Decisions keep coming back.
Agreement in the meeting produces no action after it. The same decision is taken three times and executed once.
HOME / EXPERTISE / INTERCULTURAL DUE DILIGENCE
INTERCULTURAL DUE DILIGENCE
What is cultural friction
costing your operation?
Rework and delays are rarely a failure of competence. They may be the operational cost of two teams reading the same instruction differently. We measure where that happens, in your own data, and hand you something your leadership can act on.
BUILT FOR
Multinational operations in BrazilExpatriate leadership and local teamsBrazilian companies with Chinese partnersHead-office and subsidiary misalignment01 / RECOGNISE THE SIGNALS
The friction reads as cultural. The cost lands on the P&L.
Responsibilities are read differently.
One role, two sets of expectations. Work falls between two people who each believed it belonged to the other.
Feedback changes nothing.
Delivered, received, acknowledged — and the behaviour stays as it was. The correction arrives weeks later, filed as a technical error.
One person holds the whole relationship.
Bilingual employees become the single channel between the two sides.
A single point of failure the operation does not see.
None of these appear in a management report under their real name. That is precisely why they persist.
02 / WHAT IT COSTS
Management practice is measurable. So is the gap between two of them.
Research on management practice across tens of thousands of establishments has established something useful here: how a firm runs its targets, its monitoring and its people is not soft, and the differences between firms explain a substantial share of the differences in productivity between them.
When one operation contains two management traditions, the organisation is carrying two systems at once and paying for the interference between them.
TIME
CAPACITY
TARGETS
THE UPSIDE
Worked deliberately, the same difference becomes an advantage. Evidence on international teams points the same way: diversity of background raises output when the team has the means to integrate it, and depresses it when it does not. The variable is not who is in the room. It is whether the operation has built the mechanism to convert two perspectives into one decision. That mechanism is what this work installs.
03 / THE APPROACH
Intercultural consultancy is divided in stages
Digital diagnostic
A structured questionnaire across levels and departments, answered individually. The contrast between groups is the data.
MAP THE SIGNALS.
Working session
The findings taken further, with two specialists and the first practical instruments on the table — on organisational communication, on compliance, or on both.
UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCES.
Processes in context
Observation of the real workflow — how a decision travels, where it waits, and what it costs when it stops.
FIND THE OPERATIONAL FRICTION.
Action plan and team charter
Recommendations built with the team that will use them, not delivered to them.
BUILD THE RESPONSE TOGETHER.
Research-informed. Grounded in your data. Developed with your people.
04 / THE DIGITAL DIAGNOSTIC
How it Works. See some examples
The diagnostic is a paid product and stands alone. Here is the instrument itself, and a page of the report it produces. Use the arrows to move between the two.
01 / WHAT WE ASK — SAMPLE QUESTIONNAIRE
Twenty questions, answered individually, in Portuguese, English or Mandarin. None of them uses the word culture: the reading comes from the contrast between who answered what.
Three of twenty shown. Each respondent also records department, level, origin (local or head office), time with the company and how often they work across the two sides.
02 / WHAT YOU RECEIVE — SAMPLE REPORT
One finding from a report, reproduced in full. A complete report carries eight.
Intercultural Diagnostic Report — sample
FINDING 02 — Confirmation of understanding between head office and local operation
On the statement “When I speak with colleagues from the other country, I can confirm that I was understood”, respondents from head office averaged 4.3. Locally hired respondents averaged 2.2 on the same statement. The 2.1-point gap is the widest in the set.
The reading is not language proficiency: 9 of 14 respondents work in English and report being comfortable in it. What the open answers show is asymmetry of checking. Three local accounts describe an instruction received by message, then executed, then corrected after delivery. No head-office account mentions the same cycle — from that side, the instruction was given and the task was completed.
This is a documented pattern in international teams: the sender treats silence as agreement, and the receiver treats a clarifying question as an admission of incompetence. The rework surfaces weeks later and is recorded as a technical error.
What this company already does well: three respondents independently named the directors' openness to conversation outside the hierarchy. The channel exists. It is not being used to confirm tasks.
Recommended action: a two-line instruction read-back protocol, applied in the technical department for 30 days, with a closing review. Near-zero operating cost. The verification indicator is the rework count over the period.
REPORT CONTENTS
- 1Scope, respondents and limits of the reading
- 2Confirmation of understanding across the two sides (shown above)
- 3Decision paths and where they stall
- 4Role expectations and where they diverge
- 5Load carried by bilingual staff
- 6Recognition and retention signals
- 7What the operation already does well
- 8Recommended actions, ordered by cost and reversibility
03 / SCOPE AND PRICE
01 — DIAGNOSTIC · 10 ACCESSES
Diagnostic · 10 accesses
R$ 800
- 10 individual accesses, one per respondent
- Minimum of 2 different departments
- Written diagnostic report, produced and reviewed by our team
- Response window: 21 days from purchase; report within 7 days of it closing
Why the department rule: the analysis reads the distance between groups. Ten answers from a single department produce averages, and averages tell you nothing you did not already suspect. Three departments instead of two sharpens the reading considerably.
02 — EXTENDED DIAGNOSTIC · 20 ACCESSES
Extended diagnostic · 20 accesses
R$ 1,200
- 20 individual accesses
- Minimum of 3 different departments
- Written diagnostic report, produced and reviewed by our team
- Response window: 21 days from purchase; report within 7 days of it closing
What the extra scope buys: twenty respondents across three departments let us follow a process along its actual path rather than sampling points on it. We see where a task passes from one department to the next, what happens to it at each handover, and how the relationship between the two cultures shows up at each of those joints. The result is a wider and more complex analysis, and recommendations that name specific steps in specific processes rather than general directions.
WORKING SESSIONS · BOUGHT SEPARATELY, AFTER THE DIAGNOSTIC
03 — ORGANISATIONAL COMMUNICATION SESSION
Organisational communication session
R$ 800
90 MINUTES · ONLINE · TWO SPECIALISTS
A working session that takes the findings further than the report can go on its own. We put the first instruments on the table: what to change in how decisions are recorded, how instructions are confirmed, and how meetings close — the practical mechanics of intercultural fluency and process efficiency, grounded in organisational communication.
You leave with a short set of instruments to apply immediately, and a clear sense of which ones need a longer intervention.
04 — LEGAL AND TAX SESSION
Legal and tax compliance session
R$ 800
90 MINUTES · ONLINE · LEGAL AND TAX SPECIALISTS
For operations where the diagnostic surfaces compliance questions. Ninety minutes with our legal and tax specialists, focused on what has to be done: obligations that apply to your structure, what is exposed, and in what order to address it.
You leave with an initial compliance map.
FULL ADVISORY
The complete intervention, sized to the operation. It includes on-site interviews, observation of real processes, a process map, team charters, workshops, and the implementation of organisational communication protocols — written to align with ISO 9001 guidance, so that what we install can live inside your quality management system rather than beside it.
Scope, duration and price depend on the size of the operation, the time available and the kind of advisory work required.
HOW THE DIAGNOSTIC RUNS
HOW IT IS DISTRIBUTED
One purchase, one code
One purchase gives you one access code, which you distribute internally. Responses are individual and are never attributed to named people in the report.
21 DAYS + 7 DAYS
The response window
Respondents have 21 days from purchase. The report follows within 7 days of the window closing, built on whatever has been answered by day 21. If only part of the accesses are used, or every answer comes from one department, we still produce the report and state the limits of the reading plainly.
WHEN EVERYONE HAS ANSWERED
Close the window early
If no further responses are coming, reply to the email that carried your access links and tell us. The 21-day count stops that day and the 7-day report count begins, so a company that involves fewer people does not wait out a window it no longer needs.
LET'S FIND YOUR STARTING POINT
Tell us what is happening. We will tell you which stage to start at — and if the diagnostic is enough on its own, we will say so.
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