When I started at Google in 2002, there were about 500 employees. When I left nine years later, there were over 50,000. For all that time, I marveled at the relative cohesion of company culture—the values that Google successfully conveyed to tens of thousands of employees across the world. Today Google has about 75,000 people on the payroll. The situation that exploded a few weeks ago—with former employee James Damore’s contentious memo causing internal and public fallout—makes me wonder if this is the breaking point for Google’s unique ethos of open communication.

Karen Wickre is Backchannel's worklife columnist who's enjoyed a long run in Silicon Valley, including at Google and Twitter. She's also a media obsessive, internet lover, and art & dog enthusiast. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

Google culture has always been a somewhat messy, dynamic, and aspirational ecosystem, rooted in a strong sense of ethics. The company is deservedly famous for encouraging employees to explore a wide range of ideas and to question the status quo. I remember thinking that the dysfunctional office life in “Dilbert” cartoons didn’t really apply to Google. Even at its size today, it’s rare for Google to be home to asshole leadership, behavior, or decisions.

If some of this makes Google sound a bit like a university, that’s no accident. When they launched Google, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were grad students at Stanford, surely used to questioning assumptions and lively debate. So Google grew up with features that it still retains: All-hands meetings are built around an open mic and unscripted Q&As with executives. A quarterly board report is presented to all employees. (How many companies would consider doing either?) For sharing and discussing information, there are about 87,000 Google Groups email lists organized around every kind of topic—both work-related and not so much. There are some 8,000 miscellaneous—famously, “misc”—discussions, devoted to everything from juggling and philosophy to rockets and “terrible-ideas-discuss.”

In my years at Google, my default approach to work—and indeed, to life—became more risk-friendly and more global. My critical thinking and long-game skills grew stronger. Six years after leaving, I still root for the company. Even when I’m critical about one of its products or positions, I trust Google to mostly get it right...eventually.

For culture of openness to thrive, employees are encouraged to bring their authentic selves to work—a delicate balance that hasn’t caused major problems in the past. Many, many discussions over the years have boiled over to achieve “centi-thread” (or larger) status. Along the way, participants drop off, or continue to argue their points, or bring an array of facts meant to persuade or end the discussion. Sometimes, a sharp tone or extra-sensitive topic leads readers to alert more senior managers to pursue the matter offline. What the company does have, and has always had, is spirited internal arguments about issues large and small. To my knowledge, until now, virtually none have led to firings—and definitely not shutting off discussion.

But today the landscape is culturally fraught, with real-time and viral news ready to surface every kind of tension or affront. So how does the famously elastic, free-spirited Google culture handle such unprecedented breaches of its intrinsic code?

Thanks to the flammable nature of social platforms, leaking is more pervasive than ever. Many companies, including Google, plan for leaks as part of their communication strategies. But the Damore paper breaks with several norms in distribution. From what I’ve read, rather than posing a question to a relevant group (ex: “do diversity programs really produce useful results?”), Damore proactively seeded his formal paper to several lists, including one about diversity. I can’t help but think he was looking for a fight—and several former and current Googlers I spoke with felt the same way. So it’s not surprising that some number of employees, especially women and other underrepresented minorities, may be feeling very constrained and frightened about speaking up or pushing back on unfair and unequal treatment.

It’s incredibly difficult to maintain a genuinely value-based culture in a place the size of Google. When a company has grown up to become a global brand, a verb, and is recognized as a “best place to work” year after year, it’s inevitable that things will continue to change. I fervently hope, in its moment of soul-searching, that Google can still be a “right to know” culture and not operate, as many companies do, on a “need to know basis.”

We’ve seen one early indicator that the company is trying: when CEO Sundar Pichai postponed the all-hands meeting that was to be devoted to the whole situation. That might have been the moment when some companies would institute a new default: no more company-wide discussion. Instead, his note said, in part, “In recognition of Googlers’ concerns, we need to...create a better set of conditions for us to have the discussion…we will find several forums to gather and engage with Googlers, where people can feel comfortable to speak freely.”

I was heartened to read that. It said to me, “We will continue to get together to sort out issues that are vital to us as a group.” It did not signal a top-down communications blackout or a move to “need to know.” What will keep Google being Google is if it can keep fostering ways to question the status quo, pursue thoughtful ideas, and work toward useful resolutions that benefit the people who work there. Maybe the circles of trust will be smaller, with greater attention to biases (unconscious or not) of all kinds. It will be important to develop fully baked inclusion programs in addition to bolstering effective diversity. All of the leaders and managers will need to be more sensitive and intuitive with their people.

These tasks call for great resolve. Iconic Google, with its outsized cultural influence, is a good place to unpack and tackle all of it. Let’s see how it does.

(Disclosure: I am currently an Alphabet contractor, and occasionally do projects with one or more Alphabet companies. I have no access to any internal systems, nor have I talked with any of my clients about the this topic.)