2025-2026
Adapting psychological insights for cross-cultural audiences
initial challenges
As part of a membership under the Singapore Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam, I was tasked to produce organisational psychology content for people working in or with Vietnamese teams for The Psychology Practice. The initial content angle applied standard organisational psychology topics (cross-cultural dynamics, workplace communication) directly to this audience.
However, it did not land. Stakeholder feedback flagged that this early content read as rather self-evident: pointing out that "working across cultures is difficult" told the audience nothing they did not already know from lived experience. Thus, the insight had to go deeper than description and theory.
a new strategy
The content strategy shifted from describing cross-cultural friction to explaining the unspoken mechanisms behind it: surfacing workplace behaviours that are common, normalised, and rarely discussed openly, such as the role of face-saving in Vietnamese professional culture. Many people operating in cross-border teams recognise these dynamics intuitively but have never had them named or explained, particularly if they are not from the cultural context that produced them.
This shift also repositioned TPP's role beyond a clinical practice producing wellness content. The deeper psychological framing supported a positioning closer to an applied psychology consultancy.
thinking process
Content was structured around organisational psychology themes, and written to be analytically substantive while remaining visually skimmable.
It was produced across three formats to match different consumption contexts: infographics for SingCham's website, carousel posts for their Facebook, and a digest for their weekly bulletin, then cross-posted to TPP's own channels for additional reach.
infographic
carousel ↗
digest