A senior strategy executive at a U.S.-based Fortune 100 company recently asked me a question that I hear from global leaders all the time. His teams in Asia were performing well, but he had noticed how little of his company’s strategy originated in Asia, and how little innovation from his team there fed back into the company’s global strategy. With so much disruptive innovation originating from the region, this was a missed opportunity. Struck by the trends, he asked, “Do the teams in Asia just struggle with speaking up?”

It was an honest, even well-informed, question, rooted in the idea that Asia-based teams often come from cultures of indirect communication. But in comparing the company’s headquarters with its largest Asia-based team, he and I discovered that the data actually told a different story: Collaboration was breaking down at the level of systems, not culture.