01
StoryRoot
Understand the cultural values, lived experiences, and contexts beneath the story.
Author Educator Speaker
Author Educator Speaker
The Book
Culturally Intelligent Storytelling for Southeast Asian Creators explores a question that shaped Ned Legaspi’s three decades in international media:
How can stories rooted in one culture resonate with audiences shaped by another?
Drawing from lived experience, cultural intelligence research, and storytelling practice, the book offers Southeast Asian creators a framework for understanding how culture shapes the stories we tell and the ways audiences receive them.
The book is the first fully developed application of the C3 Bamboo Framework, bringing its focus on Culture, Communication, and Connection into the practice of storytelling across cultures.
The Storytelling Challenge
A creator can reach almost anyone now. That does not mean the story will be understood, felt, or remembered the same way once it crosses a border.
Culture decides what an audience finds moving, funny, believable, or offensive.
The work is not making a local story more global. It is knowing what travels, what needs context, what can be adapted, and what has to stay exactly as it is.
A Culturally Intelligent Approach
The book puts cultural understanding and storytelling practice in the same room.
It introduces creators to cultural intelligence and shows how cultural values and audience context can shape creative decisions without turning storytelling into a formula.
The aim is not a story everyone everywhere accepts.
It is to help creators be deliberate about four things:
The book treats this as a balance between cultural theory and story practice, meant to sharpen creative instinct rather than replace it.
The CIS Bamboo Framework
At the heart of the book is the CIS Bamboo Framework, the first fully developed application of the broader C3 Bamboo Framework. Built for storytelling across cultures, it helps a story travel without losing its roots.
Inspired by the qualities of bamboo and informed by cultural intelligence, the framework follows the movement of a story from cultural grounding to cultural impact.
Understand the cultural values, lived experiences, and contexts beneath the story.
Shape characters, narratives, and creative choices with cultural awareness.
Sense where and how the story may resonate across audiences and contexts.
Listen to how audiences receive, interpret, remember, and carry the story forward.
Who It Is For
This book was written first for Southeast Asian storytellers and the people who help their work reach an audience.
Writers, directors, producers, media executives, editors, showrunners, and educators working across cultures.
It is also for anyone asking:
How do I tell a story that can travel without losing its soul?
In Readers' Hands
United Kingdom
Philippine diplomat and public servant
With the hardcover edition
United States of America
Leadership psychologist, executive coach, and founder of The Leading Mind
With the ebook edition
Australia
International Intercultural Specialist | CQ Fellow (Cultural Intelligence)
With the paperback edition
Start Reading
Before you buy, explore the ideas behind Culturally Intelligent Storytelling for Southeast Asian Creators.
This 27-page preview includes David Livermore's Foreword, Ned Legaspi's Preface, the Introduction, and selected chapters on the Bamboo Worldview and the CIS Bamboo Framework.
Discover how stories can travel across cultures without losing their roots.
Let Stories Travel
Stories do not have to lose their cultural identity to cross borders.
Culturally Intelligent Storytelling for Southeast Asian Creators is an invitation to create with more cultural awareness, more intent, and the nerve to stay rooted while reaching outward.
It is where the broader questions of Culture, Communication, and Connection become a practical method for creators.
