The Road Here
This is the turn in the story. Eight rooms into the year, and this was the first one that was not a campus or a conference at all. Talking with healthcare workers about hierarchy, communication, and generational difference is what pushed the work past storytelling and into ordinary working life. C3 grew out of this conversation.
Healthcare and Cultural Intelligence: Decoding the Intersections
Cultural Intelligence at Cedars-Sinai: Decoding the Intersections
I brought Decoding the Intersections to Cedars-Sinai, where I joined healthcare and organizational leaders for a career development session on communication styles, generational shifts, and cultural intelligence at work.
This is where C3 started. I came in to talk about storytelling. I left with a bigger question.
The Institution
A Conversation Inside a Leading Academic Medical Center
Cedars-Sinai is a large nonprofit academic medical center in Los Angeles, serving the city and patients from around the world.
Many of the people in the room were Filipino healthcare workers. That made the conversation both institutional and personal.
The session put cultural intelligence into the realities of care work: hierarchy, communication, and how people adapt.
The Session
Decoding the Intersections: Communication Styles, Generational Shifts, and the Context of Cultural Intelligence
The session explored how cultural expectations influence the way healthcare professionals communicate, respond to authority, interpret behavior, adapt across generations, and build trust in the workplace.
Communication Styles
Direct and indirect communication, high-context and low-context meaning, and the risks of assuming that shared language guarantees shared understanding.
Authority and Relationships
How power distance, hierarchy, respect, collectivism, and relationship expectations can shape teamwork and professional interaction.
Generational Shifts
How changing workplace values and expectations interact with culture, professional identity, migration, and the experience of adapting across contexts.
Talk of the Hour
Three Professional Perspectives in One Conversation
The program connected organizational development, cultural intelligence, and nursing leadership.
Liv Behre
Senior Organizational Development Partner in Learning and Organizational Development at Cedars-Sinai.
Ned Legaspi
Author, educator, speaker, and Cultural Intelligence Fellow exploring how culture shapes communication and connection.
Peachy Hain
Executive Director of Nursing and advisor to the Fil-Am C.A.R.E.S. Employee Resource Group.
From Stories to People
One Question Changed the Direction of the Work
Near the end, a male nurse raised his hand. He wanted more examples. More application. He wanted to know what to do with any of this during shifts, handovers, and team interactions on his own floor.
He was not being difficult. He was telling me the framework was still too abstract to use on a Monday. I had built it around stories. He was asking me to bring it to work.
That question is the reason C3 exists. Stories stayed as one lens, but they could not be the only one. The framework had to account for the people who communicate and care across cultural differences, not only the ones who tell stories about it.
The three lenses came out of that room. The emerging logic of C3
Acknowledgment
An Invitation That Opened a New Direction
The Cedars-Sinai engagement was made possible through the invitation and support of Janeth Zafra-Mauricio and the Fil-Am C.A.R.E.S. community.
The session opened a new field of inquiry for Ned's work: how culturally grounded frameworks could help professionals navigate communication, hierarchy, identity, care, and trust in institutions where people from different backgrounds work together every day.
C3 Bamboo Framework
Explore how Culture, Communication, and Connection now operate across the three lenses of Stories, People, and Nations.
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View speaking areas involving cross-cultural communication, healthcare, professional adaptation, storytelling, and cultural diplomacy.
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