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.
Interstice Atelier helps businesses and institutions find out what is influencing a situation before they decide how to move forward: entering a new market, bringing teams together, building a partnership, or explaining an unexpected response.
Culture can explain a problem, and so can leadership, structure, incentives, or unclear communication. Organizations that guess wrong end up fixing the wrong thing.
Consider two teams who read the same policy differently. Do their expectations differ, is the policy unclear, or both? The response depends on what we find.
We begin with what you are trying to accomplish and the question you need answered. We examine the circumstances through research, conversation, and analysis and, when the question calls for it, the histories, institutions, and cultural expectations behind them. We explain what the evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and what it means for your next decision.
Founders, executives, and leaders of businesses and institutions, in strategy, communications, people, or international operations.
Interstice Atelier was founded by Heather Noel, with co-founder François-Xavier P. Gleyzon, PhD. Our work joins experience in organizational strategy and international contexts with scholarly work in culture, philosophy, language, and literature, and we bring in further expertise when a question requires it. Meet the team →
"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