Institutions in a Split Screen
What people who live between cultures notice first at borders, in offices, and in the stories countries tell about themselves.
In this new collaboration, I bring in Emanuela B. If her name is familiar, it is probably from the piece we co‑wrote on cultural self‑awareness in her Inclusion Room series. You can read it here.
We are both versed in cultural intelligence, but from different lenses: Emanuela in coaching, and I in strategy consulting. For both of us, cultural intelligence is less a concept than a habit: paying attention to how people read the same moment differently, and what that does to trust, power, and room to move. What often surprises people is that our original professions are intertwined in a different way: engineering and urban planning, which frame how we both read systems and power.
In my career, I learned to read power by living and working between Toronto and Edmonton, and eventually between Canada and Europe. I have not lived in, let alone visited, Malta as an adult, nor have I worked at an EU institution. Comparing Ottawa, Valletta, and Brussels as overlapping systems has consequently shaped how I read all three. These institutions look less like neutral machines and more like places that sort people by identity and position.
Working across Canadian and European systems from the same city teaches you to read the same signal twice. A policy announcement that lands as reassurance on one side of the Atlantic often reads as performance on the other — not because one reading is more cynical, but because distance strips away the ambient credibility that proximity provides. I noticed this most sharply around questions of belonging: who a government addresses when it speaks about openness, whose presence it assumes when it designs a process, and where the gap opens between the two. Ottawa and Brussels share a vocabulary of inclusion that is, in both cases, partially sincere and partially self-congratulatory, and the only reliable way to tell the difference is to have needed something from both and watched what actually happened. Malta sits in that picture as a specific kind of reminder which tells you something about what formal belonging actually guarantees.
Years after arriving, immigrants remain more than twice as likely as Canadian-born workers to be overqualified for their jobs, often because foreign degrees and experience are discounted in practice. In Europe, official reports on professional qualification recognition describe the same pattern: under‑resourced authorities, slow procedures, and workers pushed into roles below their training, even as the Union talks about a “war for talent” and creates new tools to attract non‑EU professionals. People who move between systems live that contradiction directly — hearing talk of shortages and openness while spending years proving what they already know how to do.
The same contradiction shows up in the EU’s own backyard. Reports on intra‑EU labour mobility describe high costs, inflexible working arrangements, and patchy recognition of skills, even for EU nationals moving within the Single Market. The pattern also appears in Europe’s signature promise of free movement. An EU worker moving to Germany, for example, should face few barriers. Many do not. Reports cite high costs, inflexible working conditions, unrecognized qualifications, limited chances to work and advance in trained professions, and bureaucracy that derails plans to settle. In debates in both Europe and Canada, this becomes a labour shortage and productivity problem. For people navigating multiple systems, it becomes a test of what an open labour market means when skills and lives are treated as unreadable.
Credential recognition is only one place this gap surfaces. Diaspora communities read Canadian organizations at a second frequency entirely. Venezuelans in Canada reacted to Nicolás Maduro’s fall with celebration and unease, tracking events in Caracas as they watched the Canadian government respond. Will they be treated as refugees, new citizens, political actors, or security risks? Iranian-Canadians are processing upheaval in Iran and strikes on the regime with relief, anxiety, and disagreement about foreign intervention. Many follow events through internet shutdowns, check on family, and watch Ottawa’s positioning on sanctions, regime change, and the wider conflict. Canadian institutions are not only “domestic” in this context. Statements and decisions are weighed for what they mean for relatives under attack, and for safety in a country that hosts one of the world’s largest Iranian diasporas. This double reading—two political systems at once, and the gap between values and decisions—is part of what people living between cultures bring to every institution. It also shows how easily institutions can make people feel powerless.
People who live between cultures and political systems interpret institutions with a sharper eye for gaps between declared values and lived outcomes: between a Commission work programme and a border experience, between a speech about inclusion and a visa desk, between a national story of openness and a museum gallery lined with exclusion certificates. They track where rules bend for some and harden for others. They notice when “service” becomes surveillance. They learn when trust is earned and when it is demanded. They track where rules bend for some and harden for others. They notice when “service” becomes surveillance. They learn when trust is earned and when it is demanded. This piece with Emanuela holds that perspective without romanticizing the “in-between,” and with attention to what people who live there already know about how institutions work.
If these contradictions are stark at borders and immigration desks, Emanuela has watched their softer versions inside the walls of European institutions themselves. Emanuela has spent years watching the same logic play out from a different vantage point — not at the border desk, but in the working groups, performance reviews, and corridor conversations where European organizations decide, more quietly, whose experience counts.
I have spent more than twenty years working across international teams, and for many of those years, I was inside a European institution built on the idea that different ways of thinking can be held together by a shared process. In many ways, it succeeds. The procedures are precise. The consensus is carefully built. The decision layers are designed to absorb friction before it becomes conflict.
Colleagues who sit in Commission working groups describe the same effect: rooms that feel aligned and meetings that run smoothly.
From the outside, it can look effortless.
But if you stay long enough, you notice what the smoothness can hide.
Differences do not disappear. They move into the moments the process does not fully hold: performance reviews where feedback styles clash, endgame negotiations where some need collective agreement and others hold a personal line, corridor conversations where different communication styles collide.
Today, I stand in a different place: I accompany people through situations I’ve once lived, helping them find their own map. The people I coach don’t feel stuck in the process, nor do they question the framework. They are exhausted by the cost of fitting in. They are tired of translating not just language but intent, context, and the unwritten rules of who gets to speak and when. Cultural agility, in their case, is not a set of facts but a way of moving through every moment: staying curious, watching first, and letting their own assumptions be the first thing they test.
Most of these environments genuinely value diversity. The design is often inclusive by intent. Still, I keep wondering what would change if differences were not only accommodated by the frame, but invited to show themselves in those unguarded moments. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie put it in a different context, “Unity does not imply the absence of differences – it signifies the choice to unite in spite of them.” That is the choice many institutions still struggle to make when the meeting ends, and diversity moves into the corridor.
That cost is not a design flaw to be corrected. It is information about where the frame ends and where the most useful intelligence already in the room actually resides.
And yet, these environments, precisely because they concentrate so many different ways of thinking, working, and reading, are the most fertile ground we have. Not just for studying intercultural dynamics, but for learning how to channel them deliberately. The difference is the capacity to see what is already in the room and ask what becomes possible when those differences are treated as a source of strength rather than a variable to be managed. That work starts with paying attention to the moments when the frame runs out. Because that is exactly where the most useful intelligence lives.
What do people who live between cultures notice first?
What people who live between cultures notice first is rarely the policy announcement. It tends to be the smaller signal, the tiny clue that tells you how the system will really treat you. I noticed it at Lisbon airport, travelling with Sumita to the UK. The border guard said her name easily, then made a small joke about having seen harder ones. A minor warmth inside a process built on suspicion. Most of the time, the routine treats a name as a problem to be solved — the mission statement emphasizes openness, while the visa desk begins with doubt. People who move between systems learn to read these signals quickly, because misjudging them carries a cost.
What Emanuela found, working inside European institutions over many years, is that the sorting rarely stops at the border — it just becomes harder to see, absorbed into the texture of performance reviews, corridor conversations, and the unspoken rules governing who speaks and when.
Emanuela’s work points to the same internal reality. The people navigating these environments are exhausted not by the process but by the constant work of translation — not just of language, but of intent, status, and the unwritten rules governing who gets to speak and when. What these organizations treat as a diversity variable is, in practice, a fluency they cannot buy or train into existence. It is already there, carried by the people they keep asking to fit in.
What institutions often treat as a diversity “variable” is, in practice, a fluency they cannot buy or train into existence. It is already there, carried by the people they keep asking to fit in. People who move between cultures already do the translation work institutions claim to want. They see the gap between a Commission work plan and real border experiences. They recognize when “service” turns into surveillance. They notice where trust is earned and where it’s just demanded.
Canadian and European governments are sitting on this capacity and mostly leave it on the sidelines. Diaspora communities already interpret foreign policy in real time, track political signals across two systems simultaneously, and understand the gap between a government’s stated values and its actual procedures — a capacity that official reports on labour shortages and skills gaps tend to bury behind aggregate numbers and generic calls to “unlock talent.”
Reversing that pattern would show up first in the small things: a hiring process that reads a non-linear career as evidence of range rather than instability, a visa desk that begins from trust rather than suspicion, a meeting culture that does not mistake a smooth surface for genuine alignment. It would show up in the larger things too — in procedures that make sense to people coming from different systems. In a politics that understands openness as something you prove in routines, not just announce in speeches.
André Darmanin writes Cultural Currents on governance, cultural intelligence, and how multilevel systems actually work in practice. He runs Cultural Nexus Group, advising public-sector and nonprofit organizations across Canada and the European Union.
Emanuela Buccafurri writes The Inclusion Room. Her Substack is on cultural intelligence, belonging, and what organizations gain when they stop treating difference as a problem to be managed.
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