How Historical Fiction Strengthens Perspective-Taking and Develops Cultural Intelligence

SHOW NOTES:

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How Historical Fiction Strengthens Perspective-Taking and Develops Cultural Intelligence

Learning how historical fiction strengthens perspective-taking and develops cultural intelligence begins with recognising that the coordination problems in your international team may not be coordination problems at all.

Andy had been leading distributed software development teams across three continents for years — metrics strong, systems sound, results consistently praised. He was reaching the problems. He wasn't reaching the people. This is the story of the night a novel showed him why — and changed how he understood every person he led.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

The Storytelling Newsletter (Free) Short, focused, and grounded in real WorkLife situations — how we communicate, lead, make decisions, and navigate challenges at work.  

Story Lesson: How Historical Fiction Strengthens Perspective-Taking and Develops Cultural Intelligence Learn how stories that explore cultural inheritance and historical perspective can deepen cross-cultural intelligence and change how you understand the people you lead.

Guided Programme The Power of Fiction: Developing Character Traits Through Reading –Discover how literature strengthens empathy, perspective, and moral judgement — essential traits for thoughtful leadership. 

This story was inspired by my book, WorkLife Book Club Volume One Shoreditch by Carmel O’ Reilly — following members of a London book club as they navigate WorkLife challenges through the wisdom found in the books they read together.

Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships: carmel@schoolofworklife.com

schoolofworklife.com

The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles, failures and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O’ Reilly

Transcript

Speaker 0:08

Andy had been leading distributed software development teams across three continents for years. His metrics were strong, his systems were sound, his project management was the kind other team leaders benchmarked against. But something kept defeating him. Priya's team validated edge cases long after the timeline required it. James questioned user assumptions in ways that stalled decision making. Kenji agreed clearly in every meeting and then submitted proposals that ignored what had been decided. Andy had addressed each of these situations multiple times with clear communication and logical solutions. Nothing changed. He was reaching the problems, he wasn't reaching the people. Welcome to Work Life Stories from School of Work Life. I'm Carmel O'Reilly, and today's episode is how historical fiction strengthens perspective taking and develops cultural intelligence. What becomes possible when you stop managing behavior and start understanding its roots? This story is about Andy and about the night he picked up a novel to quiet his mind and discovered it was showing him everything he'd been missing about the people he led. The night he picked up a book. The shift began on a night when he'd been staring at a draft email for twenty minutes, trying to address his team's coordination problems without sounding defensive, and eventually giving up. He reached for a novel his sister had been pressing on him for months, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. He opened it expecting distraction. Instead he found himself absorbed in something entirely unexpected. Not the historical sweep of the story, but the way Gyasi made visible the invisible architecture behind each character's choices, the cultural frameworks passed down through generations, the inherited values shaping how people understood authority, quality, responsibility, and trust. The ways people carried their histories into every room they entered without knowing they were doing so. By dawn he had finished a book. He sat at his kitchen table with his coffee and found his mind moving, not through the story he had just read, but through his team, Priya, James, Kenji. He was thinking about them differently, and he couldn't quite say when the shift had happened. The Monday morning experiment. That Monday, Priya mentioned her team was taking additional time to validate edge cases again. And his usual response was already forming. We need to stay on the critical path. Edge cases can wait for the next iteration. Instead he paused and asked a different question. What's your team seeing in these edge cases that makes them worth the additional validation time? The answer had nothing to do with inefficiency. Priya explained how thorough early stage testing had prevented critical failures in previous projects, how the additional time invested at the start had consistently reduced expensive debugging later. Her team wasn't moving slowly, they were applying a culturally informed understanding of quality that Andy's frameworks had been reading as delay. The problem Andy had been trying to manage wasn't a process problem. It was invisible to him because he had never thought to look for it. What Andy realized afterwards, the more Andy thought about homegoing, the more clearly he saw what the novel had shown him. Every character's choices made sense when she understood the cultural inheritance shaping them. What looked like resistance or passive from the outside was often professional wisdom from the inside, filtered through values and framework that Andy's own background had never equipped him to recognize. He began seeing the same patterns across his team. People weren't behaving illogically, they were operating from frameworks he hadn't examined. What happened next? A few days later Andy approached James, whose persistent questioning of user assumptions had been slowing decisions and frustrating the team. This time, instead of managing the behavior, he got curious about it. Help me understand your thinking when you raise these questions, he said. What James described stopped Andy completely. In James' professional background, questioning fundamental assumptions wasn't a challenge to leadership, it was a professional obligation. Failing to raise potential concerns would be seen as nell negligent. His questioning wasn't obstruction, it was culturally formed expression of rigor that Andy had been constantly misreading as the resistance. The problem wasn't James' behavior, it was Andy's interpretation of it. The shift, one insight changed how Andy approached international leadership from managing visible coordination problems efficiently to understanding the cultural inheritance shaping them. Instead of asking, why isn't this working? He started asking, What frameworks might be driving this that I haven't considered? And the conversations changed almost immediately. The ripple effect. Once Andy began working this way, other situations started to make more sense. Kenji's polite agreement that consistently failed to translate into aligned implementation wasn't passive resistance. It was a culturally informed approach to professional hierarchy that Andy's meeting structures had never created space for. When Andy designed a pre-meeting process that allowed Kenji to share technical analysis in writing before group discussions, architectural concerns that had been accumulating for weeks finally surfaced. Problems that had been appearing late as expensive implementation obstacles began appearing early as design questions, and they were still straightforward to resolve. The test he wasn't expecting, but Andy's growing confidence in his new approach was about to be tested. When Soon Ji joined from the sole office, Andy believed he recognized her measured responses immediately. He introduced a structured written feedback protocol before she had indicated she needed one. She requested a private conversation shortly afterwards. I'd prefer to be asked how I work, she said, rather than given a process that assumes I already know. Andy had taken specific insight about one person's cultural inheritance and quietly converted it into a general theory. The result was a more sophisticated version of the same error he'd started with, and recognizing that took him somewhere more uncomfortable still, an examination of the cultural inheritance he had never once thought to question in himself. When he brought this recognition into a conversation with the whole team, asking everyone, including himself, to describe what a recent decision-making process had looked and felt like from where they sat. The responses revealed that the same events had been lived as entirely different realities. The conversation became the foundation for something his earlier approach had never produced. A team developing collective capacity to navigate cultural difference rather than one that depended on Andy to manage it for them. The teaching insight, Andy discovered that international leadership wasn't about managing cultural differences efficiently. It was about understanding the inherited frameworks shaping how people approach their work. When he stopped asking, why aren't they adopting, and started asking, what might they be carrying that I haven't understood? Two things changed. His decisions incorporated intelligence he'd previously been structuring out of the conversation. And the people he led finally felt seen for what they actually brought. Why this matters, professional training and cross-cultural management often focuses on frameworks, communication styles, and country-specific protocols. But leading international teams also requires something harder to teach, the recognition that every person operates from a complex inherited set of values, assumptions, and professional instincts, and that your own frameworks are no less inherited, no less invisible, and no less shaping of what you see and miss. When we read historical fiction, we practice a specific kind of attention, genuine curiosity about what someone is carrying from their history before judging what they should do differently. And his story shows what happens when the habit of attention moves from the page into the room. And like the best novels, the practice keeps revealing new things the longer you stay with it. That's today's story, how historical fiction strengthens perspective taking and develops cultural intelligence. The complete lesson follows Andy's full journey, including how insights from Home Going transformed how he approached cultural difference, the moment his growing confidence produced its own blind spot, and what he discovered when he returned to the book six months later. It shows how you can apply the same perspective in your own work, learning to recognize the cultural frameworks behind behavior and respond with the intelligence and curiosity that international leadership quietly requires. And if you want to go deeper, the companion guided program, The Power of Fiction, Developing Character Traits Through Reading, is there when you're ready. All the details and links are in the show notes, or you can find everything at schoolofworklife.com. Subscribe to the podcast for weekly audio stories, or visit a storytelling newsletter for the written versions, or both. Next time we'll be exploring how strategic opening lines transform leadership communications. A story about how Declan discovered that a culture leader wants to build has the power to begin in the very first sentence. Until then, remember the novels that move you most deeply often contain the keys to understanding the people and challenges you encounter in your professional life. Thank you for listening.