“Quick question: why do we freeze deploys on Fridays?” “No idea. Marcus set that up.” Marcus left in March.

Wherever I work, the question I ask most is where a rule came from. The most common answer is a name. Rarely a reason.

Engineers call this technical debt: Ward Cunningham’s term for shortcuts that save time now and charge interest until someone repays them. Culture carries the same debt. A norm that outlives its reason is a loan against future understanding, and the interest gets paid daily, as friction.

The debt builds quietly because culture transmits as behavior while the reasons stay in a few heads. New people learn what to do long before they learn why, and asking why carries a social cost, so most stop asking. Each unexplained rule makes the next question feel more like a challenge, and the people holding the original context eventually leave. Nothing breaks, so nothing flags it, until the day you try to change something and no one can tell the load-bearing rules from the leftovers. G.K. Chesterton warned against removing a fence until you know why it was put up. The advice assumes someone can still answer. An organization that can’t explain itself can’t change itself on purpose.

This week, pick one rule you enforce and finish the sentence in front of your team: “We do this because.” If you can’t, say so, then dig up the reason together and write it where the rule lives. You’ll either recover context you were losing or retire a fence that was holding nothing back.

Every team has a Marcus. What did yours leave behind?