We help organizations understand why culture is affecting a decision, a message, or a relationship.
The space between cultures — where communication, meaning, and understanding are gained or lost.
Between intention and reception, between one way of seeing and another, and between the assumptions we carry and the realities we encounter.
We examine what happens to meaning when people, ideas, and institutions encounter different cultural contexts.
A decision that appears straightforward in one context may be interpreted differently in another. The same is true of a message, a strategy, a brand, a relationship, or an institution itself.
A merger where two teams read the same policy differently. A brand that lands well at home and falls flat abroad. A partnership where the roles are clear on paper but not in practice. This is the kind of question we work on.
The reasons are not always obvious. What appears to be resistance, mistrust, disagreement, or an unexpected response may have several explanations. Cultural context may be contributing to the friction — or the explanation lies somewhere else.
Before deciding how to respond, it helps to understand what is influencing the situation.
We investigate how a situation is being understood, determine whether cultural context is playing a role, and give leadership a clear basis for deciding how to move forward with what we have learned.
Culture may be central to a question. Sometimes it's one influence among several. Sometimes it isn't particularly consequential at all.
Our work begins with the question itself.
What are you trying to do? What are you encountering that you did not expect? What are people understanding differently? What assumptions are being made? What needs to be understood before you decide how to move forward?
We follow those questions wherever the evidence requires. The investigation may lead into organizational history, institutional structures, language, professional norms, regional or national context, political or economic conditions, or the experiences of the people involved. Often, several are operating at once.
The purpose is not to find culture everywhere. It is to understand where culture matters, how it matters, and what else may be influencing the situation.
Translation is not only a matter of language.
An idea can remain perfectly intelligible and still mean something different in another context. A practice intended to communicate accountability may be read as distrust. A decision intended as efficient may be experienced as exclusion. A brand, policy, relationship, or institutional position can carry assumptions that are obvious in one setting and nearly invisible in another.
Interstice examines those differences without reducing people to cultural types or treating any one interpretation as culturally neutral.
We are interested in what meaning survives, what changes, what is understood differently, and why.
Interstice works with businesses, institutions, and their leadership when something consequential needs to be understood — entering or developing a market, bringing organizations together, establishing an international partnership, communicating with different audiences, developing a brand or institutional position, working with governments or communities, or trying to understand why an existing approach is producing an unexpected response.
The work may begin with a CEO or founder, or with leadership in strategy, people, communications, brand, international operations, public affairs, or another part of the organization responsible for the question.
What matters is not the sector. It is the question the organization needs to answer.
"Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants."— Edward T. Hall
Each begins with a different kind of question, while all draw on the same attention to culture, perception, and meaning. Together, they describe the kinds of work people bring to Interstice and the different ways we may approach it.
For organizations, leaders, and institutions working across cultural contexts — entering markets, communicating across systems, or trying to understand why something that works in one context does not translate cleanly into another.
For organizations and brands communicating across audiences, markets, or cultural contexts. We look at the relationship between what a brand intends to communicate and what people actually perceive, interpret, and experience.
For individuals, families, leaders, and teams navigating cultural transition, global mobility, identity, belonging, or life across more than one cultural system.
For organizations, institutions, conferences, and groups interested in examining culture more closely. We develop talks, workshops, and facilitated conversations around perception, identity, communication, belonging, and the assumptions that may become visible when different ways of seeing meet.
Across organizations, public figures, film and media, theater and performing arts, publishing, sciences, humanities, foundations, healthcare, communications and marketing, East ↔ West engagements, and individuals in cultural transition.
For work that benefits from continuity: an evolving market, organizational change, a long arc of communication across cultures, or another situation in which understanding develops over time. We remain involved as thinking partners, observing patterns, testing assumptions, and informing decisions as the context evolves.
For a defined challenge such as a market entry, brand or communication question, cultural transition, research problem, experience design, or a particular point of friction. We work closely with you to understand what is happening and develop a useful way forward.
A focused day devoted to one question, challenge, or area of uncertainty. You bring the situation; we bring sustained attention, cultural analysis, and an outside perspective. The aim is greater clarity about what you are seeing and what a useful next step might be.
We also work between French and English, carrying not only words but the cultural meaning that informs them.
Heather Noel · François-Xavier P. Gleyzon, PhD
Interstice brings together different ways of seeing, informed by scholarship and lived experience, cultural theory and practical application, language, observation, research, and the experience of living across cultural contexts. Our wider advisory network draws from scholarship, the arts, and other disciplines that deepen the questions we are trying to understand.
Meet the founders & advisors →Cultural distance is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition of human experience — one that, when met with genuine attention, becomes the place where the most meaningful connections are made.
We built Interstice because we have lived in that distance. We know what it costs when communication fails to cross it, and we know what becomes possible when it does. That knowledge is not just academic. For us, it is personal.
We see cultural distance as an opportunity — to build bridges between people, organizations, and communities, and to create understanding where there was once only gap. This is not work we offer from the outside. It is work we do from within.
If you are navigating cultural distance within an organization, a brand, a team, a family, a transition, or a question that is difficult to see clearly from where you are standing, we would welcome the conversation.
You do not need to arrive with the problem fully defined. Understanding what is actually happening is often the first part of the work.
hello@intersticeatelier.com