Cultural Drift Risk is the danger that a network gradually shifts its shared norms, assumptions, and defaults over time, until the culture no longer matches the values it originally claimed to protect.
If the entire network shares certain initial biases or assumptions, those biases can compound. Even without bad actors, the group can drift in a direction that feels “natural” internally while becoming increasingly misaligned with its founding intent.
Drift often happens through quiet mechanisms rather than dramatic coups. New members copy what seems to work, informal practices harden into “how we do things,” edge cases get handled with ad-hoc exceptions that become precedent, and people adapt their beliefs to fit the incentives and status signals around them. Over time, the culture can change more than any written rule.
Cultural drift is also a selection effect. If a network rewards certain rhetorical styles, forms of expertise, or social confidence, it will attract more of those traits and repel others, gradually narrowing the worldview of the group. This can produce a self-confirming bubble that looks like competence from the inside and bias from the outside.
This risk connects directly to Clique Conundrum, because cliques are one of the engines that accelerate drift, and to Open Secret, because drift often becomes legible to insiders before it is speakable in official channels.
Defenses against Cultural Drift Risk usually require more than transparency. They require intentional renewal mechanisms: periodic re-statement of values, onboarding that teaches the original intent, structured dissent, rotation of roles, and the Power of Fork principle so misaligned subcultures can branch rather than quietly capture the whole.