The woman at the front desk of a building in Brasília asked for my ID, and when I handed it over and said good morning in Portuguese, she looked up at me as though I had performed a small magic trick.
“Meu Deus,” she said. “I was sure you were a foreigner.”
I was in my mid-twenties, and I had spent most of the previous decade leaving Brazil and coming back: university abroad, then home, then graduate school somewhere else, then home again. My Portuguese was the Portuguese I had spoken since childhood, unmistakably from Rio. So I asked her what had given me away. She thought about it for a moment and said: the way you carry yourself.
I stood by the elevator afterward with my visitor badge, running a quiet inspection of my own posture, my hands, my shoes. I could not find it anywhere. She was standing squarely inside the local norm, and that is what allowed her to register a small deviation from it in the time it took me to say good morning.
Who this is about
An outsider, for the purposes of this piece, is not someone with the wrong passport. It is someone whose reference points were formed somewhere else.
That covers the immigrant and the returning native. It covers the engineer who moved into management, the economist in a room of engineers, the designer sitting with the operations team, the person who entered a profession at forty, the only woman at the table, the remote employee who has never absorbed the culture at headquarters, and anyone two months into a job who still cannot tell whether leaving at six reads as efficient or uncommitted.
Almost everyone in that position treats it as a deficit. You are behind, you missed the shared assumptions, and you are the one who has to ask. You also learn quickly to keep your odd observations to yourself, because saying them out loud sounds like a claim to better judgment than you feel entitled to.
But there are at least four things that position gives you. I’ll take them in order, and then come to what it costs, because it does cost.
1. You see local habits as choices
Everyone around you learned the local way of doing things for too long to question it, so they experience it as how things are. You arrive with nothing installed and the same habit looks to you like a decision somebody made.
The welcome session for my MBA program included a segment on cultural tips, because a large share of the incoming class had arrived from abroad and would spend the following year interviewing for jobs in a country most of us had never worked in. Near the end of it, a Chinese classmate raised his hand and asked whether it was appropriate to wear cologne to a job interview.
There was laughter. It was not cruel and it was not loud, just the kind that ripples along two rows and stops out of politeness. The trainer, to his credit, answered seriously. A little is fine, he said, but you don’t want to walk into the room bringing a cloud of cologne in with you.
What has stayed with me over the years is the laughter rather than the question. There is a real convention about how much a person may smell in a North American interview room, it is quietly enforced, and nobody has ever written it down. Everyone who laughed knew it perfectly well. What they had lost was any sense that it was a rule at all, which is why a sincere question about it sounded like a lapse in common sense.
Fresh eyes hand you the question, not the answer. Whether a local habit is worth keeping is a separate judgment, and the people who grew up with it will often win that argument. But you are the one who can ask.
It is also the most perishable of the four. Most of the people laughing in that hall were foreigners themselves. They had already absorbed enough to find the question naive.
2. You carry a second reference point
You know how things work somewhere else, so you notice when a plan or a practice depends on conditions that are not there.
Around the middle of the last decade, a colleague and I spent the better part of a week reading through a plan to build ten business incubators in three years across Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Somewhere in that week the plan stopped looking ambitious and started looking wrong, the way a word starts to look misspelled if you stare at it long enough.
An incubator is meant to be one piece of a larger ecosystem, and an ecosystem assumes several other things exist at the same time: capital willing to bet on an idea with no collateral behind it, people trained to build a company and try again when it fails, business schools that treat entrepreneurship as a real subject, enough macroeconomic stability for a small firm to plan a year ahead, and a culture where failure reads as information rather than disgrace. The plan had exactly one of those pillars. There was no meaningful pool of angel investors in either country, no bank product for early-stage lending, and no track record of business schools producing people who saw founding a company as a live option. At best, ten buildings would have filled with young companies that were undercapitalized, undercoached and mostly alone.
We argued the number down to one incubator per country, and the time the other eight would have taken went into the plumbing nobody had budgeted for: sponsors among large companies, mentors among the few local business owners who had built something, banks willing to consider a small loan product for a startup with no assets, and business school faculty willing to update a curriculum. To some of the people who had believed in ten, the new number looked like a loss of nerve.
The part worth dwelling on is why we could see it, and it was not expertise. The people who wrote the plan knew incubators very well. But their frame had been built from watching incubators work in places where the other pillars were already standing. Mine came from somewhere else. A decade earlier I had been on the other side of the table, an entrepreneur in Brazil trying to build a company in an ecosystem where most of those pillars were missing. I was not carrying more knowledge than they were. I was carrying a different reference point, one that nobody in the room where the plan was written had any reason to have, and set against it the missing foundation was the only thing I could see.
(I am describing both countries as they were nearly a decade ago. Both have almost certainly built out more of those pillars since.)
There is good evidence that this is about position rather than talent. The sociologist Ronald Burt mapped the networks of 673 supply chain managers at a large American electronics company and then looked at what happened to their ideas. Managers whose contacts reached across several groups inside the company had their ideas rated 2.4 out of 5 for value, against 1.5 for managers whose contacts stayed inside one group, and they were promoted at more than double the rate. Opinions converge inside a group because everyone in it hears the same things from the same people. Whoever sits between two groups is the only one holding both sets of assumptions at once, and therefore the only one who can see where they contradict each other.
The effect depends on the setting and it is worth saying so. Zhixing Xiao and Anne Tsui studied four Chinese high-tech companies and found the opposite pattern. People who sat between two groups did actually worse on pay and bonuses, particularly in firms built on mutual commitment, while the ones who did well were those who brought the two groups together instead of holding the gap for themselves.
3. You bring answers from somewhere else
A method that is routine where you come from can be unknown in the room you have walked into. The move that seems obvious to you is often the one nobody here has tried.
The clearest evidence I know comes from a study by Lars Bo Jeppesen and Karim Lakhani, who looked at 166 scientific problems that companies had posted publicly after their own laboratories failed to solve them. The further a solver’s own field sat from the field the problem came from, the more likely that solver was to produce a winning answer. Also, women made up 11.4% of the people who submitted solutions and 15.2% of the winners, which the authors read as an effect of standing at the margins of the scientific establishment rather than as anything about women in particular.
The same mechanism runs through ordinary working life and you do not need a laboratory to find it. The only economist in a room of engineers, the only engineer among the lawyers, the nurse in a meeting of administrators, the person who spent ten years in logistics and now works in retail: each of them is carrying a standard toolkit from one field into a room where it is not standard. What gets called originality is often transport.
4. Your presence makes the room think harder
This is the one I would have doubted before I read the evidence, and it is the most useful of the four, because it works even when you say nothing.
Samuel Sommers ran 29 mock juries, some of them all white, some with four white and two black members. The mixed juries deliberated longer, raised more facts about the case and made fewer factual errors. Most of that improvement came from the white jurors, and their behavior began changing as soon as they knew who was on the jury, before deliberations had started.
Katherine Phillips, Katie Liljenquist and Margaret Neale found something similar with a different kind of difference. They gave problem-solving groups of fraternity and sorority members a newcomer partway through the task. When the newcomer came from a rival house, the group reached the correct answer more often, and it also felt less confident and rated its own teamwork worse.
So if you are the only woman on the team, the only foreigner, the only one without the degree everyone else has, part of what you contribute happens before you open your mouth. The people around you check their reasoning, say the thing they would otherwise have left unsaid, and stop assuming everyone present shares their starting point. Notice also what the second study found about how that feels. The groups that performed better were the ones that enjoyed the process less. Awkwardness in a mixed room is not a sign that the room is working badly.
The other half of the story
But none of this comes free and the honest accounting needs more room than I have here. Three things belong in it. The insider knows more about nearly everything involved in running a place, and will out-know you almost every time. Your own reference point can be the wrong one: some years after Central Asia, on a program in Senegal, we arrived at a group of women entrepreneurs with a curriculum of business model canvases and financial projections, and the local coordinator told us plainly that what they needed was a working refrigerator, so the fish and produce they were already selling did not spoil before reaching a buyer, and packaging that survived the trip to market. She was the insider, we were the foreigners with the imported frame, and she was right. And fresh eyes expire faster than you expect.
Then there is the cost of saying what you see, which is higher than the cost of seeing it. Four months into a new job I corrected a senior executive in front of his team, the room went silent, and he told me “kindly” that it was all right, I was new, I did not know how things work around here. Everyone else present had known that rule for years. Over the following months I learned to raise difficult points privately, and then to run each idea through a quiet estimate of how much friction it would cause, and a growing share of them did not survive the estimate. Nobody told me to stop. I simply left when my contract ran out.
I will come back to both in a future post: what the position costs, and the few habits that make the window worth more while it is open.
A place to see from
Almost everyone who is new, late, switched, foreign or the only one of something treats that position as a waiting room, somewhere to sit quietly and a little apologetically until they are let in. I treated it that way for a long time. It is better understood as a place to see from. The discomfort is real, and I won’t try to talk you out of it. But it is the price of the view, not evidence that you are in the wrong room.
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