A cultural norm is an unwritten rule with plausible deniability Press enter or click to view image in full size Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash The speech came during onboarding. Our VP of People — the title had recently changed from HR, which was apparently important — stood in front of twenty-three new hires and said the company believed in outcomes over activity. Said the old way of measuring work by time in seat was outdated. Said what mattered here was delivery, impact, the quality of the thinking you brought to the problem. Said nobody was going to watch the clock. I wrote this down. I was genuinely excited. I had come from a place where the expectation was visibility — early arrival noticed, late departure noted, presence in the building treated as evidence of commitment regardless of what the presence was actually producing. The idea of being measured on output felt like a correction of something that had always been slightly wrong. I believed the speech completely. This was month one.…