October 17: That’s Just What We Do
That's Just What We Do
There are certain things we do without ever really deciding to do them. They become part of how life works around us, absorbed so gradually that we may not even recognise them as cultural until we encounter somebody whose version of normal is different from our own. When that happens, something we have never previously thought to explain can suddenly become visible, and we realise that what felt completely ordinary to us was actually shaped by the community in which we learned it.
As we continue Honouring Our Communities and our week exploring The Things That Make Us, Us, today we are looking at those unwritten ways of doing things that rarely come with instructions. They are learned through being around other people and understanding, often without anyone explicitly telling us, what is expected in a particular situation. Eventually they become so familiar that the simplest explanation we can offer is often that this is just what we do.
Learning the rules nobody teaches us
Every community develops expectations about how people interact, but many of them are never formally explained. We learn them by observing what happens around us and noticing how other people respond, gradually developing an instinct for what feels appropriate within that environment.
Because this learning happens so naturally, it can be easy to assume that everybody shares the same understanding. We may not realise that something is specific to our own experience until another person responds differently, at which point both people can find themselves slightly confused by behaviour that made perfect sense from their own perspective.
These moments are interesting because neither person necessarily needs to be wrong. They may simply be working from different understandings of what is normal.
Culture influences those understandings in subtle ways, shaping how people interpret situations long before they consciously think about why. That can make cultural difference much more complex than the things we can easily see, because some of its strongest influences exist within assumptions we barely notice ourselves.
When different versions of normal meet
The possibility for misunderstanding becomes particularly interesting when people move between different communities throughout their lives.
The expectations that feel natural within one environment may not work in quite the same way somewhere else, and people often become skilled at recognising those differences. They learn when an aspect of their usual behaviour will be understood immediately and when it may need adapting or explaining.
For people whose lives sit across more than one cultural context, moving between these different versions of normal can become an everyday experience. The way somebody behaves within their family or cultural community may be different from the expectations they encounter elsewhere, not because either environment is less authentic but because each operates according to a different shared understanding.
Black British experiences can include this kind of cultural movement, although there is no single way in which it is experienced. Individual relationships with heritage and British identity vary enormously, and what feels deeply significant within one family or community may have little relevance within another.
That complexity is important because culture becomes less useful when we turn it into a set of rules about how particular groups behave. Understanding culture should help us become more open to difference, rather than giving us another set of assumptions to make about people.
Familiar doesn't mean universal
One of the easiest mistakes to make is to confuse familiarity with universality.
When we have spent most of our lives around a particular way of doing something, it can feel like the obvious way rather than simply one way. We rarely have a reason to examine our own assumptions until they come into contact with somebody else's.
This can happen within workplaces as easily as anywhere else. Organisations develop their own unwritten rules about how people are expected to behave, and those rules often reflect the people who historically had the greatest influence over the culture. New colleagues then have to work out not only the formal requirements of their role but also the expectations that nobody thought to explain because everyone already there considered them obvious.
For somebody whose cultural experience differs from the dominant environment, this can require additional interpretation. They may be trying to understand whether a behaviour is genuinely necessary for the work itself or simply the way things have always been done within that particular organisation.
That distinction matters because inclusion is not about removing every cultural norm from a workplace. It is about being willing to notice which expectations have a genuine purpose and which have simply become invisible through familiarity.
Curiosity without turning people into explanations
Becoming aware that our own normal is not universal can make us more curious about other people's experiences, but that curiosity works best when it comes without an expectation that somebody else must educate us.
There is a difference between creating space for people to share what something means to them and asking an individual to explain an entire culture. No person can do that, because communities contain far too much variation for one experience to become representative of everybody else.
This is something we are conscious of at Powered by Diversity when working with lived-experience speakers. The value of hearing someone's story comes from understanding their perspective as their own. It may help us recognise experiences we had not previously considered, but it should not become a template through which we interpret everybody who appears to share the same identity.
In many ways, cultural understanding becomes richer when we stop searching for a definitive explanation and become more comfortable with variation.
Sometimes culture is hiding in plain sight
As we continue Honouring Our Communities, the unwritten customs within them remind us that culture is not always found in the things we deliberately preserve or publicly celebrate. Sometimes it is embedded so deeply in everyday behaviour that the people living within it barely notice it is there.
It can reveal itself unexpectedly when somebody encounters a different way of doing things and suddenly becomes aware of an assumption they have carried for years. That moment can be an opportunity to recognise that our understanding of normal was shaped somewhere, just as somebody else's was shaped somewhere different.
Perhaps that awareness is one of the most useful things cultural understanding can give us. Instead of assuming that unfamiliar behaviour needs to be corrected, we can become a little more interested in the context behind it, while also becoming more conscious of the context behind our own.
What feels like “just what we do” may have been shaped by experiences we have never stopped to examine, and noticing that gives us a different way of understanding both our communities and ourselves.
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