In this solo episode, Trisha unpacks a powerful question: What if the most important cultural intelligence work isn't happening in training rooms at all?

Drawing on Malcolm Gladwell's concept of the "overstory"—the shared narratives hovering above us that shape what we consider normal—Trisha explores how stories themselves shift these invisible cultural frameworks. From a 1978 TV drama that gave America permission to talk about the Holocaust, to Bad Bunny's history-making Super Bowl performance that had 135 million people experiencing Puerto Rican culture through their bodies, this episode examines the ecosystem of cultural change.

How do storytellers, experience creators, and CQ facilitators work together to help people see beyond the narratives they're living under? Trisha previews upcoming conversations with Ned Legaspi applying his CIS Bamboo Framework to specific films, starting with "How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies."

Resources mentioned include "Revenge of the Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell and Ned Legaspi's "Culturally Intelligent Storytelling" framework.

Join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

[00:00:39] Trisha: Hi there everyone. I'm Trisha Carter, an organizational psychologist and an explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness.

[00:01:32] Today I'm doing a solo episode, and so I'm gonna be demonstrating a bit of that. Thinking about our thinking. I want to talk with you about a few ideas that have been in my head over the past couple of weeks. If you listened to the last episode, you have met my colleague and friend Ned Legaspi. Ned spent three decades in global media with the A-B-S-C-B-N Global Network in the Philippines.

[00:02:23] He was talking about a Filipino film that was a massive hit at home, one of the top grossing films of all time in the Philippines, and it did well with Filipino diaspora audiences too. But when non Filipino audiences overseas had access to it, it didn't land the same way. And Ned said he realized it wasn't about language, it was about something else.

[00:03:25] So that idea, what people are culturally prepared to hear has been working on me. It made me wonder. What about the stories that people aren't hearing in a training room? What about the cultural shifts that are happening in places we're not looking? And that's what I want to explore today. I've been reading some work that I think gives Ned's insights a much bigger frame, and I want to share it with you 'cause I think it matters for how we think about cultural intelligence work.

[00:04:25] This one is a bit more cautious, and it asks what happens when those same mechanisms spread harmful ideas. At the center of the book is a concept he calls the overstory. He borrows the term from forestry In a forest, the overstory is the upper canopy, the tall trees that determine how much light reaches the ground.

[00:05:17] We consider possible and who we consider belongs. When I read that, I thought, this is what we're working with in cultural intelligence. This is the water we are swimming in, and the part that's hard to see because we're inside it. And honestly, this connects to something that Ned was describing also when he talked about the cultural logic beneath a story.

[00:06:08] Not policies, not legislation, definitely not mandatory e-learning stories. Gladwell gives two examples that really stuck with me and I think they're worth us thinking about. So the first was talking about the Holocaust. After World War ii, the Holocaust was something that was largely not spoken about publicly in America or indeed in many other countries around the world.

[00:07:09] And here's what I find interesting from a CQ perspective. It wasn't a documentary. It was a dramatized story that let people feel their way into something they'd been intellectually avoiding for decades. It gave the event a name in common language and it gave people permission to talk about it. And when it aired in West Germany, it had a similar effect.

[00:08:07] The second example he referenced is about the shift in attitudes towards same-sex marriage in the us. In 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act passed and state after state voted against same sex marriage. And then only within about a decade, opposition had largely fallen away. So when people were asked why they'd changed their minds, the number one reason they gave was television Gladwell points to the miniseries Will and Grace, which started in 1998.

[00:09:16] That normalization quietly rewrote the over story. Now, think about what that means for those of us who work in cultural intelligence or intercultural understanding, acceptance of difference. We spend a lot of our time in training rooms and coaching sessions working on awareness, perspective taking, and that work matters.

[00:10:00] But it's also, I think, an exciting one because this is exactly what Ned is working on. Remember he talked about Parasite, how it didn't try to sound like Hollywood. It stayed deeply Korean while touching something human that audiences everywhere could feel. He said that when stories try too hard to be universal by sanding their cultural edges, they lose their texture.

[00:10:57] Bad Bunny's super Bowl halftime show. The first in Super Bowl history performed nearly entirely in Spanish. 13 minutes of Puerto Rican culture on what is probably the biggest cultural stage in America. Sugarcane Fields, dominoes, references to the islands, infrastructure failures, and a finale where he said, God bless America, and then named every country in the Americas from Chile to Canada, redefining what America means.

[00:11:59] Think about what actually happened in those 13 minutes. 135 million people were moving to the music. They were feeling the rhythm. They were experiencing Puerto Rican culture through their bodies, through music and color and movement and joy before their minds had any chance to categorize it as other or different.

[00:12:46] Their bodies were already participating in the culture. Those who listened to my conversation with Kath Brew back in episode six and with Mariet Rus Donnelly in her episode, we will remember how they each talked. About the body. Kath said, the body knows things before the mind does. Our physical responses carry information that our conscious thinking hasn't yet caught up with.

[00:13:42] That's not just an attitude shift, that is CQ action. That's behavioral change. And it didn't come from a training session, it came from joy. And there's something here that connects to what Ned was saying about authenticity. Bad bunny didn't dilute Puertorican culture for a mainstream American audience.

[00:14:36] If it's happening on stages and screens and through music and food and shared physical experiences, what if there are ways of reaching people who will never attend a cultural intelligence workshop, but whose bodies might say yes to another culture of given the chance?

[00:15:17] First there are the storytellers, people like Ned, who equip media creators and writers with the cultural intelligence to tell stories that resonate across cultures. Not stories that argue for inclusion, but stories where cultural differences, just their lived normal complex. Ned's hope, as he shared last episode, is that stories from Southeast Asia and the global self will be approached not as exotic or niche, but as essential perspectives.

[00:16:21] The bad bunny principle, your body experiences the culture before your mind has time to resist. We don't talk about these people enough in our field, and I think we should.

[00:17:00] Now, I've laid these out as three separate groups, but the truth is a bit more interesting than that. Some of the most powerful CQ work I've seen happens when these overlap. Think about Quentin Pretorius, who was on the podcast last year. Quentin designs immersive leadership experiences. Where he takes leaders out of the training room and into spaces, into communities, historical sites, city streets, at early in the morning, and he lets the place do the teaching.

[00:17:49] In the podcast, he asked me whether I could remember what I learned in grade five. I couldn't. But then he asked me about a school excursion. I immediately recalled lying in the grass. At Aoraki, Mount Cook in New Zealand, watching the Aurora Australis in the sky as a teenager many years later, that experience is still vivid and Quentin's point was, that's how these immersions work. A participant will come on one of these journeys and years later they'll still be able to recall how they felt. And what they learned, it embeds the learning far more deeply than a traditional classroom ever could.

[00:19:00] At one end, you have storytellers shifting culture through narrative. The Gladwell examples Ned's work. At the other end, you have embodied experiences, shifting culture through the body, bad bunny, music, food, shared physical moments, and in between you have facilitators like Quentin, who are deliberately designing experiences that use space and sensation to create the conditions for metacognitive shifts.

[00:19:54] And the metacognitive work we do, do helping people think about their thinking. Through our training, through our coaching is most powerful when people have stories and experiences to reflect on. The storytellers open the door, the experience creators draw people through it, and we help people make sense of what they're seeing on the other side.

[00:20:43] The Thai film that was Ned's own aha moment, the one that helped him crack part of his framework, and we'll work through. The story root and part of the story craft to understand what makes it resonate so deeply across cultures if you haven't seen that film yet, I'd really encourage you to watch it before the next episode, and following that in a following episode, we'll also look at the Driver's Wife, an Australian film by Lee Purcell.

[00:21:40] Because if Gladwell is right, then the stories we tell, the experiences we create, the reflective capacity we build in, people aren't separate from the work of cultural change. They are the work. Thank you for listening to me today. If this episode sparks something for you, I'd love you to share it with someone, especially someone who might not think of themselves as working in this area, but who tells stories or creates experiences, or brings people together across difference 'cause they're part of this ecosystem too.

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