Learning to See Again: What France Taught Me About Culture

By the time we met our client in Lyon, we’d already spent days learning to see.

Our work began not with frameworks or presentations, but with observation: field notes, jottings, long walks, and quiet curiosity. We practiced reading the environment as data: how people greeted one another, how conversations unfolded, what went unsaid. The city itself became a kind of classroom for socio-technical systems. The interplay between people, structures, and symbols.

I tried to take it all in: the rhythm of the mornings, the gentle chaos of scooters and café chatter, and yes (one pain au chocolat every single day). France has a way of reminding you to slow down and savor, whether it’s pastry or perspective.

That immersion set the tone for everything that followed. It sharpened our attention, stripped away the safety of assumptions, and reminded us that culture lives in the ordinary.

It’s remarkable what happens when your words don’t land as easily as they do at home. You start listening differently. Watching differently. The whole system becomes sharper in your peripheral vision: the pauses, the glances, the order of who speaks and who waits.

That was the first lesson: disorientation is a gift.

In France, our consulting team was there to help an organization think about career growth. How to make development pathways clearer in a culture already rich with autonomy and mastery. Fourteen interviews later, we had stories of engineers who valued learning for its own sake, leaders wrestling with structure versus freedom, and a deep pride in open-source work that blurred the lines between individual and collective achievement.

From an OD perspective, it was textbook and unpredictable all at once. Schein calls this “humble inquiry” …the posture of curiosity over knowing. You can’t diagnose what you don’t yet understand, and understanding isn’t just linguistic, it’s cultural. I found myself leaning into silence, resisting the urge to fill it with expertise. Letting meaning surface in its own tempo.

We often talk about culture as “the way we do things around here,” but abroad, I realized how layered those ways are. National, organizational, team, and even professional subcultures overlap like transparent maps. Hofstede’s dimensions came alive in the cadence of meetings, the respect for expertise, the understated hierarchy, the precision in phrasing feedback.

Every nod, every “oui,” every careful pause carried context.

And yet, beneath those layers, something universal emerged: people want to grow. They want to belong. They want clarity about how their contributions matter.

The paradox, of course, is that you can only see a system’s assumptions when you step outside of it. Standing in another country, working within another culture, I could suddenly see my own defaults, the American appetite for speed, the instinct to jump from insight to action, the comfort with informality that can read as chaos elsewhere.

Awareness like that doesn’t come from textbooks. It comes from noticing.

Our team’s greatest breakthroughs didn’t come from the slides we built or the models we referenced. They came from moments of stillness: walking through the lab, watching collaboration unfold wordlessly, seeing how pride lived in craftsmanship. In that quiet observation, the system started to reveal itself, not as a puzzle to fix, but as a story to understand.

That’s what this experience taught me about consulting, and about culture work more broadly:

We are not there to translate language. We are there to translate meaning.

The goal isn’t fluency. It’s connection.

When we stop trying to impose understanding and start participating in curiosity, the work shifts. We move from diagnosing to discovering. From doing to being with.

On the train back to Paris, I flipped through pages of notes, a mix of quotes, arrows, and reflections, while the city blurred by in tones of gold and gray. Between the scribbles ran a simple thread: seeing systems clearly requires stepping into someone else’s.

Culture isn’t what we declare. It’s what we notice, especially when we’re lost enough to see it.