Turn insights into solutions

Consumer attitudes might seem easier to decode today. Automatic translation gives us access to content from anywhere; social media surfaces behaviour in real time; data analytics promises to reveal patterns that individual observation would miss. And yet the gap between access and understanding has not closed. Behaviour remains deeply rooted in culture, and culture resists the tools designed to make it easily legible. What people do, and why they do it, rarely translates as cleanly as the words they use to describe it.

 

True cultural insight begins where those tools reach their limit. It requires something slower and less systematic: extended immersion, genuine linguistic access, the willingness to be wrong about a place you thought you understood. Working across cultural contexts over more than two decades — with deep roots in both Russia and France, and fieldwork extending across the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond, engaging with people in their own languages and on their own terms — has made one thing consistently clear: the most important things about a culture are usually the ones it considers too obvious to explain. But proximity is not the only path to seeing them. Attentiveness — the disciplined willingness to follow what you notice rather than what you expect — can take you further than years of immersion that has stopped asking questions.

 

This is what makes large comparative studies both valuable and treacherous. They reveal patterns that individual observation cannot see — the broad tendencies, the structural regularities, the differences that hold across regions and generations. But they can also produce a false confidence, a sense that the pattern is the thing rather than the surface of it. The challenge is holding both scales simultaneously: the broad framework and the specific detail that either confirms it or quietly contradicts it. Neither is sufficient on its own.

 

What complicates this further is that cultures are not static objects to be described but living systems in constant motion. Some changes are superficial — the rapid turnover of trends and styles that every culture produces. Others run deeper, reshaping the underlying values and assumptions that give behaviour its meaning. Distinguishing between the two requires knowing not just where a culture is now but where it has been — the preceding waves, their logic, their unresolved tensions, the sediment they left behind. Current developments are only legible against that longer history.

 

The local and the global add another layer. Every cultural phenomenon exists at both scales simultaneously — expressing a specific regional or national identity while being shaped by forces that cross every border. The analyst who focuses only on the local loses the structural context; the one who focuses only on the global loses the texture that makes the difference meaningful. Cultural insight requires moving fluidly between the two, knowing when to zoom in and when to pull back.

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Film, fiction, and documentary, approached with the right questions, are among the more useful instruments available for this kind of attention. Leviathan or The Farewell don't explain Russian or Chinese culture — they immerse you in their emotional logic, make you feel the weight of assumptions you don't share, give you access to interior experience that no amount of demographic data can provide. The same is true of Succession or Extremely Inappropriate! read as cultural documents. Paired with the analytical frameworks offered by books like The Culture Map or American Nations, this combination — emotional immersion and intellectual structure — produces something closer to genuine understanding than either achieves alone.

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"There is an ancient Chinese story, still known to most East Asians today, about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. Knowing that the horse was the mainstay of his livelihood, his neighbors came to commiserate with him. “Who knows what’s bad or good?” said the old man, refusing their sympathy. And indeed, a few days later his horse returned, bringing with it a wild horse. The old man’s friends came to congratulate him. Rejecting their congratulations, the old man said, “Who knows what’s bad or good?” And, as it happened, a few days later when the old man’s son was attempting to ride the wild horse, he was thrown from it and his leg was broken. The friends came to express their sadness about the son’s misfortune. “Who knows what’s bad or good?” said the old man. A few weeks passed, and the army came to the village to conscript all the able-bodied men to fight a war against the neighboring province, but the old man’s son was not fit to serve and was spared. The story, which goes on as long as the patience of the audience permits, expresses a fundamental of the Eastern stance toward life. The world is constantly changing and is full of contradictions."

 

Richard Nisbett — The Geography of Thought

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