The Birthday Song Problem
Maybe I am sensitive to this because of the proximity to my birthday, but there is a particular kind of discomfort that settles over a table just before it happens. You know what I mean.
You can sense it in the slight shift of posture, in the glances exchanged between people who suddenly realise they are about to be pulled into a moment they did not ask for. The music dips or changes, the staff begin to gather, and somewhere between the kitchen and the table, a decision made long ago comes to life once again.
A group of people whose actual job is to deliver a seamless dining experience is now required to perform a song. Often sung out of tune.
It is presented as a gesture of warmth, a small flourish of hospitality, a way of making the customer feel special.
That is the theory.
In reality, it often lands somewhere closer to polite endurance. The staff are not there because they chose to be, the table if guests participates out of obligation rather than joy, and even the person whose birthday it is appears unsure whether to embrace the attention or apologise for it.
What interests me is not the awkwardness of the moment - though there is plenty of that to go around - it is the fact that this moment continues to exist at all. At some point, someone decided that this was a good idea. It likely emerged from a meeting where the conversation centred on customer experience, differentiation, and memory-making. It would have sounded compelling in the room and it would have felt like a simple way to add value.
What no one accounted for, or perhaps what no one returned to examine, is how that decision plays out in the real world, in the hands of the people who have to carry it out.
This is how many decisions take hold inside organisations.
They are conceived at a distance from the point of impact, they are implemented with good intention, and then they settle into the fabric of the business without ever being questioned again. Over time they stop being decisions and become rituals, and rituals are rarely challenged because they feel like part of the natural order of things.
The issue is not that the song exists, it is what it represents.
It represents a moment where performance is prioritised over authenticity. It asks people to display enthusiasm on command, to step briefly into a role that has little to do with their actual craft, and to do so in a way that serves an idea of experience rather than the reality of it. There is a subtle erosion that comes with that, not dramatic enough to trigger alarm, not severe enough to prompt immediate change, though persistent enough to shape how people feel about their work.
When this pattern repeats across an organisation, it begins to show up in more consequential ways. People learn to perform alignment rather than express disagreement. They learn to comply with decisions they do not believe in because the cost of questioning them feels higher than the cost of going along. The gap between what is said and what is felt widens, and over time that gap becomes culture.
It is easy to dismiss all of this as trivial, after all, it is only a song, only a few moments in an evening, only a harmless tradition. Though leadership rarely falters through a single dramatic misstep, it more often drifts through the accumulation of small, unexamined choices that no longer serve the people expected to live with them.
The discipline of decision-making is not simply about making the call in the first place. It is about returning to that call with enough honesty to ask whether it still holds. It requires a willingness to look at what has become normal and question whether it remains useful, or whether it has simply been left unchallenged for too long.
A more interesting question for any leader to sit with is this
Who is this decision truly serving now?
That question has a way of cutting through the language of intention and getting closer to the experience of the people involved. It invites a level of scrutiny that many organisations avoid because of the inconvenient to act upon.
The next time that moment unfolds in a restaurant, it is worth paying attention to what is really happening beneath the surface. There is a shared understanding in the room, an unspoken recognition that this is something to be endured rather than embraced. The decision persists not because it is effective, but because it has never been meaningfully revisited.
There are few things in organisations that are truly inevitable. Most of what feels fixed has simply gone unquestioned for long enough to appear that way.
Which raises a more uncomfortable thought.
Where, within your own organisation, are people still singing songs they never chose?