Normalizing — friend or foe?

One of the most powerful — and, in my opinion, most dangerous — words to emerge from the Covid chapter is normalize. We spoke of the new normal. We adjusted. We adapted. We moved on.

That's good. But did we move on well?

Normalize used to mean bringing something into conformity with an established standard. You took the outlier and brought it back into line.

What it seems to mean now is something far more unsettling: we change the standard to accommodate the outlier.

We don't course-correct — we redefine the course.

That subtle shift in meaning? It's worth pausing on. Because the same thing that happened to the word is quietly happening inside many of us — and inside the teams and organisations we lead.

The Quiet Rewiring

Normalization doesn't announce itself. There's no dramatic moment of compromise, no line clearly crossed. It's far quieter than that. It's the meeting that runs over every week until no one schedules recovery time anymore, and accept it as normal. It's the sharp remark that goes unchallenged until sharp becomes the culture. It's the ethical shortcut that gets taken once, then twice — and then stops feeling like a shortcut at all. "It's just how we do things around here." (Reminds me of that quip, "when all else fails, lower the exp[ectation"!)

In our personal lives, it's the habits or choices we make on a daily basis and allowed the lines to get blurred when it comes to values and goals. What we would never tolerate before, gradually, we've allowed into our lives.

What you repeatedly expose yourself to, you eventually stop noticing.

Neuroscience confirms this — the brain is a pattern machine. It files the familiar as safe and

stops raising flags. What once triggered a pause, a question, even a moment of discomfort, gets quietly categorised as normal. Your internal alarm system doesn't break. It recalibrates — to a lower standard. And the danger? You don't feel yourself drift. The compass still feels like it's pointing north. It's just that north has quietly moved.

In my recent repatriation to the country of my birth, South Africa, I've been very aware of how the "how we do life" is so very different from my norm of living in the USA for so long. Not all of it is bad. A lot of it is part of essential survival through decades of strife and economic struggle as the country moves through the adjustment to its own new normal. It's not there yet. That's not the point. You can't just impose American (aka ""first world") thinking or standards into every situation. It's just that the problem is we don't pause and push back when necessary and question what we're tolerating or just living with because we've stopped noticing.

The danger of any normalization of society, business, or faith practices is that we no longer ask if this is what really want or should accept.

The compass still feels like it's pointing north. It's just that north has quietly moved.

The prophet Isaiah saw this dynamic clearly in his own generation: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness." — Isaiah 5:20

He wasn't describing people who consciously chose wrong. He was describing people who had gradually redefined the categories. The standard itself had shifted. Jeremiah goes further — "They do not even know how to blush." (Jer. 6:15) The discomfort was gone. The drift had become the new normal.

A simpler illustration of this:

A young woman is preparing a roast and, just like her mother taught her, she cuts off the end before putting it in the pan. Curious, she asks her mother why they do this. Her mother replies, “That’s just how my mother always did it.”

So the young woman goes to her grandmother and asks the same question. The grandmother gives the same answer: “It’s how I was taught.”

Finally, she asks her great-grandmother. The older woman laughs and says, “Oh, that? My roasting pan was too small, so I had to cut the end off to make it fit.”

And just like that, a practical workaround became a generational “rule”—long after the original reason no longer applied.

The wake up call: We often inherit habits, systems, and beliefs without questioning their origin. What once solved a real constraint can quietly become unnecessary limitation.

Post Covid - what new norms did we adopt that no longer make sense? (social distancing) And what did we adopt that are actually improvements to the way of life? (hand washing)

The easiest way to become aware of these questions is to simply ask, "Why do I do that?" and get honest with yourself in your answers. It is so easy confuse tradition with truth—and how important it is to revisit the “why” behind what we do.

Incrementalism — Normalization's Close Cousin

There's a concept worth naming here: incrementalism. In socio-economic thinking, it describes how systems change — not through dramatic revolution, but through small, successive steps. Each one reasonable enough on its own.

Your own drift works exactly the same way.

No single decision takes you far off course. But a series of small adjustments — each one normalized, each one justified in the moment — can move you a significant distance from where you intended to be. The lines don't disappear. They just get blurry.

You look around one day and the culture you're leading doesn't quite reflect the values in your leadership philosophy. Or one day you realize your life is not what you wanted it to be.

The gap didn't open overnight. It opened one small concession at a time.

"There is a way that appears right to a man, but its end is the way of death." — Proverbs 14:12

It doesn't say the way is right. It says it appears right. From the inside. To the person walking it.

What Are You Normalizing?

This is the question worth sitting with — honestly, and regularly.

Not "Am I a person of integrity?" 

Most would answer yes without hesitation.

The better question is: What have I stopped questioning that I should still be questioning?

• The relentless pace that leaves no room for depth, reflection, or God?

• The transactional relationships being passed off as connection?

• The half-truths in your communication because full transparency feels too costly?

• The results-at-all-costs pressure quietly eroding human dignity on your team?

• The personal habits — rest, honesty, prayer, self-awareness — that got quietly deprioritized this season?

None of these feel like major failures in the moment.

That's exactly the point. Incrementally, we compromise until we think it’s normal.

The Recalibration

The antidote to normalization isn't a dramatic reset. It's intentional friction — pausing long enough to ask whether what feels normal is actually still right.

It means returning, regularly, to your anchors. Your values. Your stated commitments. The kind of leader you decided to be before the pressure set in.

It means having people in your life who are allowed to say, “You’ve drifted." Or “That’s not OK, nor should it be.”

And it means taking seriously that leaders set the baseline for what becomes normal. What you tolerate, model, reward, and ignore — that becomes the definition of acceptable. For your team, and eventually, for yourself.

True values don't shift. Courage, honesty, dignity, accountability, compassion — these aren't negotiable depending on the season. But our proximity to them can drift, one incremental normalization at a time.

The question isn't whether you've drifted. Most of us have, somewhere.

The question is whether you're honest enough — and brave enough — to look.

Where has your "normal" quietly shifted — and what would it take to bring it back into alignment with who you actually want to be?