Parliament | The Invisibility of Culture
I just got back from two weeks in France with my husband and three kids — fourteen, twelve, and six. We'd been talking about this trip for years. We wanted to get them out in the world while we could still make them come with us - and to visit my best friend who lives in Provence with her husband and two children.
I hadn't been to Europe in over a decade. I expected it to be uncomfortable. I didn't expect to come back with this much to think about.
The thing about traveling somewhere genuinely different is that it holds up a mirror to the place you came from. You stop seeing your own culture as normal and start seeing it as a choice. France made me realize how many things I take for granted at home (good and bad) — things I've absorbed so completely that I stopped noticing them.
Here's what I kept noticing:
The obsession with speed. In America, I am always optimizing. Always compressing. Always trying to make something more efficient. France resisted this at every turn — narrow roads, slow dishwashers, small washing machines, produce that you shop for every day instead of hauling in from Sam’s on Sunday. I found it frustrating at first. Then I found it clarifying. We are addicted to more, to faster, to bigger. I didn't know how deep that ran until I was somewhere that simply didn't share the addiction.
The cafes. The chairs face outward toward the street, not inward toward each other. Nobody had a laptop open. There was no pressure to turn the table. People were just... there. Talking. Watching. I kept thinking about how different that design choice is from what we build in America, where every restaurant configuration is quietly engineered for throughput. The French cafe seems designed for a different purpose entirely — people-watching, close talk, existing.
The food. I am not a foodie. I shop at Sam's Club. In France, we bought fresh bread every morning and fresh vegetables every day, and all of it was smaller than what I'm used to — the fruit, the portions, everything. It felt intentional in a way my grocery shopping at home almost never does. Not precious about it. Just closer to the source.
How families are treated in public spaces. A separate line at the airport for large groups. A family bathroom with a miniature toilet scaled for a six-year-old. These things sound small. But I noticed them because at home I've completely internalized the idea that my children are my problem to manage around everyone else's inconvenience. I apologize for them in restaurants. I try not to take up too much space. France didn't require that of me, and it took a few days before I even noticed the weight I'd been carrying.
We say all the time at Hoot: you can't read the label from inside the jar. We say it to explain why founders need outside perspective to name what they've built — because when you're immersed in your own culture, it becomes invisible to you.
I lived that in real time for two weeks.
The pace, the food, the cafe chairs, the way France designs its public spaces for families — none of that is individual choice. It's accumulated belief made physical. It's what a culture values, expressed in its infrastructure.
And it made me think about how true that is for the organizations we build as well.
This is why outside perspective matters in organizations too. Not because the people inside are missing something — usually they're brilliant about their own work. But culture is invisible from within. The values running your company are as hard to name as the pace you're moving at every day. You need someone standing outside the jar to tell you what's on the label.
France was the mirror, the one I was not capable of holding for myself.
