Norming: where the team's culture quietly hardens

Norming is the stage with the highest invisible stakes. The defaults that lock in here are the team's culture for the next year. If they default to neurotypical assumptions, autistic colleagues pay the cost in masking and burnout.

At Norming, the team starts to settle. Roles are clearer. Disagreement has either been processed or pushed underground. 'How we do things here' begins to harden into folklore.

This is the stage where unwritten defaults harden into culture. Most defaults, set by majority behavior, will default neurotypical — meetings without agendas become normal, Slack expectations creep upward, decisions get made in DMs, small-talk-heavy rituals become 'how we connect', cameras-on becomes assumed.

None of these defaults is evil. Each of them, taken in isolation, has a reasonable rationale. Together, they form a workplace that quietly taxes anyone who pays a cost to follow them — autistic colleagues, parents on the school run, people with chronic illness, second-language English speakers, deep-focus workers. Some mask their way through; some quietly opt out. Masking has a documented cost. Opting out has a documented retention cost. Both cost the org something.

What helps at Norming:

• Audit your norms in writing. Write down what your team actually does: meeting frequency, decision channels, response-time expectations, ritual events. Then ask, in writing, who pays a cost to follow each one.
• Make accommodations explicit and routine, not exceptions. Cameras optional. Agendas required. Written-first defaults real. If something only happens 'when someone asks', it is a tax on disclosure.
• Watch for the 'culture fit' move. 'They're a great culture fit' is sometimes shorthand for 'they fit the team's neurotypical defaults'. Replace it with specific, work-related criteria.
• Re-run the Forming norms doc. The norms you wrote down in week one will have drifted. Update them, with the team, in writing.

The Management Center's framing (that equitable management is a deliberate practice, not a default) applies here exactly. The team's culture is not what you intended; it is what you actually do.