Scan the context for seventy-two hours before you enter it. Keep a standing roster of local mirrors who see the work before the public does. Write the apology and the fix before you publish, not after. Under an hour a week, and each one is difficult to fake.
The answer, in one line
Before any cross-market launch or significant meeting, spend seventy-two hours on the environment: the top three local news sources, one local creator, and three questions put to somebody who understands both your world and theirs.
Definition#
The getting global drills: three repeatable practices for building global adaptability. The seventy-two hour context scan, the local mirrors roster, and the apology protocol.
1. The seventy-two hour context scan#
Before any cross-market launch or significant meeting, spend seventy-two hours on the environment you are about to enter. Read the top three local news sources. Watch one local creator. Then ask a local mirror, somebody who understands both your world and theirs, three questions:
- What do we never see?
- What do we often misread?
- What do we oversell?
Each answer exposes a blind spot, and the third is the one people are least prepared for. The scan stops you walking into a conversation everybody else has already outgrown.
2. The local mirrors roster#
A small standing group of trusted local advisors across your key markets, two per region. Their job is to act as cultural mirrors before you go public: a twenty-minute call before releasing a campaign, policy or product, asking what could this mean here.
Standing is the operative word. A roster assembled at the point of need is a favour asked of strangers under time pressure, and it produces politeness rather than information. Mirrors see what insiders cannot, and what they most often stop is the assumption that what feels authentic to you will read as authentic elsewhere.
3. The apology protocol#
Write a one-paragraph apology and a one-paragraph fix before publishing anything public. The point is readiness rather than pessimism: when meaning slips, you respond with clarity instead of panic, and a good apology restores respect faster than silence.
Writing it beforehand also does something to the thing being published. An apology drafted in advance forces you to name what could go wrong and who it would go wrong for, which occasionally results in the publication being changed instead.
Why drills rather than training#
Because the evidence on this capacity is that exposure alone does very little. International experience has only modest effect unless accompanied by active reflection, and cultural intelligence does not correlate with general intelligence: it is a set of learnable behaviours. Drills are what reflection looks like when it is scheduled rather than hoped for, and these three are short, repeatable and hard to perform without actually doing them.
What this has not been shown to do#
None of the three has been trialled. The illustrations in the book are individual cases reported from practice, which establish that the failure mode is real and say nothing about how often the drills prevent it. Nothing here establishes that teams running them make fewer cross-cultural errors.
Source#
Rahim Hirji, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, Kogan Page, 2026, chapter five.
Related SuperSkills research#
Essay · SS-2026-330
Hirji, R. (2026). Getting global: three drills. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-330. https://thesuperskills.com/research/getting-global-three-drills. Last reviewed 26 September 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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