A Story About What Happens When You Stop Managing Behaviour and Start Understanding Its Roots
Learning how historical fiction strengthens perspective-taking and develops cultural intelligence begins with recognising that the coordination problems in your international team may not be coordination problems at all.
Andy had been leading distributed software development teams across three continents for years.
His metrics were strong.
His systems were sound.
His project management was the kind other team leaders benchmarked against.
But something kept defeating him.
Priya’s team validated edge cases long after the timeline required it.
James questioned user assumptions in ways that stalled decision-making.
Kenji agreed clearly in every meeting and then submitted proposals that ignored what had been decided.
Andy had addressed each of these situations multiple times, with clear communication and logical solutions.
Nothing changed.
He was reaching the problems.
He wasn’t reaching the people.
The Night He Picked Up a Book
The shift began on a night when he had been staring at a draft email for twenty minutes, trying to address his team’s coordination problems without sounding defensive, and eventually gave up.
He reached for a novel his sister had been pressing on him for months.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
He opened it expecting distraction.
Instead he found himself absorbed in something entirely unexpected — not just the historical sweep of the story, but the way Gyasi made visible the invisible architecture beneath each character’s choices.
The cultural frameworks passed down through generations.
The inherited values shaping how people understood authority, quality, responsibility, and trust.
The ways people carried their histories into every room they entered without knowing they were doing so.
By dawn he had finished the book.
He sat at his kitchen table with his coffee, and found his mind moving — not through the story he had just read, but through his team.
Priya.
James.
Kenji.
He was thinking about them differently, and he couldn’t quite say when the shift had happened.
The Monday Morning Experiment
That Monday Priya mentioned her team was taking additional time to validate edge cases — again.
Andy’s usual response was already forming.
We need to stay on the critical path.
Edge cases can wait for the next iteration.
Instead he paused.
And asked a different question.
“What’s your team seeing in these edge cases that makes them worth the additional validation time?”
The answer had nothing to do with inefficiency.
Priya explained how thorough early-stage testing had prevented critical failures in previous projects — how the additional time invested at the start had consistently reduced expensive debugging later.
Her team wasn’t moving slowly.
They were applying a culturally-informed understanding of quality that Andy’s frameworks had been reading as delay.
The problem Andy had been trying to manage wasn’t a process problem.
It was invisible to him because he had never thought to look for it.
What Andy Realised Afterwards
The more Andy thought about Homegoing, the more clearly he saw what the novel had shown him.
Every character’s choices made sense once you understood the cultural inheritance shaping them.
What looked like resistance or passivity from the outside was often professional wisdom from the inside — filtered through values and frameworks that Andy’s own background had never equipped him to recognise.
He began seeing the same pattern across his team.
People weren’t behaving illogically.
They were operating from frameworks he hadn’t examined.
What Happened Next
A few days later Andy approached James — whose persistent questioning of user assumptions had been slowing decisions and frustrating the team.
This time instead of managing the behaviour, he got curious about it.
“Help me understand your thinking when you raise these questions,” he said.
What James described stopped Andy completely.
In James’s professional background, questioning fundamental assumptions wasn’t a challenge to leadership — it was a professional obligation.
Failing to raise potential concerns would be seen as negligent.
His questioning wasn’t obstruction.
It was a culturally-formed expression of rigour that Andy had been consistently misreading as resistance.
The problem wasn’t James’s behaviour.
It was Andy’s interpretation of it.
The Shift
One insight changed how Andy approached international leadership.
From:
Managing visible coordination problems efficiently.
To:
Understanding the cultural inheritance shaping them.
Instead of asking:
“Why isn’t this working?”
He started asking:
“What frameworks might be driving this that I haven’t considered?”
And the conversations changed almost immediately.
The Ripple Effect
Once Andy began working this way, other situations started to make more sense.
Kenji’s polite agreement that consistently failed to translate into aligned implementation wasn’t passive resistance — it was a culturally-informed approach to professional hierarchy that Andy’s meeting structures had never created space for.
When Andy designed a pre-meeting process that allowed Kenji to share technical analysis in writing before group discussions, architectural concerns that had been accumulating for weeks finally surfaced.
Problems that had been appearing late as expensive implementation obstacles began appearing early as design questions, when they were still straightforward to resolve.
The Test He Wasn’t Expecting
But Andy’s growing confidence in his new approach was about to be tested.
When Soo-Jin joined from the Seoul office, Andy believed he recognised her measured responses immediately.
He introduced a structured written feedback protocol before she had indicated she needed one.
She requested a private conversation shortly afterwards.
“I’d prefer to be asked how I work,” she said, “rather than given a process that assumes I already know.”
Andy had taken a specific insight about one person’s cultural inheritance and quietly converted it into a general theory.
The result was a more sophisticated version of the same error he’d started with.
And recognising that took him somewhere more uncomfortable still — an examination of the cultural inheritance he had never once thought to question in himself.
When he brought this recognition into a conversation with the whole team — asking everyone, including himself, to describe what a recent decision-making process had looked and felt like from where they sat — the responses revealed that the same events had been lived as entirely different realities.
That conversation became the foundation for something his earlier approach had never produced: a team developing collective capacity to navigate cultural difference, rather than one that depended on Andy to manage it for them.
The Teaching Insight
Andy discovered that international leadership wasn’t about managing cultural differences efficiently.
It was about understanding the inherited frameworks shaping how people approached their work.
When he stopped asking “Why aren’t they adapting?”
And started asking “What might they be carrying that I haven’t understood?”
Two things changed.
His decisions incorporated intelligence he had previously been structuring out of the conversation.
And the people he led finally felt seen for what they actually brought.
Why This Matters
Professional training in cross-cultural management often focuses on frameworks, communication styles, and country-specific protocols.
But leading international teams also requires something harder to teach.
The recognition that every person operates from a complex inherited set of values, assumptions, and professional instincts — and that your own frameworks are no less inherited, no less invisible, and no less shaping of what you see and miss.
When we read historical fiction, we practise a specific kind of attention: genuine curiosity about what someone is carrying from their history, before judging what they should do differently.
Andy’s story shows what happens when that habit of attention moves from the page into the room.
And like the best novels, the practice keeps revealing new things the longer you stay with it.
This is an extract from How Historical Fiction Strengthens Perspective-Taking and Develops Cultural Intelligence — a School of WorkLife Story Lesson.
This story was inspired by my book, WorkLife Book Club Volume One Shoreditch by Carmel O’ Reilly, available to order from bookshops — following members of a London book club as they navigate WorkLife challenges through the wisdom found in the books they read together.
The featured book is Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Disclosure
Book links go to Bookshop.org UK, which shares its profits with independent bookshops. You can choose from the formats available. It currently ships to UK addresses only, so these links are for readers in the UK. I hope to find a way to offer something similar for readers elsewhere. If you buy through them, I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you, which helps support this work.
Continue the Learning
The complete lesson follows Andy’s full journey — including how insights from Homegoing transformed how he approached cultural difference, the moment his growing confidence produced its own blind spot, and what he discovered when he returned to the book six months later. It shows how you can apply the same perspective in your own work — learning to recognise the cultural frameworks behind behaviour and respond with the intelligence and curiosity that international leadership quietly requires.
Experience the complete Story Lesson:
How Historical Fiction Strengthens Perspective-Taking and Develops Cultural Intelligence Learn how stories that explore cultural inheritance and historical perspective can deepen cross-cultural intelligence and change how you understand the people you lead.
Deepen the practice with the WorkLife Compass Guided Programme:
The Power of Fiction: Developing Character Traits Through Reading –Discover how literature strengthens empathy, perspective, and moral judgement — essential traits for thoughtful leadership.
Work With Me: Individual WorkLife Coaching, Commissioned Learning Resources, Speaking Engagements and Organisational Partnerships.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
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