I remember the first time I heard the phrase “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”

It landed well. It sounded like leadership and accountability. A reminder that culture isn’t shaped by what we say we value, but by what we let become normal.

At the time, I agreed with it instinctively. Of course standards matter. Of course silence can reinforce behaviours and norms we claim not to agree with. And people with power should be paying close attention to what they overlook, excuse, or silently normalise, particularly when the consequences fall on others.

Over time, though, my reaction to the phrase has shifted. The problem I have is less about intent, and more about where responsibility ultimately lands.

The phrase works because it’s simple. It reduces leadership to a moral posture: notice the problem, intervene, move on. It asks people to imagine themselves as active agents rather than passive bystanders. Great!

But simplicity does a lot of work here. It flattens context. It ignores power. And it assumes that everyone who “walks past” something does so with the same authority, safety, and capacity to act.

That assumption doesn’t last long.

I don’t accept littering. I care about shared spaces. But if I were to pick up every piece of litter I walked past, I would spend my days compensating for a system that had failed to provide bins, maintenance, enforcement, or social norms that actually work. My individual effort wouldn’t raise the standard. It would merely disguise the absence of one.

The system would appear to function precisely because someone was absorbing the cost.

And this is my point. It happens all the time: systems don’t work properly, and people step in to make them seem like they do.

When “walking past” isn’t a choice

In my work in the disability and accessibility contexts, this way of thinking becomes particularly fragile. Many people notice the problem immediately. They understand exactly what’s wrong. And still, they don’t intervene. It’s not because they accept the standard, but because acting comes at a cost they can’t afford to pay.

That cost might be physical or cognitive energy.

It might be professional risk.

It might be safety.

Or, sadly, it might simply be the knowledge that speaking up will lead nowhere.

A disabled person choosing not to self-advocate in a meeting is not endorsing inaccessibility. They may be conserving energy, protecting their reputation, or avoiding yet another moment of them being framed as the problem rather than the system.

A frontline worker who wants to make a adjustment but lacks the authority to do so is not “accepting the standard”. They are working within products, processes, and systems they did not design, and environments they do not control. We talk a lot about empowerment, but empowerment without permission, tools, or backing is just responsibility without authority.

When all of this complexity is collapsed into a single moral judgement - “you walked past it, therefore you accept it” - structural failure is recast as personal responsibility.

How responsibility slides downhill

What concerns me most is how predictably this idea travels. It is often voiced by leaders. Repeated by managers. Absorbed into organisational culture as a shorthand for integrity. And then it settles on the shoulders of the people with the least power to act.

Those with the greatest authority to change systems are rarely the ones encountering their sharp edges day to day. They are not the ones repeatedly navigating inaccessible processes, poorly designed tools, or exclusionary norms.

Instead, the expectation falls on those closest to the problem. Speak up. Intervene. Educate. Correct. Absorb the risk. Do the emotional labour. Uphold the standard on behalf of everyone else.

Over time, accountability is reframed as individual courage rather than organisational responsibility. And systems are very good at surviving under those conditions.

I also think there’s a broader pattern at play here.

We admire people who push through. We praise resilience. We tell stories about those who speak up despite the odds. These stories are often genuine. They are sometimes necessary. But they can also obscure the fact that environments that rely on constant heroics are poorly designed environments.

If a workplace depends on individuals repeatedly intervening to prevent harm, exclusion, or inequity, then the standard is not being upheld. It is being manually enforced, one person at a time.

Accessibility makes this particularly clear. When inclusion depends on someone asking, reminding, explaining, correcting, or justifying their needs, the system itself has failed to do its job.

Calling that accountability does not change the underlying design.

Where attention should sit

The question I’m increasingly interested in is not whether someone walked past a problem, but why the problem existed in the first place, and who had the power to prevent it.

Why did this situation rely on personal intervention?

Who benefits when responsibility is framed as individual action rather than system design?

And what extra work is being done, unseen and repeatedly, to keep things functioning at all?

These questions are harder to answer than a slogan. They resist neat packaging. But they point responsibility back toward leadership, governance, policy, and design. Back toward the places where leverage actually exists.

I still believe that standards matter. I still believe that what leaders tolerate shapes culture, and that silence can, at times, signal consent. None of that disappears just because a slogan is imperfect.

What has changed for me is where I think responsibility should sit.

When we lean too heavily on ideas like “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept”, we risk mistaking proximity for power. We treat the person closest to the problem as the person most responsible for fixing it, even when they are the least equipped to do so. Over time, this normalises a transfer of labour: emotional, cognitive, and professional work shifts downward, while authority remains where it has always been.

In disability and accessibility, this pattern is especially visible. People navigate systems that were not designed with them in mind, and are then expected to correct those systems in real time. When they do, it is framed as courage or resilience. When they don’t, it is read as acquiescence.

Both interpretations miss the point.

The more useful question is not whether someone walked past a problem, but why the problem required personal intervention at all. Why the standard was fragile enough to depend on individual action. And who benefits when responsibility is framed as something people should shoulder, rather than something systems should carry.

For those with power, this is where leadership actually lives. Not in noticing every failure, but in reducing the number of moments where someone else has to decide whether it is worth the cost to speak up. Not in praising those who compensate for poor design, but in changing the conditions that make such compensation necessary.

The standard you walk past may tell a story. But it is rarely the whole one.

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