It started with 80 people, 20 countries, and a lot of conversations about the weather.
I work in a team of around 80 people from 20 different countries. Different cultures, different backgrounds, different ways of seeing the world. On paper, it's the kind of diversity that should make for some pretty interesting conversations.
And yet, most of our conversations sounded remarkably similar.
How was your weekend? Any plans for the holidays? Can you believe this weather?
Nothing wrong with any of those questions, of course. But I couldn't help thinking about how much we were missing. Here we were, surrounded by people who had grown up with completely different ideas of what was normal, polite, funny, strange, or simply obvious. And most of the time, we never got around to discovering any of it.
I started looking for something that could change that. I explored conversation games, icebreakers, and different ways to get people talking. But nothing quite did what I had in mind.
I didn't want people to feel like they were being interviewed, pushed to share personal stories, or asked to represent an entire culture. I wanted something easy, natural, and genuinely fun. Something that would make differences come up almost by accident, through the little everyday things we rarely think to question.
So I created Where We Come From, the first edition of Things We Thought Were Normal. A social discovery game about the everyday habits, unwritten rules, and behaviors we often assume are universal. The kind of game where a simple question about dinner, visiting someone's home, or standing in a queue can suddenly make everyone around the table realize that their version of normal isn't quite as universal as they thought.
And that was exactly the kind of moment I wanted to create.
How everything came to life
Then came a different kind of realization.
I attended a Diversity & Inclusion workshop and found myself thinking about the gap between talking about differences and actually discovering them.
We can sit through presentations about different perspectives, unconscious assumptions, and the importance of inclusion. We can understand the ideas in theory. But that doesn't necessarily mean we understand the person sitting next to us any better.
And in a work environment, there's another challenge: people need to feel comfortable participating. Nobody should feel put on the spot, judged, or expected to reveal something personal to prove a point.
I started wondering whether the same playful approach could work for the everyday situations we navigate at work.
That's how the second edition of the game - At Work - came to life. A social discovery game about the unwritten rules of working together. From meeting etiquette and office gossip to feedback, teamwork, and the small things that make someone a "good colleague," it reveals just how differently we can approach the same situations, even when we think we're all following the same rules.
And then the idea followed me home.
As I started talking about the game with close friends, something became clear. These little discoveries weren't just interesting between colleagues or people from different countries.
They could happen between friends who had known each other for years. Between parents and their grown-up children. Between people who had shared a home, a childhood, or countless family dinners and still had surprisingly different ideas about how things should be done.
That led to the third edition of the game: Across Generations. A game that brings different generations around the same table to explore how everyday life, expectations, habits, and ideas of what's normal have changed over time. Sometimes the differences are exactly what you'd expect. Sometimes it's the similarities that catch everyone off guard.
Three editions later, the idea behind Things We Thought is still the same. We spend so much time around other people, yet there is so much we never think to ask, and so much we assume without even noticing.
Sometimes, all it takes is one unexpectedly good question.
A story comes out. Someone laughs. Someone says, "Wait, you do that too?" or, "Hang on, I thought everyone did that."
And suddenly, people who thought they knew each other have something new to discover.
That's what Things We Thought is here for. To make more of those moments happen.
