The colors you don’t see on the walls

When you walk into an Essent office, the first thing you notice is the color.

Magenta.

You see it in the little things like, the color on the walls, the meeting rooms, the presentations we create, and these small details make the environment feel unmistakably Essent. Everything feels carefully designed, consistent, and connected. There is a certain beauty in that. A company with a clear identity, a shared direction, and a color that ties everything together.

Then you start talking to people.

And after a while, you realise the most interesting colors are not the ones on the walls or the presentation slides.

They are the ones sitting around the meeting table.

Working in SNAPPS (App platform team at Essent IT), I have the privilege of seeing this every day. We work with the same tools, the same processes, and the same goals, but the people behind them bring completely different experiences and assumptions. We all arrive with our own human operating systems: different ways of communicating, solving problems, building trust, and deciding what "normal" behaviour looks like.

Sometimes those systems connect perfectly and sometimes they need a little troubleshooting.

Sometimes a short email can sound refreshingly clear to one colleague and a little too sharp to another. A lively discussion can feel like great collaboration to one person and like a race to get a word in to someone else.

And none of the approaches is wrong.

They are simply different settings.

And that is what makes a diverse team interesting. The goal isn't to erase our differences to blend in but, to learn how to make all those unique colors work beautifully together.

And while it may create a little friction at moments, it also creates an opportunity to learn something new.

The Dutch directness paradox: According to my Slavic partner

The Dutch have a global reputation for being direct.

"You people just say what you think."

At least, that is the international stereotype.

Then my Belarusian partner moved to the Netherlands and experienced Dutch communication for herself. After observing a few conversations, she looked genuinely confused.

"Wait... where is the directness?" she asked.

To her, Dutch communication did not feel particularly blunt. In fact, it often felt surprisingly diplomatic.

A Dutch colleague might not say, "This does not work."

Instead, they might say something like, "Shall we look at this together?"

It sounds friendly, collaborative, and open. But depending on the situation, that sentence can mean anything from "there is a small improvement we could make" to "we should probably rethink this entire approach before it causes bigger problems."

That was the moment I realised that directness is not an objective measurement. It depends entirely on your reference point.

What feels straightforward in one culture can feel carefully softened in another.

My partner, coming from a Slavic background, communicates in a much more direct style. When she writes e-mails, she focuses on clarity and efficiency. Her messages usually contain exactly what needs to be said and nothing more.

The result is wonderfully logical.

It is also occasionally so concise that a Dutch reader might wonder if they have accidentally received instructions from someone managing an operation.

"Please update document today."

"Current solution incorrect."

"Meeting unnecessary."

The funny thing is that there is no aggression behind it. It is simply a communication style where the message itself matters more than the wrapping around it.

Eventually, she started asking Dutch colleagues to review some of her e-mails before sending them. And it had nothing to do with her English skills. She just wanted to double-check that a completely standard request wasn't sounding way more serious than she meant it to.

Could we add a "perhaps"?

Would a "maybe we could explore this" make it feel more collaborative?

Could we soften the edges slightly?

And that is where the cultural translation happens. We are not changing the message itself, we are adjusting the packaging.

Because every culture has its own default settings.

It turns out the Dutch version of directness comes with a little extra politeness compared to the Belarusian version which comes with fewer layers.

But, both are trying to achieve the same thing, understanding each other.

When refinement becomes a real-time conversation

The same differences appear in the way we discuss ideas.

Growing up in Nepal shaped the way I look at people. A person is rarely just their role, their output, or their current task. Their emotions, health, family situation, and personal circumstances are all connected.

If someone is struggling, the first question is often not only "How do we solve this?"

It is also "How is this person doing?"

People do not have separate systems for work and life. Everything runs on the same human hardware.

Another habit I grew up with is giving people space to finish their thoughts. Listening means allowing someone to complete what they are trying to express before adding your own perspective.

Then I joined Dutch refinement meetings, and I had to learn a completely different rhythm.

Someone starts explaining an idea. Before the explanation has fully landed, another person jumps in with a question. Someone else adds an example. Another person challenges an assumption. Suddenly, five ideas are moving around the room at the same time.

At first, I wondered what was happening.

Was this interruption? Or was this impatience?

After a while, I realised it was engagement. People were not trying to interrupt each other. They were trying to build on each other's ideas as quickly as possible.

Once I became more aware of that rhythm, I got used to raising my hand in the middle of the conversation more often.

Dutch discussions often have a kind of real-time collaboration. Ideas are tested immediately. Questions appear quickly. And potential problems are spotted early.

It is a little like a group of developers reviewing code together; everyone notices possible improvements, edge cases, and bugs while the solution is still being built.

The only challenge is remembering where the original idea started.

The interesting irony is that this happens in the same country famous for the Polder Model: the idea of reaching agreement through discussion and finding common ground.

And perhaps that is exactly what makes it work. Consensus does not always come from everyone speaking in perfect order. Sometimes it comes from putting different perspectives on the table, shaping them together, and eventually finding a solution everyone can support.

The moments between the work

Interestingly, some of the moments where I notice our differences the most have nothing to do with work.

Over time, with colleagues from different backgrounds, including our Italian and Brazilian teammates, we have created more opportunities to connect outside the normal work rhythm. We were having more events and more shared moments. And the potlucks were happening more often,
where everyone brings something from home.

And those moments have a special kind of energy.

Someone brings a dish from their childhood. Someone explains how it is traditionally prepared.

Someone tries something new. Someone shares a story that would never have appeared in a project meeting.

Suddenly, people who spend their days discussing architecture, priorities, and deadlines are simply people enjoying each other's company.

The table fills with different flavours, different languages, and different conversations.

And maybe that is exactly the point.

Because behind every Jira ticket, every technical discussion, and every deadline is a group of human beings.

And these moments are a good reminder that we are not only colleagues who happen to work on the same things. We are people who enjoy sharing stories, laughing together, and occasionally solving problems over a plate of homemade food instead of another meeting.

And you won’t find it listed in our sprint goals.

The many settings behind one team

After experiencing these differences, I started thinking less about cultures as stereotypes and more as different settings. Every person has their own preferences for how they communicate, decide, trust, and collaborate.

At Essent, we may share the same goals and many of the same ways of working, but that does not mean we all arrive with the same expectations about how things should happen.

A simple way to look at those differences is through eight cultural dimensions:

None of these settings is better than another.

They simply create different ways of approaching the same challenges.

A team becomes stronger when we understand those differences instead of trying to eliminate them.

More than one shade of magenta

The longer I work in an international environment, the more I appreciate that diversity is not about creating one perfect way of working.

I do not think a strong team is one where everyone learns to communicate the same way. That would probably make life easier, but also much less interesting.

The real value is in noticing the differences and being curious why something feels normal to us but strange to someone else. And sometimes, in simply knowing that the person sitting across the table may be working from a completely different set of experiences than we are.

That awareness makes collaboration easier. It helps us understand the intention behind a short e-mail, recognise why a discussion is moving quickly, or realise that a question about how someone is doing is not avoiding the work, it is part of how that person works.

And that is what makes working together interesting; the different perspectives, the different habits, the occasional misunderstandings, the unexpected laughs, and the moments when someone else’s way of seeing the world helps you notice something you might otherwise have missed.

Maybe that is what all those different colors add up to, not a single perfect shade, but something much more interesting when they are all in the same picture.