Does your change program account for culture?
The survey you run in London and the survey you run in Dubai might use the same questions.. but the answers mean different things, and if you don't account for that, your entire diagnosis is off before you've even started designing anything.
In some organizational cultures, people will tell you directly what's not working.. they'll name the barriers, challenge their manager's assumptions without thinking twice, so your data is roughly what it says it is.
In others however, that same survey produces something very different.. not because people are being dishonest, but because the cultural context makes certain things unsayable.
-In high power-distance environments, nobody is going to self-report a capability gap that reflects on their manager.
-In high-context communication cultures, friction gets expressed through what's not said, not what is.
-In collectivist contexts, people don't attribute barriers to personal factors the way individualist contexts do.. they talk about role expectations and group obligations instead.
Same survey.. completely different meaning underneath, and this affects everything at once.. how reliable your data is, how you interpret what people tell you, and whether the interventions you design will actually work in that context.
Social comparison strategies that work in London can backfire in Tokyo.. individual goal setting that drives results in New York means nothing in a context where collective obligation is the primary driver.
The part that gets missed the most though.. it's not about the country, it's about the organizational culture that's actually operating, because a Dubai subsidiary of a UK company might behave more like London than Dubai.
You have to assess what's actually in front of you, not assume based on geography.
When we work across cultural contexts we don't just translate the questions.. we assess how much we can trust each data source, adjust how we weight the evidence, and flag which interventions need rethinking before they go into the plan.
That's built into how we help customers.. not added on after.
If you're running change across different cultural contexts.. are you adapting your approach or just translating your slides?