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 writing a play taught be about the value of cultural intelligence

In the autumn of 2023, I started writing a play. By the end of 2025, I had produced two sold out readings.

Audience members came up to me after each performance telling me how they laughed, how they cried, how they felt seen.

But I didn’t set out to write about corporate culture. I set out to write about what I kept seeing from my startup journey: in meeting rooms, in Slack messages, in exit interviews.

What I kept seeing was this: organisations that wanted to build more inclusive cultures run by well-intentioned leaders kept producing environments where the people they most wanted to retain were quietly burning out and leaving.

Not because anyone was evil. But because no one had a shared language.

The First Woke War follows Temi, a Black woman hired as Chief Culture Officer at a fast-growing AI startup preparing for its IPO. She’s brilliant, qualified, and genuinely motivated. Her CEO, Arthur, is publicly committed to the work. Her CTO, Martin, is openly sceptical. Her mentee, Grace, is waiting to see if the company can live up to the employer brand it boasts online and in All-Hands.

By the end of the play, Temi has delivered results. She’s narrowed the gender pay gap, increased diverse hiring, built training programmes… yet is still being asked to lie on social media about how much the culture is actually changing.

The play isn’t a cautionary tale about flawed leadership. Most of the leaders in it aren’t bad people. They’re people operating without a shared understanding of what culture actually is, the impact it has, and what it takes to change it.

Solving cultural issues requires more than revamping corporate values. It requires gathering cultural intelligence and and leveraging it to make lasting change. I call this “Cultural Intelligence in Action”.

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How leaders can leverage cultural intelligence

Cultural intelligence isn’t a workshop you attend so you can tick a box and consider yourself fully informed.

It’s the ability to decode and understand the invisible systems shaping how people in your organisation communicate, collaborate, and feel connected - or othered.

Cultural Intelligence in Action is translating that understanding into decisions that create meaningful impact on the people working in your organisation.

In my play The First Woke War, every character is operating from a different map.

The CEO Arthur’s map says:

• Culture is reputation.

• “If we look right externally, we are right internally.”

• So he hires Temi publicly, celebrates her on social media, and asks her to make the employee brand sound good, regardless of what the data says.

The CTO Martin’s map says:

• Culture is distraction.

• “People who are good at their jobs are too smart to be biased.”

• So he deprioritises training and calls Temi “emotional” when she pushes back.

Temi’s map says:

• Culture is systems.

• She wants to change the processes: recruitment, feedback, communication to create lasting cultural change.

• So she builds a culture roadmaps, closes pay gaps, and builds training programmes. Then watches them get quietly undermined.

Grace’s map says:

• Culture is belonging.

• She wants to do her best work without having to prove she deserves to be in the room.

• She spots the biased outputs in the AI image generator that no one else was looking for and is ignored.

These are the cultural gaps that quietly cost organisations six to seven figures each year.

Gaps that lead to the slow drain of the champions who can see what leaders can’t.

The champions who eventually stop trying to explain and take their talent elsewhere.

What closing the gap actually looks like

Cultural intelligence starts with exploration. This is where ‘the story behind the story’ comes in. Unpacking surface-level themes to understand what’s actually happening. Not just accepting “we have a diversity problem”, instead asking:

• Whose stories are being heard in hiring decisions?

• What assumptions are baked into how we define performance?

• What does the pattern of who speaks first in meetings tell us about our actual power structures?

In the play, the story behind the story is everywhere if you know what to look for.

The engineering group chat rating candidates by attractiveness isn’t just an HR issue. It’s a signal about what the culture actually values, regardless of what the careers page says.

Martin’s resistance to training isn’t just stubbornness. It’s a survival strategy shaped by a prior experience where his protected characteristics were weaponised against him. Understanding that changes how you approach the conversation.

Arthur’s support for Temi isn’t cynical. He genuinely believes the things he says. He just also believes that the story matters more than the substance and has never had to question that trade-off.

Why I used theatre as a method to showcase cultural intelligence

I could have written a report. A newsletter. A LinkedIn carousel. But I wrote a play because cultural intelligence isn’t transferred through data points alone. It lands when people sit down, absorb a story, and see themselves - and others - clearly.

The most powerful moments in the performances weren’t the confrontations. They were the quiet ones. Grace asking Temi, “Are you coping OK?” because no one else had thought to. Martin confessing, unexpectedly, that he used to be the person starting the diversity groups before his employer made him choose between his values and his job.

A story evokes empathy from it’s audience, regardless of what their lived experiences have been. That’s why storytelling is at the heart of how I do this work. Stories spark self-reflection and influence behaviour.

My experiences show me that leaders who develop cultural intelligence aren’t the ones who have attended the most training sessions. They’re the ones who learned to read the room, even the parts that don’t mirror them, seeking the story behind the story and using that insight to inspire action.

The First Woke War was last performed at Second Home, Spitalfields in London. If you'd like to find out more about bringing the play to your company as a catalyst for cultural intelligence conversations, or about my Cultural Intelligence in Action framework, email me on [email protected].

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