Photo by cottonbro studio

Hi readers, Abadesi here. Hope this finds you well. This essay is part of a series I’m developing “Cultural Intelligence in Action”: a framework for leaders building high-functioning, healthy teams.

What Industry can teach us about Cultural Intelligence

There’s a scene in the first season of HBO/BBC Industry I keep coming back to.

Harper has just outmanoeuvred all her peers and boss to win back a former client of her investment back. Without waiting for permission she reads the room, anticipates a need, and delivers results nobody expected.

Her reward? She’s questioned. Scrutinised. Made to justify herself in a way her male colleagues never are.

Sound familiar?

We’ve seen this play out in real organisations more times than we can count. Not only at investment banks and hedge funds. In startups, agencies, media companies. Anywhere a high-performance culture was built without anyone checking the system underneath it.

We call that system Communication Infrastructure™.

Every organisation has one, whether they designed it intentionally or not.

It decides:

• Whose voice carries weight

• Who gets the benefit of the doubt, and who has to prove themselves first

• Whose ideas get credited

• Who gets a second chance, and who gets managed out

Most leaders think their Communication Infrastructure is captured in the values page, the all-hands rituals, employee handbooks and an open-door policy. It isn’t. The real system is often unwritten, and keenly felt by those on the outside of it.

At Pierpoint, the fictional workplace in Industry, Communication Infrastructure runs on three things: performance, proximity to power, and plausible deniability.

Deliver the numbers, stay close to the people who matter, never make anyone uncomfortable enough to act… and you will succeed.

Harper reads that system perfectly. But cultural intelligence without institutional cover is a precarious position to find oneself in. She’s always one bad quarter from being let go.

Photo by cottonbro studio

Yasmin vs. Harper

Now look at Yasmin. She arrives at Pierpoint with something Harper doesn’t have: cover, by virtue of her status and family connections. Not more talent, just more legibility in that environment. Her background, her accent, her ease with a certain kind of wealthy Englishman means less friction for her, every single day.

But cover has a price. Proximity to the dominant culture also means being absorbed by it. She is shaped, compromised, slowly hollowed out. It’s a process that is as insiduos as it is polished. She barely notices the transformation until it’s too late.

Same floor. Same system. Two completely different experiences of it.

The catch

A broken communication system doesn’t fail everyone equally. It concentrates the cost on the people with the least cover and hides it from the people with the most.

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How to spot the system failures in your team

Feedback training and psychological safety workshops matter. But they don’t touch the infrastructure. Try these questions in your next leadership meeting:

• Instead of “do our people feel safe?” → Ask “whose discomfort is this system designed to avoid?”

• Instead of “do we have an open-door policy?” → Ask “who actually walks through that door and who doesn’t?”

• Instead of “are we inclusive?” → Ask “what does our system reward, and who does it leave out?”

Harper and Yasmin can’t fix Pierpoint’s culture. They can only navigate it, each at their own cost.

But leaders who spot these dynamics in their own organisations can do something different. The first step is naming what’s actually there.

That’s the work we do through Cultural Intelligence in Action™. We’re not simply training people to be less biased, but mapping the invisible system and giving leaders the tools to change it.

Cultural Intelligence in Action is a framework for leaders building organisations where team mates feel empowered to speak up and share observations that can positively impact stakeholders.

If this resonated I’d like to hear from you. Reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn.

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• Inclusion Scorecard

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