. A trader makes a series of risky bets and each one pays off. They interpret this as skill – confirmation that they’re doing something right. But what they’re actually doing is loading risk into the tail, storing up exposure to a catastrophic event that simply hasn’t happened yet.
Absence of failure is not the same as presence of safety.
The same dynamic shows up in the normalisation of deviance. Each successful repetition reinforces the deviation. The boundary moves incrementally. And because the immediate rewards are real – faster, easier, less friction – the system quietly and gladly adapts to the new baseline.
The really insidious part is that you can’t see it from inside. That’s the nature of normalisation – the baseline shifts so gradually that you don’t notice it happening. What was once exceptional becomes routine, then invisible. And because you’re often being rewarded in the short term, there’s no signal telling you to stop.
So how do you recognise when you’re inside this dynamic? I’m not sure I have answers here, but maybe some questions you can ask:
- What small victories am I celebrating that might actually be risk accumulating?
- Where have I stopped feeling uncomfortable about something that used to bother me?
- What shortcut have I taken so many times it no longer feels like a shortcut?
- What behaviour do we tolerate from high performers that we wouldn’t accept from others?
- What’s the thing we now do routinely that, if described to someone new, would sound problematic?
You could sum it up with – ‘what’s the conversation we keep not having?’.
These aren’t comfortable questions. And if you start asking them out loud, expect resistance, because systems have immune responses. I wrote in an earlier post about how social systems protect themselves – they detect disruption and move to restore equilibrium. If you start pointing out normalised deviations, you become the disruption. The thing that needs managing.
You’ll hear:
- ‘You’re being oversensitive.’
- ‘We’ve always done it this way and it’s been fine.’
- ‘Don’t make a big deal out of nothing.’
- ‘Why are you suddenly so difficult about this?’
Because naming the drift threatens the comfort of not having to see it. And that makes you the source of friction, not the thing you’re pointing to.
This is part of what makes the normalisation of deviance so difficult to confront. By the time you know for certain that the deviation mattered, it’s usually because something has already gone wrong.
So perhaps the real question isn’t ‘how do we prevent it?’. Maybe it’s more like ‘How do we stay uncomfortable enough to notice when it’s happening?’
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