Default Defense

The social, organizational and cultural structures that turn design choices into invisible and inviolable "common sense"

Defaults are fascinating. And insidious. Today’s substack is a deep dive into the specific social and economic forces that have brought us to a time where they are significantly more prevalent at the same time that they are significantly harder to detect.

I normally start with writing…but today I’m going to start with promises, because this is a looooong one and I recognize the cognitive load I’m asking you to take on.

If you stay with me, I’m going to give you the language for what you’ve been feeling, the “it’s maybe not quite broken, but it’s definitely not working” fog and help you see why it’s not a personal weakness. You’ll walk away with a way to understand your own credibility in a system where “professionalism” is used to shut down truth. You’ll know the difference between a real constraint and something you can redesign. If you’re neurodivergent, or love someone who is, this will make a lot of your/their career make sense. You’ll understand how we got here, why it “suddenly” feels so bad, and what it looks like to keep your organizations from outsourcing their values and retake control over the decisions that are made at work. And you’ll be able to see what’s at stake as AI starts drafting our policies, performance language, and “best practices” for us: not just efficiency, but whether design choices get further hidden and solidified as truth without anyone’s permission.

The cost of NOT seeing these defaults isn’t confusion, it’s the erosion, the slow collapse, of trust, meaning, and self-belief. For leaders, the cost is transformation efforts that continue to lose momentum, decisions made in your name without your knowledge, and visions that never lead anywhere at all.

Mini Recap of My Journey

The first glimpse I had of defaults, as an embodied understanding long before my brain identified a name for them, wasn’t at work. It was at school. Specifically my son’s school. My son has Fragile X Syndrome (yeah you’ll probably have to google it, this essay is long enough). He was trying to exist inside a system built like a fluorescent-lit obstacle course. Schools are loud, rigid, evaluative, “standardized” for imaginary standard humans, weirdly proud of their own discomfort. The environment demands adaptation, contortions to get through the day and for those who aren’t quite twisty enough, well they get identified as a problem to solve. They don’t get treated as people in a mismatch, they get treated AS the mismatch.

IEP meetings are basically a crash course in how power hides. Everything is framed as “support” but the baseline assumption is the same: the system is fine, everything that needs changed is a favor to help your child who is the deviation. The accommodations are the exceptions you have to justify. That’s what defaults do when they’re fully integrated and naturalized: they stop looking like design and start looking like “reality” and “common sense.”

Once you’ve seen it in one place, you start noticing it everywhere. Corporate life has its own version of standardization. We call it “professionalism,” “executive presence,” “being strategic.” Communication norms, pace, meeting culture, unspoken rules about tone and presence are all treated as neutral, universal design and any “non-standard” needs get labeled as deviant or difficult. The system doesn’t have to defend itself, it just has to make “different” sound like “wrong.”

The Choice You Didn’t Know You Had

Defaults don’t just shape behavior, they shape what we’re allowed to call true. Somewhere in your organization is a setting you didn’t know existed.

Not a value or a strategy. Not a big, dramatic “we decided this at an offsite in Peru” kind of choice. A setting.

The kind you only notice when something feels….off. Like when your phone starts autocorrecting “fur” into “fir” as if you’re obsessed with deciduous trees and not talking about how much of a mess brushing your dog made. Or when your car’s lane assist runs up against a repaving project that has new paint layered over old and beeps at you while making the wheel feel like it’s trying to tug you over into a merger with the neighboring vehicle. You didn’t choose it. You don’t remember agreeing to it. You don’t even know where the menu is to change it. But you’re living with it.

That’s what defaults are like. They don’t announce themselves. They’re usually not even as obvious as the lane assist example. There isn’t a pros and cons list. They’re just the background conditions everyone has learned to navigate. Like weather. You don’t debate with weather, you dress for it. You complain about it, you build your day around it, but you don’t question its existence. It just is. A solid, dependable fact of the universe.

Lately defaults have become every closer to weather in our perception and further away from things like the lane assist that we might actually think to try to calibrate. They’re harder to see, harder to name, harder to even understand as chosen.

Why? It would be easy to say we all stopped thinking, got intellectually lazier, too busy, too tired, too overwhelmed by dashboards and Slack channels. But that’s not it. Defaults are harder to see because the decision points are increasingly buried inside black boxes we don’t see the inner workings of.

That black box part matters. That’s the part that steals the memory that this was ever a choice, and once choice disappears so does permission to change it. A default takes on the aura of untouchable fact of life when nobody can point to a human being and say “that was a choice you made.”

Humans adore plausible deniability….almost as much as we like snacks and videos of kittens. Humans are tired, overwhelmed and generally risk averse. And when a decision is buried in a vendor configuration, a benchmark touted by a consulting agency, an “industry standard,” or a policy we inherited from the prior leadership team, it becomes very easy to shrug and just call it reality.

No villain. No author. No accountability. Just…..weather.

When Defaults Recruit Their Own Enforcers

Here’s where it gets particularly nasty. Once a default has been naturalized….absorbed into “how things work”….questioning it isn’t treated as insight. It’s treated as immaturity.

The system doesn’t have to defend itself on the merits. It just has to downgrade the credibility of the person who is willing to name the problems. The conversation shifts from “is this system aligned with our stated values?” to “do you even belong in this conversation?”

That move devastates trust because it turns what should be a design question into a status contest. The person is forced to either back down or assimilate (okay, sure, I see, it’s just business.), or they can keep pushing and then they end up labeled difficult, unrealistic, or not leadership material. Either way, the default wins, and people quickly learn “don’t name what you see unless you’re prepared to carry the social cost of seeing it.”

That’s the silencing mechanism. No overt punishment. Plausible deniability wrapped in “professionalism” wrapped in a suit and an MBA. A soft, respectable way to tell someone “your clarity is inconvenient.”

The Neurodivergent Tax

I almost hesitated to include the section both because this is incredibly long, and also because it prompts immediate defensiveness amongst some of those who most need to understand this. So if you saw this an immediately rolled your eyes, sorry, I’m not the problem here.

If you’re neurodivergent, that “soft, respectable” enforcement doesn’t just feel like a cultural annoyance. I slightly itchy tag on a sweater than you can eventually mostly ignore. It feels like a wool sweater you’re allergic to that’s turning your entire torso into a fiery, itchy rash. But you don’t know you’re allergic or why you’re itchy. It’s a system that is constantly grading you on rules you were never given.

This is where the default story stops being abstract and becomes painfully literal. That same mechanism I described above, where defaults recruit social enforcement, lines up uncannily with what many neurodivergent people describe as masking or camouflaging at work. The daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, meeting-by-meeting, dreaded small talk need to suppress natural traits to be perceived as competent, safe, “easy,” and leadership-ready.

Tone. Eye-contact. Responsiveness. Facial expression. Small talk. The speed at which you reply. The way you structure an idea out loud. The amount of context you give. The amount you hold back. The number of exclamation points you add to prove you’re friendly, and the number you remove to prove you’re serious.

It may be labeled “professionalism” but in practice it’s just a whole slew of neurotypical defaults that never actually got labeled that way. And because they aren’t labeled and they’re accepted as “normal” the cost of maintaining them is individualized. If you can’t perform them naturally enough to pass, the system doesn’t say “oh, perhaps our norms are narrow.” The system says “you lack polish,” “you’re not strategic,” “you’re too intense,” “you’re too blunt,” “you’re not a culture fit,” and that vague damning statement “you don’t have executive presence.”

Lovely, plausible deniability ways of keeping the criticizer comfortable while saying “your way of being a person is inconvenient to our operating system.”

So our neurodivergent colleagues get two jobs. Their actual job. And the job of constantly translating themselves into the default. Smoothing edges, softening truths, performing approachability, calibrating intensity, managing sensory load, navigating rejection sensitivity, and recovering from the sheer cognitive effort of doing all of that while also being competent at their assigned job.

Based on what I disclosed about my son you probably knew immediately why this work mattered to me. But the second reason it matters, and the reason it’s included in here is because there’s a particularly cruel connection between neurodivergence and defaults.

The people who are best equipped to see defaults as constructed rather than natural are the same people most likely to be penalized for pointing at them. The people who notice that the stated value is collaboration but the reward system is individual, that the organization says “speak up” but punishes the WAY people speak. Those who notice when “psychological safety” is being used like a scented candle instead of a design principle.

All the social reinforcement we talked about above, piled on to someone who is already navigating the need to mask constantly. Now they’re not just masking traits. They’re masking perception, clarity and the part of them that screams “this doesn’t make sense” while knowing that raising their hand to ask a clarifying question will prompt an immediate eye-roll and knowing glances amongst the leadership who seem to be saying out loud “ugh, they always have to be the difficult one.”

Quick Recap: The Social Machinery of Defaults

Okay let’s pause for a second and process because your brain deserves a bit of time to chew on that.

Here’s what we know so far: Defaults are design choices that melt into the background, settings nobody remembers were a choice in the first place. Just weather to dress for, not anything you feel like you can change.

Defaults are harder to see now because decision points are buried in black boxes. Vendor configurations, industry standards, policies we inherited, code we can’t read and that makes them feel even more untouchable.

Once a default gets naturalized it recruits social reinforcement. This social reinforcement is particularly brutal for neurodivergent people, who are both more likely to see the default and also more likely to pay a high price socially for pointing it out.

That’s the social machinery. But that’s far from the only trick that makes defaults stick. They stick because we’ve built structural forces that make them feel inevitable. That’s what we will talk about next.

Structural Glue That Makes Defaults Extra Sticky

Defaults don’t just survive through social pressure. They survive because we’ve built an entire architecture around them that makes questioning them look irresponsible. It’s not that these forces are new, it’s that we’ve reached a tipping point where the social, organizational and cultural forces have converged. These aren’t abstract forces, they are concrete operational choices that get layered on top of each other until they form something that feels like bedrock. Like a natural law of physics. Like “just how business works.”

The Metric Spell

At some point we stopped treating measurement as a tool and started treating it as an authority. We ALL know the maxim “what gets measured gets managed. What gets managed gets rewarded.” The fascinating thing about metrics though is that they don’t just describe reality, they edit it. It was that discovery that had me diving gleefully down the rabbit hole of people analytics for a few years.

The minute you choose a metric, you choose a definition of success. The minute you build a dashboard, you solidify a theory of what matters. The minute you adopt a performance rating scale, you choose a philosophy of human worth at work. Those are worldview-level decision, but they’re presented as operational…..and all too often adopted with far less scrutiny than they deserve. This is where best practices and benchmarks and templates are little default petri dishes. But because metrics feel objective, those worldview decisions don’t even register on most people’s radar. And they very quickly stop reading as anyone’s “choice” and adopt a costume of “the truth.” Dashboards, ratings, numbers that teach people day by day what to take seriously.

You say “we value collaboration.” You include it in your job descriptions, you talk about it in town halls, you brag about it in Forbes. But you measure individual output. Then you reward people with the highest personal numbers. Then you find yourself surprised when collaboration becomes a decorative nice-to-have but not at all what happens when things are tense or stressed. Nobody lied. Nobody held an evil meeting. The measurement just taught people what they needed to do to be rewarded.

This is how values die in perfectly reasonable ways. They don’t get attacked. They get outvoted by the mundane, the measurable, the things that fit cleanly into a cell in spreadsheet. The things we have an industry standard formula to calculate.

The Meta-Metrics

Here’s where it gets particularly sneaky. There’s a specific set of metrics that have become a meta-default….that is, a default about what even counts as legitimate work in the first place. Revenue per employee, labor cost as a percentage of revenue, output per hour, utilization rates….these efficiency metrics promise to show who’s being “responsible” with resources and “disciplined” with headcount.

But these metrics that define what work counts are a large part of the reason that work to notice defaults has become even harder to do. Once these numbers become the scoreboard, they’ve redefined what work is real. Time spent closing tickets, shipping features, or generating revenue shows up as productivity. Time spent rethinking a brittle approval path, redesigning a performance framework, or questioning whether a metric is undermining a core value shows up as overhead, but the payoff may never appear in an attributable way on a dashboard at all. Compound that with the fact that those payroll dollars will inevitably hit operating expenses and impact EBITDA and it becomes extremely obvious why this work isn’t talked about.

Inside that world “do more with less” stops being a slogan and becomes a full on epistemic framework. The work that improves the efficiency metrics is treated as real. The work that questions the defaults underneath those inputs, that focuses on long-term stability instead of short-term quarterly growth is treated as optional, risky, or indulgent……or in modern parlance, wasteful.

This is why default redesign never makes it onto a priority list. The very metrics leaders rely on to prove they’re responsible and to justify their bonuses, are the same metrics that make it look irresponsible to pause and invest in changing the systems…..even when those systems are making choices in their name and even when those systems often get in the way of extremely expensive transformation projects.

Automation and Black Boxes

A lot of defaults shaping organizational life are now embedded in technology. Scheduling, work allocation, performance flags, eligibility logic, workflow nudges, approval hierarchies, hiring filters, productivity scoring….these are not neutral pipes though. They encode a worldview just like the metric choices.

When a policy lives in a binder its a bit easier to argue with. When it lives in code, you may not even know WHY you’re required to do something, and changing it feels significantly more difficult. Even when you know it exists, you may not be able to see how it works so you feel the consequences, without being able to locate the logic.

Now you have a new kind of authority deferral. “It’s not me, it’s the system” becomes both a shield and a confession. Platforms feel inevitable, tools feel neutral, and the defaults embedded in them have a much easier time masquerading as reality.

You can negotiate with a policy, even if it eats up social capital. You can’t negotiate with a black box. (Side note, if you’re looking for a fantastic, incredibly dense but worth it, read, Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine is one to add to your list.)

Procurement as Philosophy: Defaults Arrive Pre-blessed as “Standard”

We import so much of our organizational life now. Tools, templates, best practices, vendor configurations, consultant frameworks, it’s endless. In doing so we import assumptions about people. Assumptions about what motivates them, what fairness means, what risk looks like, what performance is, what is good work. And we rarely notice it as ideology. It arrives wearing the package of convenience, efficiency…..as “not reinventing the wheel.” But industry standard is not neutral, it’s a worldview with a purchase order.

This is another way you get organizations who claim to value growth but run a performance system designed for risk control. You get cultures that claim to value psychological safety but operate through surveillance logic. You get leaders who sincerely want something better, but whose machinery teaches something else.

Your systems and processes are how you keep your promises. If you outsource your systems without interrogating the worldview they encode, you don’t just outsource work, you outsource your promises. And then you wonder why people don’t believe you when you talk. Why looking in the mirror feels vaguely dangerous. Why some mornings you have to sit in the parking lot in your car and give yourself a pep-talk to make it through your part of the town hall presentation. Why you feel like you’re required to choose between career progression and your own values. But that’s an article for a different day.

Speed Culture: Urgency Turns Defaults Into Survival Tools

If the first thought you had when you read the section above was, “oh my lord who has time for this?!” congratulations, you’ve already felt this next structural support that makes defaults sticky. When everything is urgent of course you use templates, rely on identified best practices, and cling to the familiar. Not because it’s better, but because it’s defensible. If you adopt the standard, you can always say “it’s what everyone does.” Pretty much the organizational version of hiding behind your more outgoing friend at a party.

Questioning defaults slows things down. It adds friction. As previously noted, it takes time, effort, energy and attention away from work that “counts.” If you’ve managed to survive your time in corporate culture without once being told “we are building the plane while we’re flying it” then congratulations you might have found a true unicorn amongst all the horses with carrots strapped on their heads.

The Broader Cultural Forces

We just covered some of the individual organizational forces that keep defaults hidden while making us less likely to ever do the work to notice that they exist or dig them out.

But there are also so forces at work in our larger culture that have made the problem significantly worse as well. In this essay I’m going to specifically focus on those related to education because they are the forces that have made this work more difficult for us to see. There are multiple financial and political forces that reinforce the social and organizational trends I noted above, but even my brain is ready to tip over and sleep so I’m going to save them. Just keep it in the back of your mind that this is far from all.

The ROI Reflex

The first of the cultural shifts that has actively undermined our ability to see defaults in the first place is that we have increasingly taught people to think of everything, including education, as an investment calculation.

Over the past forty to fifty years, the way higher education is structured and financed shifted so that college is treated less like a public investment and more like a personal financial product that individuals are expected to buy on credit. If you’re under the age of 50, chances are student loans were just part of the deal for education, the concept of being able to work while you went to school and just pay for everything might be something your parents talked about, but the cost of education was well out of reach for that to be a reality by the time you went to college. Let’s walk you through the history a bit.

As higher education became more common, employers started requiring degrees, even for jobs that hadn’t fundamentally changed, turning credentials into mandatory gate passes. Concurrently, governments and institutions shifted more and more of the costs on to individuals, who borrowed heavily to pay for what was now being framed as a personal investment in future earnings.

The result? Education stops being about learning to think and starts being about calculating returns. Students carrying tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt don’t have the luxury of asking “what should I study to understand the world?” They ask, “what will pay off these loans the fastest?” When your economic survival depends on that degree “working,” you don’t question whether the system makes sense, you optimize within it.

Okay great, but what does that have to do with defaults being harder to see? The fields that explicitly teach people to recognize frames AS frames, to question what counts as “natural” or “true,” to spot hidden assumptions….fields like philosophy, critical theory, history, the humanities, get labelled as “bad ROI.” As impractical. As luxuries you can’t afford when you’re going to be carrying debt to pay for that education. You’ve definitely heard jokes about people with liberal arts degrees flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Those jokes are the evidence of these ideas as core level “common sense.”

So the exact disciplines that train the capacity to notice defaults get systematically devalued and deprioritized. Students are nudged away from them. Institutions cut or shrink these programs. Additionally students become increasingly focused on courses only within their specific domain. Cross-domain learning also shrinks. The cultural message is clear: learning to see systems doesn’t matter. Learning to question frameworks is self-indulgent. Ivory tower nonsense not for people who have to operate in “the real world.” The “smart” choice is to accept the categories the market currently rewards and train yourself to fit them. Leave the rest for the impractical people with their head in the clouds.

Once you’re trained into that posture, once you’re managing yourself and your education like a portfolio, treating every choice as an investment decision, calculating risk and return on everything from what you major in to when and if you rest, you stop asking “does this frame make sense” and you ask “how do I win within the frame?”

That’s one of the most powerful default-blinding forces we experience. A default doesn’t HAVE to be hidden if you’re already oriented towards compliance. If you’re already living and thinking inside a logical world where success is “making smart investments and minimizing risk,” then challenging the frame is difficult to view as anything other than naive. Questioning the system starts to sound like refusing to be a functional adult.

You see it everywhere in how we talk about work. Saying “I want work that feels aligned and humane” seems like childish rebellion. People don’t say “this policy undermines trust” they say “how do we realistically manage the messaging?” The don’t say “our design causes harm” they say “that’s just business.”

It’s tempting to think it’s just because humans are cold and selfish creatures. But that’s simply not true. Humans have to cut off their own humanity to survive in these systems. We see it in the burnout and the breakdowns. It’s because the FRAME is incredibly strong, and it got strong partly because we made the disciplines that teach you how to see them and think about them economically dangerous to pursue.

Once you’ve internalized investment logic, you begin to experience values as optional add-ons. Nice to have when things are going right, luxuries to cut back on when the numbers get tight. And that capacity to step back and pause, to say “wait, who decided we’d measure it this way?” or “what assumptions are baked into this policy?” starts to feel inefficient, effort you can’t afford - both financially and in terms of your credibility in a room full of people who’ve also learned to call questioning “impractical.”

It’s zero surprise that employees react with cynicism when we talk about purpose and our mission. You can’t run a moral story on top of an ROI-driven system without it glitching. People feel the contradiction.

The Credential Trap

Degree inflation is where the ROI trap and organizational defaults lock together into a particularly vicious partnership.

Watch the progression. A credential becomes a proxy for competence > the proxy becomes a requirement because it’s a convenient screening tool > people stop questioning whether the requirement is REAL. Suddenly the degree isn’t just a piece of paper, it’s legitimacy. Proof you belong and a mandatory ticket to get through the gate.

The tricky part is how quickly this gets narrated as “raising standards” even when the actual work hasn’t fundamentally changed. We’ve seen this in our lifetimes. In the 90’s and early 2000’s middle-skill jobs (supervisors, technicians, administrative roles) started requiring bachelor’s degrees in job postings even though the majority of the people already doing the jobs successfully didn’t have degrees. It also happened for roles that already required a bachelor’s degree. Pharmacists required a doctoral level degree rather than a bachelor’s, physical therapists are another example. The credential requirement grew while the complexity of the work really didn’t.

Why do employers do it? It’s a cheap, fairly defensible screening mechanism. They offload training costs on to individuals and schools. The can assume candidates already have self-funded a baseline of skills. It’s efficient and the costs are exported to the worker which means that it’s not hitting the bottom line of the organization.

So now you have a system where degrees are mandatory to be considered for roles that didn’t used to require them, degrees are expensive and funded primarily by individuals, the degree must be financed with loans, and those loans mean education decisions are logically based on salary projections.

Using degrees as a proxy for skill is not neutral. It is easier if you have stability, family support, insider knowledge on how to navigate higher ed without falling into predatory programs. When a degree becomes the default filter for roles that could be learned through training or apprenticeship it’s not just an HR preference, it’s a design decision about who gets to participate in middle-class work.

And over time that design decision gets absorbed into “common sense” and exported everywhere. Talent pipelines are sorted by credentials, leadership readiness assessments include credentials, access is sorted by credentials. We stop asking “what conditions help people do great work?” and start asking, “who has the right ticket?” Side note, this is coming back to bite us right now because the skills that are required right now aren’t yet being taught in schools, and because organizations have abdicated their responsibility for measuring things like curiosity and learning agility, they’re poorly positioned to even know who in the organization can and should be trained.

There’s one final little loop here. The people most harmed by the system, those who can’t afford the credential or took on debt for it and now feel trapped by repayment, are the least positioned to question it. Outsiders, people new to a system are the most likely to ask “why” questions, but because credentials serve as a proxy for credibility, those questions from those without credentials or lower credentials are more likely to be dismissed as that person not understanding “how the world works.” And goodness knows those people can’t question the need for a credential in the first place, that just looks like making excuses for not having one.

So credentialism doesn’t just gatekeep opportunity, it gatekeeps the ability to even question the gate.

Legitimacy Laundering: When Repetition Turns a Worldview into “Common Sense”

This is the big one. Context-bound, contested ideas….theories….get repeated by someone important enough or in the right institutions and they harden into “how the world works.” Normative choices become managerial physics and once that frame is canonized disagreement stops looking like an alternative hypothesis and starts looking like ignorance and incompetence.

Let me show you how this works with a specific example that has shaped decades of organizational life: Milton Friedman’s shareholder primacy doctrine. In 1970, Friedman wrote that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, but he explicitly conditioned this on firms obeying "the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom." He was writing into a world with stronger unions, more progressive taxation, robust antitrust enforcement, and tighter regulation.

That context matters because it shows why his ideas weren’t immediately proven flawed.

Business schools took Friedman’s context-dependent argument and every person who took any business course learned that the only reponsibility of business is to increase its profits. Full stop. The conditionality disappeared. The historical moment vanished. MBA programs canonized “maximize shareholder value” as the core purpose of the firm—not as one theory among many, but as the baseline against which everything else had to justify itself.

Students learned it in week one of corporate finance. It showed up in strategy frameworks. It became the lens through which “good management” was defined. And because it was taught as foundational truth rather than as a contestable hypothesis from a specific moment in time, it stopped feeling like a choice.

Meanwhile, the world Friedman was writing into got dismantled. Unions weakened. Progressive taxation eroded. Regulations were stripped back. The safety net frayed. Corporate political power grew. All the things that made his narrow corporate focus “work” in 1970 were methodically removed—often by people citing Friedman as justification.

So you ended up with a framework designed for a world with strong external constraints, now operating in a world where those constraints had been gutted. And instead of updating the theory when the conditions changed, business education doubled down. Shareholder primacy became more entrenched, not less. Jack Welch turned it into a playbook. Business schools kept teaching it. Consultants spread it. It became “how the world works.” Indoctrination so strong that it resists even catastrophic evidence to the contrary. More like a cult than science at this point.

Want evidence? When the 2008 financial crisis revealed the disastrous consequences of that framework, when taxpayers had to bail out firms that had been run exactly according to the “maximize shareholder value” gospel, the response wasn’t to question the doctrine. It was to treat the crisis as an unfortunate anomaly and go right back to teaching the same map.

Today, S&P 500 companies are setting all-time records for stock buybacks. Executive pay is still overwhelmingly tied to short-term stock performance. Business schools are still centering shareholder value in their curricula, with stakeholder approaches relegated to electives. The buybacks that divert money from wages, R&D, and resilience into engineered stock price support? Those get celebrated as “returning value to shareholders.” We’ve had over a million layoffs in the U.S. this year, often at companies posting record profits.

The doctrine that helped create the conditions for systemic collapse is still being taught as the responsible, adult way to run a company.

That’s legitimacy laundering. A context-bound idea from 1970 got repeated so many times, in so many prestigious places, that it stopped reading as “Friedman’s theory” and started reading as “how business works.” Questioning it doesn’t sound like intellectual inquiry. It sounds like you don’t understand capitalism.

That’s the trick. Legitimacy laundering doesn’t just make defaults invisible, it makes challenging them socially expensive. It turns critique into a credibility risk. This pattern is everywhere in corporate America. Performance management, hiring practices, organizational design….a decision gets made in a specific context, gets copied, gets taught, then it’s benchmarked and labelled “best practice” and somewhere in that repetition it stops being a choice and starts being common sense. Legitimacy, once established, is incredibly hard to dislodge….even when the outcomes are demonstrably harmful.

Why This Is Particularly Urgent

You knew we weren’t going to end 2025 without this circling around to AI. We’ve spent decades building systems that hide their authorship. And then we built a machine that is very, very good at making authored things sound like they are natural law.

LLMs don’t “think” their way out of frame, or notice the frame at all. They learn the frame by compressing patterns into human language and then giving those patterns right back to us with the kind of soothing confidence that makes it feel even more like an unquestionable reality.

Which means whatever has dominated the prior forty years of managerial writing and decision-making….ROI brain, metric worship, narrow ideas of value and productivity, “professionalism” as social policing, will tend to come back to us as the default continuation. Not because the model is evil, but because the model is obedient.

It’s a remix engine, autocomplete on steroids. It’s a reduction of our textual past, boiled down until it’s concentrated. And when you feed it a culture that has been training people to treat certain assumptions as maturity, it will soak up those assumptions, reproduce them, smooth them out and make them feel inevitable.

LLMs don’t have to be right, they just have to appear right. They have to be defensible.

The danger in that is that the smoother the output is, the harder it is to see the seams, the harder it is to pick apart. A human telling you “this is how business works” is much easier to argue with. AI won’t just obscure our defaults, it can turn inherited frameworks into polished “best practice” at scale and on demand.

That polish is so seductive too. Answers at the tips of our fingers, answers we are assured are the compilation of the best of human thinking. No need to question, no need to second guess or use our exhausted brains.

The model doesn’t just give you content, it gives you a feeling. “Someone competent has already sorted this for me.” The inherent problem is that it’s always wrong, but that it’s often plausible enough to lower your skepticism. If you already live in a culture that treats metrics as truth and professionalism as morality, then an AI system that speaks in polished, confident managerial dialect is going to feel like authority.

If AI becomes the first draft of your policies, your performance narratives, your competency models, your job descriptions, your training modules, your leadership messaging…then the organization’s operating system becomes even more likely to converge on the same polished, metric-friendly, defensible worldview.

And then it gets harder to tell where the organization ends and the template begins. Harder to tell which parts were deliberate. Harder to tell which parts are just the model handing you the past as “best practice.” Which means the social enforcement loop tightens: You aren't arguing with your manager's opinion anymore. You're arguing with the machine that sounds like the corporate universe.

So yes, this work is urgent now. Not because we're about to miss some shiny tech moment, but because we're about to further degrade our ability to tell the difference between a choice and a law of nature.

Okay, I Care….Why Should My Leader?

If you’ve ever been in an organization in the midst of a transformation initiative that started with energy and alignment only to watch it lose momentum and revert to “how we’ve always done things” you’ve felt defaults at work. Transformation initiatives cost a fortune and most of them fail.

Why? We usually blame it on the people. Defensiveness, lack of buy-in, lack of understanding, “resistance.” And that happens. But even when you have competent change management, even when the people are cared for, this work still gets stuck. It’s because the vision has to get translated through existing systems. The approval processes, metrics, performance templates, budget cycles, the everyday of how work gets done, and by the time the people doing the work are interacting with the vision, the vision has been reinterpreted back into something that works within the old patterns. After all, surely you didn’t mean collaboration that requires us to change our performance management system, or you would have told us to change our performance management system.

You think you have an execution problem or a communication problem, but you actually have a default problem. All of those systems are embedded with assumptions about what matters, what’s risky, what success looks like, who deserves resources, and who can speak up if something is going wrong. And unless you surface and redesign those assumptions, they will translate that lovely vision right back into whatever the system was originally optimized for.

This is why transformation efforts feel exhausting. It’s not just leading change, it’s fighting an invisible architecture that’s making thousands of micro-decisions against the stated direction every single day. Your approval process is still designed for control even though you said you wanted speed and innovation. Your performance management system is still optimized for payroll predictability even though you said you wanted growth. Your hiring rubric is still filtering for the same profile even though you’re trying to build diversity. Your metrics are still measuring and rewarding call length even though you’ve said you want to build customer relationships.

Because these systems are “the way it’s always been done” nobody thinks to flag them as a problem. The system gets to stay invisible while the transformation dies the death of a thousand translations. If leaders want their vision to survive contact with reality, they have to start caring about defaults. This isn’t soft culture work, it’s the infrastructure of execution. Your systems and processes are how you keep your promises and if you’ve outsourced them, you’ve outsourced your ability to lead.

What Do We Do With This?

A checklist can’t fix a world designed to hide its decision points, but I do think there are a few moves worth naming as acts of reclamation.

Begin to treat this is just how it works as a clue phrase. Not an accusation, a signal flare. A moment to pause and ask, what is being treated as natural here? Who benefits from it being treated as natural? What would it cost to admit this is a choice? What could we do if this was something we could change?

Build default literacy. Talk about the existence of defaults. Teach the ability to look at a system and see what it rewards, what it punishes, what it assumes about humans, what it makes easy and what it makes socially costly. Practice asking the question “If we didn’t choose this on purpose, why are we defending it so fiercely?” Be ready for this to be extremely hard, organizations are very practiced at avoiding that question.

It’s easier to talk about engagement than to admit we’ve designed systems that teach people not to trust. It’s easier to talk about resilience than to admit that for many people, work has become chronic threat exposure. It’s easier to demand adaptability than to ask whether the change itself is coherent, honest, or humane.

Going Forward

The work here is reclaiming authorship through mundane decisions. The unglamorous work of finding the settings menu. The courage to say out loud “this isn’t weather, this is a choice we’ve been living under.”

Once you acknowledge that it’s a choice, the question that becomes unavoidable is “what else have we been living under without our own consent?” Once you begin to ask that question, you start noticing all kinds of things you were trained to call normal. You start noticing where credibility gets assigned, who gets to be blunt and still be called decisive instead of abrasive, who gets to ask why and be labelled strategic instead of naive. Who gets to be different and still be considered leadership material, who gets supported vs who gets told to “level up.”

You’ll likely also stumble across the giant pool of grief roiling under the surface of this work. The grief of people who came into work wanting to do good work, to be useful, to build something, to belong….only to slowly learn that the operating system does not actually reward the values it advertises.

We’ve felt the turmoil of living in a system that rewards compliance, similarity, assimilation, the performance of being unbothered by things that should bother you. And when that’s the weather you can live inside it for a while. You can dress for it, make jokes about it, develop coping mechanisms. But at some point you either stop believing in the hype, or you stop believing in yourself.

This is so much more than “fixing culture.” It’s the infinitely harder and yet simpler work of deciding that in your organization, your sphere of influence, in the systems you touch, you’re going to be the author instead of the tenant. That you’re going to start treating “this is how it works” as a question instead of an answer. That you’re going to build and be part of organizations where the truth doesn’t cost people their credibility, their energy, their sense of self. Where people can do good work without having to become someone else to survive it. That’s what’s on the other side of this. Not perfection, not even ease.

The restoration of your relationship with truth, the small, daily practice of being able to name what you see without that voice in your head calculating the social cost. The freedom to say “this doesn’t make sense” and have it be treated as valuable data instead of a character flaw. The ability to look in the mirror and recognize yourself.

And maybe most importantly it’s the reclamation of human creativity and judgment. When you don’t have to spend all your energy optimizing within broken defaults or performing compliance in systems that don’t make sense, you get your brain back. You get to use it for the thing it’s actually good at: noticing patterns, making connections, imagining alternatives, building something new.

After decades of surviving inside systems that have asked us to choose between being honest and being safe, the possibility of building something that doesn’t require that is worth the work.