Cultural understanding: how quickly can your team fall out of touch?

It has been a sweltering summer.

Staying productive at this time of year is never easy.

The out-of-office messages flood the inbox as colleagues go on holiday. Kids are off school, making cameo appearances in the backgrounds of calls. Some clients have told us outright that August is a dead zone, completely off-limits and barren for any excessive workload.

If only we at The Unmistakables were so lucky. Culture does not take August off.

At The Unmistakables, we try to maintain a consistent drumbeat around what is happening in culture. We share news stories internally most days, follow shifts across the industries we work in and create regular space to discuss topics that might shape our work.

It is surprisingly easy to fall out of touch without that practice. Cultural shifts rarely arrive without build-up and missing enough of those smaller signals, and the gap between understanding the world around us widens quickly. 

So we recognise that these conversations go beyond keeping ourselves informed, as they exercise our critical thinking, help us interrogate what is happening around us, and prepare us to use our judgement effectively before a difficult decision demands it. 

Over the past two years, major companies have scaled back, renamed or quietly continued DEI programmes as the label has come under growing political and legal pressure. For us, maintaining this practice has become something of a lifeline; keeping us engaged even as the label itself has become increasingly contested. 

Knowing about culture only gets you so far

Businesses already talk a lot about continuous learning, the ongoing process of updating people’s knowledge and skills as their roles and the world around them change.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that 39% of workers’ existing skills will change or become outdated by 2030, with curiosity and lifelong learning becoming increasingly important.

Most of that conversation focuses on AI advancement, the evolution of technical skills and shifting notions of what professional development looks like. But what rarely gets the same attention, but goes hand in hand with it, is cultural understanding. 

By cultural understanding, we mean having a working sense of how people’s identities, histories and lived realities might shape the way they interpret a decision, message or experience.

This affects how we work with colleagues, how we engage consumers and how we make decisions for audiences whose lives may be very different from our own. It also involves recognising where our knowledge stops, becoming more comfortable with uncertainty and knowing when to ask, involve or bring in someone with a perspective we do not have.

That understanding needs consistent practice. Otherwise, considerations connected to someone’s identity or experience may only surface when the right person happens to notice them and feels confident enough to speak.

Take something as ordinary as scheduling. A Friday evening away day might appear neutral until it clashes with Shabbat for a Jewish colleague who observes it. In 2025, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleged that Apple had refused to accommodate a long-serving employee’s request to avoid working on Friday evenings and Saturdays after he converted to Judaism. The wider point is that nobody can hold detailed knowledge of every identity, practice or community. But teams can still build the awareness and best practice to pause, check and ask before a default decision excludes someone.

Regular discussion and engagement with topics related to people’s cultural nuances, and exploring differences, help teams spot these patterns earlier and also serve to upskill members who may not be privy to certain conversations. 

One of the most common issues we work through with clients is the fear of getting it wrong. “Cancel culture” has become a rhetorical dog whistle used to dismiss overdue conversations about racism, misogyny and other injustices, many of which have led to important accountability. Yet within the attention economy of social media, some of these conversations can also become flattened into groupthink, pile-ons and a kind of damnation protocol without nuanced understanding of the substance of the claims or accusations as well. For people and organisations who mainly encounter them through large-scale public call-outs, the learning environment can feel incredibly high stakes. An imperfect question or gap in knowledge risks being treated as a moral failure, which can leave people more focused on avoiding the conversation than learning how to navigate it.

For organisations or individuals with good intentions and gaps in their understanding, the prospect of asking an imperfect question can feel risky. Regular discussion gives people somewhere to work through uncertainty, raise concerns and hear different interpretations before the pressure of a live decision. These spaces still need to be carefully facilitated and intentionally shaped as places for learning, respectful mistake-making and holding space for other people’s experiences.

Research on psychological safety links it with learning and performance. Every time somebody questions a decision, the organisation shows them whether the challenge will be explored, ignored or treated as an inconvenience.

The CIPD’s evidence review on high-performing teams also points to the value of shared thinking, reflection and structured practices such as debriefs.

Having different perspectives in the room only gets you part of the way. Teams need regular ways to apply that thinking and carry what they learn into the next decision. Otherwise, the organisation is left to chance and over-reliant on individuals. 

Getting the tea

We practise this in a few different ways at TU.

Our daily internal sharing helps us keep up with stories affecting our clients, their audiences and the wider culture around them.

But in terms of emboldening this practice for other organisations, there is EDI-T.

It began, quite literally, as a way of getting the tea on what was happening across equity, diversity and inclusion in marketing. “Tea”, in the sense of gossip or inside information, has roots in Black drag culture and the language of gay Harlem. That feels quite fitting for a practice asking us to pay attention to where language and cultural meaning come from, and how they travel.

EDI-T has since grown into a way of examining creative work more closely. We look at representation, stereotyping, appropriation, cultural context and how an execution might be interpreted once it leaves the safety of the meeting room.

For clients, these sessions go further than handing over a neat list of correct answers that everyone can feel good about. We create a structured space to test how people are thinking about live campaigns, invite challenge to our own interpretation and discuss the decisions sitting underneath the work.

The sessions centre around questions such as: What associations does this choice bring into the work? How might it land without all the context sitting inside our heads? What does it add to a wider cultural pattern?

The intention is to leave teams with questions and decision-making skills they can carry into future work.

In a recent EDI-T session, we brought in a Transport for London campaign to explore why practising those questions is useful.

The campaign is complete. The audience sees one clip.

TfL’s “Act Like a Friend” campaign was designed to help passengers intervene safely when they witnessed sexual harassment or hate crime.

One shortened Facebook advert, seen in October 2025, showed a Black teenage boy verbally harassing a white teenage girl. A white male friend was also present, sitting close beside her and boxing her in. TfL saw both boys as contributing to the intimidation.

The Advertising Standards Authority ruled in February 2026 that the individual execution reinforced a harmful racial stereotype. While the white friend appeared in the clip, the regulator concluded that the Black teenager was the only character clearly presented as the aggressor.

The ruling quickly sparked a wider argument online. Some people saw the scene as a realistic depiction that could no longer be shown in a “woke” climate. Others pointed to a perceived double standard, arguing that the response would have been different if the perpetrator had been white.

Those reactions also sat within a wider public conversation about growing xenophobia and claims of “two-tier policing”, including the perception that institutions apply different standards depending on someone’s race. Whether those claims stand up is part of the debate. What matters here is that they shaped how people interpreted the ruling and pulled the advert into much larger tensions around race, fairness and who is allowed to be shown doing harm.

The ASA, however, assessed the clip as it might appear in somebody’s feed, separated from the wider film, casting balance and campaign intention. On its own, the execution risked being read as deliberately inflammatory, shifting attention towards the racial identity of the aggressor and away from the intended message of the campaign. In doing so, it could cause more harm than good by reinforcing a familiar stereotype of Black men as threatening or aggressive.

We used the example in EDI-T to help a client explore the decisions sitting underneath the ruling and the context driving the wider response.

The purpose was never to decide that another identity would have been a safer choice for the perpetrator. That only moves the problem somewhere else.

We focused on context and consequence. What cultural association does this portrayal activate? How often has this group already been shown in similar roles? What happens when one asset travels without the rest of the campaign around it?

These sessions mustn’t be a verdict for them to memorise. Instead it's a live example of interrogating, discussing and critically evaluating work streams which in turn, can pertain to our own.

Undoubtedly, holding regular conversations alone cannot predict every cultural tension, but quarterly sessions keep those questions active and give the team a better chance of recognising them when they arrive. 

It's important to mention that just having these conversations will not make an organisation culturally intelligent. The same people can meet every month and reinforce the same blind spots. A team can have a brilliant debate while its briefs, approval process and decision-making hierarchy remain completely untouched and unchanged.

The consistency of quarterly sessions keeps these questions active and gives the team a better chance of recognising the next cultural tension when it arrives, and having an external perspective like ours can also create some useful distance from the pressures attached to a decision, challenge assumptions that have become normal internally and introduce viewpoints the existing team may not hold.

We undoubtedly make these conversations easier in the sessions through facilitation. The longer-term value is helping teams build their own confidence, recognise when an external perspective is needed and become more comfortable working through what they do not know. It also prepares them to make the organisational changes needed to embed better decision-making.

Conversation needs a route into the work

For that practice to have an impact, the questions raised in these sessions need to travel into development, testing and sign-off. Decision-makers need to be close enough to the conversation to act on what comes out of it. Other people across the organisation also need to see that raising a concern can genuinely influence the outcome.

Through consistent questioning, discussion and critical evaluation, cultural understanding can begin to build across the organisation rather than sitting with a few individuals. Teams become better equipped to navigate questions around culture and identity, even as those questions move faster and become more complex.

Culture will keep moving, so the answer will move with it. The ability to reach a considered answer needs to be built before the pressure arrives.

When the next culturally difficult decision lands, will your team be meeting these questions for the first time or using judgement it has already practised?