In our installation, user profile pictures are synced from a Discourse SSO provider site to our Discourse SSO client sites upon login. This works well, but does not work in the following case:
User changes profile picture on the SSO provider Discourse site, from a custom picture to be again "system default" (a letter on a coloured background). This applies fine on the SSO provider site, but is not synced to any Discourse SSO client sites.
As a visually equivalent workaround, you can save the system default profile picture on your computer and upload that as a new custom profile picture. It will be synced to SSO client sites on the next login.
(This is nothing important, just a note to us to test this again when we upgrade to the latest version of Discourse and to report this upstream if the issue is still found there.)