A few daily reminders that "normal" is just what you grew up with.
I was recently asked for an interview with Emirates 24/7 for their Dubai-it series, profiling residents on why they choose to live and work here. One of the questions kept circling back to something she says often: living in Dubai is a daily masterclass in how differently people see the same thing. Here is the fuller version of that answer.
Invite people here for 7pm, and you get three very different reactions. Some arrive around 7:15, entirely convinced that is exactly right, early enough to be respectful, late enough not to look overeager. Others treat 7pm as a rough suggestion and stroll in closer to 11, completely relaxed about it. And then there are the ones who arrive right on the dot, and end up sitting alone for a good while, visibly wondering where everyone else is. It happens almost every time, and it never stops being funny.
Then there is cutlery. In some cultures, eating with your hands is simply not done, a knife and fork are non-negotiable at a proper dinner, while for many of our friends here, a knife rarely makes an appearance. More than once we have watched a host's family disappear into the kitchen, drawer by drawer, and come back a little sheepishly with a stack of plastic cutlery salvaged from some old takeaway order. Add the eternal debates about what counts as spicy, or what makes good party music, and you get a daily reminder that "normal" is really just "what I grew up with."
It becomes even more interesting once the same pattern shows up at work. We regularly meet employees who are genuinely engaged, fully invested, but who will not challenge their leader in front of the room. Not because they disagree less than someone more vocal, but because doing it publicly would feel disrespectful to them. Meanwhile there are leaders who actively want debate, who see disagreement as the engine of innovation, and who cannot quite understand why half the room stays silent in the meeting and then shows up at their desk individually afterwards to say everything they did not say out loud.
A lot of it comes down to individualistic versus collectivist cultures, and in this region specifically, there is also a strong tribal dimension layered on top. If that is not something you grew up with, you tend to underestimate it early on, and you usually end up learning it the hard way.
The habit that actually helps
Here is the harder version of the same lesson. Sit in rush hour on Sheikh Zayed Road, surrounded by wildly different driving styles and equally different ideas of what counts as good driving, and staying calm and curious is not exactly the first instinct. And that is really just traffic. Even the most open-minded people fall into the trap of treating their own value system as the neutral, default one, simply "normal," without realising it.
A few years ago the UAE declared a Year of Tolerance. Tolerance still implies putting up with something. What we actually see here, day to day, is something more active than that.
"What am I not seeing" is the question underneath it. What do I not yet understand? What could I learn here? What am I missing? One of the most beautiful things about living in this country is that you learn something new almost every day, about the habits and worldviews of people from every corner of the globe.
The French writer Balzac put it best: "The more one judges, the less one loves." That, in a single line, sums up the whole habit, and it happens to be exactly the muscle we train in our Bravos Labs, where leaders sit with questions like this one out loud, in a room, instead of only in theory.
What it builds, over time
Practice that question enough, at scale, across a whole city, and something interesting happens. You do not get sameness. You get a place that built its own identity out of the mix instead of flattening it, a bit like New York did with its melting-pot humour. There is a lingo here that outsiders half understand at best, khalli walli, shway shway, memes like "tell me you live in Dubai without telling me you live in Dubai." That is not a superficial detail. It is a sign of a culture that is genuinely forming, rather than one that got smoothed down trying to please everyone.
Some of that identity comes from the good times. A lot of it comes from what we have gone through together, the harder moments as much as the proud ones. The floods of 2024. Expo 2020. The tension the whole region has felt at different points. The particular rhythm of Ramadan every year. These are the "moments that matter," and they are what continues to shape the identity of this young nation.
The habit that works in a living room works just as well in a boardroom. Ask the question before you judge. It changes more than most engagement programmes ever will.
