One thing I’ve always found fascinating is how much discussion a thermostat can create.
Walk into almost any office and, sooner or later, someone will mention the temperature. Someone is too warm. Someone else is freezing. A jacket appears from the back of a chair. Somebody jokes that they should have brought a blanket. The thermostat gets adjusted, only to be adjusted back an hour later.
It feels like one of those harmless office debates that never really gets resolved.
Then I came across something I hadn’t thought about before.
Many office temperature recommendations can be traced back to thermal comfort models developed in the 1960s. Those models relied on the best data available at the time, which happened to be based on the metabolic rate of the average man.
There wasn’t anything malicious about that decision, as it reflected the information people had available. And I don’t want to start a polemic around the gender angle, just to observe that a default can outlive the assumptions that created it.
What fascinated me wasn’t how the standard started.
It was how the assumption survived.
Over time, the original calculation faded into the background. People no longer experienced it as a calculation. They experienced it as room temperature.
That’s what surprised me. How a reasonable assumption became the environment everyone was expected to adapt to.
When defaults stop looking like decisions
The more I thought about it, the less it felt like a story about heating and air conditioning.
It started reminding me of organizations.
Every transformation makes hundreds of decisions. Some take weeks of discussion. Others happen in a few minutes because someone has to keep the project moving. A workflow is designed. An approval path is chosen. Training is organized a certain way. A report is built around the information people believe they’ll need.
None of those decisions are inherently right or wrong. Most are perfectly reasonable given what the team knows at the time.
Then something interesting happens: the decision slowly disappears.
A year later, nobody remembers debating it. People don’t experience it as someone’s choice anymore. They simply experience it as “the way we work.”
I’ve started thinking if that’s how most organizational defaults are born.
Through reasonable decisions that outlive the circumstances that made them reasonable, and not through a grand strategy that we like to show on our project launch.
What if the most influential changes in an organization are the ones nobody experiences as change anymore? They just experience them as normal.
The invisible work of adapting
Most people don’t spend their day questioning those defaults.
They adapt to them.
Someone keeps a spreadsheet because it’s quicker than finding the report they need. Another team creates a side conversation because the official communication never quite answers the questions they’re actually asking. Someone learns which approval path is technically correct and which one actually gets the work done.
After a while, those adjustments stop feeling like workarounds. They’re now part of the environment.
For years, I thought workarounds were something organizations should eliminate. But maybe they’re one of the richest sources of information we have.
Every workaround tells us where the designed process met everyday reality.
Maybe we should see them as clues, rather than inefficiencies.
A different way to look at resistance
In change management, we often ask why people resist change.
Sometimes that’s exactly the right question.
Other times, I wonder if we’re looking at people who have simply become very good at adapting. And have now stalled due to overload?
They’ve adapted to systems that require one extra click. They’ve adapted to approval paths that no longer make sense. They’ve adapted to competing priorities, legacy processes, and assumptions that were perfectly reasonable when they were made, but have become today’s defaults.
When another transformation arrives, it doesn’t land on a blank canvas. It lands on years of invisible adaptation.
Perhaps that’s why implementation plans often look simpler than implementation feels.
One last thought
The office thermostat just happens to make one default easy to notice.
You can feel it the moment you walk into the room.
Most organizational defaults are quieter than that. They’ve been around for so long that they no longer feel like someone’s decision. They simply feel like reality.
Which makes me wonder how many of the things we call “the way we work” are really just yesterday’s assumptions that nobody has thought to revisit.
The office thermostat is probably the least interesting default in the building. Unless you constantly have to wear a sweater.
About The Shift Series
Shift Happens is a series exploring how organizations can turn disruption into direction. We write about the real, human side of work, where change, technology, behavior, and leadership collide in ways no framework fully captures.
Every article follows one of the five currents that shape modern work:
The Human Side of Transformation, the heartbeat beneath the strategy.
Change Management as the Missing Discipline, the discipline hiding in plain sight, quietly determining who succeeds.
Technology, Tools + Human Behavior, the space where logic meets instinct, and where most rollouts live or die.
Organizational Structure, Power & Governance, the lines, ladders, and tensions that decide how work truly flows.
Leadership Micro-Shifts, Governance & Operating Models, the small shifts that create disproportionate impact.
We combine lived experience with practical insight. The kind you can apply the same day, not someday.
Shift happens! But with the right mindset, it happens through you.
If your organization is navigating a shift in technology, structure, or culture and needs practical, human-centered support, reach out.
This is the work we love! And the work we do best.
