Your Innovation Playbook Doesn't Survive the Flight

I have run the same workshop in Berlin and in Jakarta, in the same month, with the same slides — and watched it electrify one room and flatline the other.

The Berlin session did what it always does. I asked people to tear into the weakest idea on the wall, told the most junior person to push back on the director, pressed for a decision before lunch. Energy, friction, a clear call by the afternoon. Textbook.

Three weeks later I ran the same playbook with an equally smart, equally motivated team in Jakarta. And it died. The critique round produced polite silence. Nobody contradicted the senior person in the room. My push for a decision earned me a quick, warm "yes" that — I'd come to learn — meant almost nothing. I left thinking the team was reserved, maybe risk-averse. I was wrong, and the mistake was mine. I had flown a Berlin playbook into a Jakarta room and then blamed the room.

Here's what took me too long, and a fair bit of humbling, to see: the method travels. The choreography doesn't.

Design thinking, the double diamond, sprints, "diverge then converge" — these are portable. They work on planes and across borders. What is not portable is the invisible social contract that makes them run: who is allowed to speak, how disagreement is allowed to show, what a silence means, how trust gets built before anyone will tell you the truth. Change the room and you change all of it — while your slides stay exactly the same.

Before I unpack it, feel it. Here's a Berlin facilitator's playbook. Flip the room:

Notice what just happened. Nobody got less creative on the flight. The moves didn't get worse. They hit a room running on different rules — and a move that signals respect in one place signals disrespect in another.

The two dials that flip almost everything

You don't need a PhD in anthropology to navigate this — you need to watch two dials. The cultural psychologist Geert Hofstede spent decades measuring how national cultures differ, and two of his dimensions explain most of what breaks in a workshop.

Power distance — how much hierarchy a room quietly accepts. Germany scores 35; Indonesia scores 78. That gap is the whole story of my failed critique round. In a low-power-distance room, challenging your boss in public is healthy and even admired. In a high-power-distance room, it forces an impossible choice: contradict a senior person (unthinkable) or stay silent (safe). They chose silence, every time, and I read it as having no opinion. They had plenty. They just weren't going to spend their standing to perform my idea of candour.

Individualism — whether the unit that matters is the person or the group. Germany scores 67; Indonesia scores 14, one of the most collectivist scores in the world. In an individualist room, "what do you think?" is an easy question. In a collectivist room, a person speaks for the group, after the group, and not ahead of it — so cold-calling someone for a hot take puts them in a bind, not a spotlight they enjoy.

Layer on what Erin Meyer maps in The Culture Map — Germany sits at the blunt, low-context, say-exactly-what-you-mean end of feedback; much of Southeast Asia communicates in high context, where the real message lives in what's not said — and you can predict, almost move by move, which parts of your playbook will misfire.

This is not "the West is right, adapt the locals"

That's the trap, and it's worth naming, because the lazy version of this post would be a guide to "managing" other cultures into behaving like a Berlin room. Run that and you'll be the most culturally fluent person failing in the room.

Because the dials cut both ways. The Jakarta room read things the Berlin room couldn't — the unspoken hesitation, the relationship under the task, the question nobody had asked out loud. The collectivism I mistook for passivity is also why a commitment, once it's genuinely shared, actually holds. Gotong royong — the Indonesian idea of shouldering a load together — is something a lot of individualist teams would kill for. And Berlin's bluntness, which can land like a slap elsewhere, is a gift too: you find out fast where you stand, and the feedback reaches you instead of circling behind your back.

Neither room is the advanced one. Each is fluent in something the other is clumsy at. The facilitator's job isn't to decide who's right. It's to stop running one room's rules in the other room.

How to read the room you're actually in

The fix is not a second template you swap in at the border. It's a habit: read the room's rules before you run your moves. A few that have saved me:

• Make speaking up cheap where it's expensive. Where challenging upward costs face, stop asking for it out loud. Take input in writing, anonymously, in parallel — then the quietest person in the room can be the boldest on the page. (Half of my "the Germans are just more vocal" assumption was really "I only ever gave people one, very exposed, way to contribute.")
• Let the senior person open the door. In a high-power-distance room, dissent doesn't start until the most senior person visibly invites it — and means it. Brief them beforehand to go first: to ask for pushback, to name one thing they got wrong. Then it's safe to follow.
• Read silence before you fill it. My instinct screams that a quiet room is a stuck room, so I jump in. Often the silence was thinking, or respect, or the half-second before someone says the most important thing all day. Count to five. Let it be uncomfortable. The discomfort is usually mine.
• Spend the relationship budget first. Where trust is relationship-based, the "wasted" hour on food and family and small talk is not a delay before the work — it is the work. Skip it and every later exercise runs on credit you never earned.

None of this is in the slide deck. It can't be — it changes with the room.

The skill was never the playbook

For years I thought I was good at this work because I had a sharp toolkit and could run it cleanly. Splitting my life between Berlin and Jakarta took that apart, gently. The toolkit is the cheap part. It's on the internet; it's in every facilitator's bag.

The actual skill is noticing — fast, and before you've done damage — that you've walked into a different room, and being willing to be a beginner in it. I've written about how learning a language gave me that beginner's mind back; reading a room is the same muscle. It's also close to reading the moment — except the variable isn't time, it's the unwritten rules of the people in front of you.

So before you run your favourite exercise in an unfamiliar room, ask the question that would have saved me a few bruised workshops: whose rules is this room running on — and are they mine?

Curious how your own room actually behaves — who really decides, whether evidence or seniority wins, what happens to a risky idea? That's what the Innovation Mirror is built to surface. Or let's talk through a room you're trying to read.