King's College London

Every organisation likes to think it communicates well. Yet across global businesses, hospitals, universities and international agencies, the same problem keeps resurfacing: messages that make sense in one language or culture land very differently in another. The costs are often subtle, but significant, showing up as a client who feels unheard, a colleague who stays quiet in a meeting or a policy that gets lost in translation between the head office and a regional team.

Research by Dr Shuangyu Li, Reader in Clinical Communication and Cultural Competency and Director of King's Cultural Competency at King's College London, suggests that this kind of miscommunication is not a peripheral issue to be solved with better phrasing. Navigating linguistic and cultural difference is not simply a matter of better phrasing; it is a professional capability in its own right.

From the hospital room to the boardroom

Dr Li's communication research began in the medical world, a setting where the stakes of miscommunication are immediate and obvious. As a trained conversation analyst, he studied how doctors, patients and interpreters navigate moments where language and culture pull in different directions, and what happens when that navigation goes wrong in a clinical setting. Over the past decade, he has expanded his research remit and has watched the same dynamic move well beyond healthcare.

That shift, from clinical consultations to professional communication more broadly, is why Dr Li's work now speaks directly to business. Multinational organisations, international bodies and universities alike are grappling with how to serve markets, students and staff who do not all share the same language or cultural assumptions. 

Barriers as opportunities

The temptation, Dr Li argues, is to treat linguistic and cultural difference as friction to be managed or minimised. His research points the other way. ‘Linguistic and cultural diversity is often described as a barrier to be overcome, a problem to be solved’, he says. ‘I'd argue they're an opportunity. A genuinely diverse workforce should be excited about its differences and mobilise diversity as its unique resource to gain perspectives and market insight that a monolingual, monocultural organisation simply cannot access’.

That reframing has practical implications for how organisations are structured. It is not enough just to train individual employees to be culturally aware. Dr Li's work asks what it looks like for an organisation as a whole to reconfigure its communication so that it can genuinely serve its own diverse workforce and subsequently serve the markets, rather than simply translate its existing messaging into new languages, where it might fall flat. For senior leaders, that means treating communication strategy as a matter of organisational design.

Communication in the age of AI

Dr Li's most recent research turns to a newer complication: artificial intelligence. As organisations increasingly rely on AI tools to communicate, translate and train staff, cultural competency becomes a design question as much as a human one. Poorly designed AI systems risk hard-coding cultural stereotypes into everyday communication at scale, spreading a problem rather than solving it.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to AI. There is a more constructive side to new technology. By leaning into AI tools and designing them ethically and with cultural competency from the start, AI can actually help people learn to communicate better across difference. Used well, Dr Li suggests, these tools can increase accessibility, reduce costs and remove some of the barriers that limit participation and inclusion.

Listening to understand

For all the complexity of language, culture and technology in Dr Li's research, his central message is disarmingly simple: ‘Listen to understand, not to respond. Suspend your own assumptions for a moment and start from the belief that the other person is coming from a good place. That single shift brings greater kindness and empathy into almost every difficult conversation’.

It is a principle Dr Li returns to across his work, from clinical training to organisational strategy: that cultural competency is not primarily a technical skill to be mastered or a task to be ticked off, but a practice grounded in listening with kindness, appropriate curiosity and a willingness to understand others on their own terms.