Julian Johns

Thirty years of international commercial work taught Julian the same lesson over and over, and it took most of those thirty years to see it clearly.

He has built and led commercial teams in Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and now Norway. Seven countries, and in each of them the technical part of the job was rarely what made it hard. What made it hard was the gap between how he read a room and how the room read him.

The pattern was consistent enough to be worth naming. Talented people would underperform, deals would stall, hires would quietly fail, and every post-mortem would land on something about the individual. They were not ready. It was not the right fit. Almost never on the thing actually causing it, which was two sets of reasonable expectations that did not line up.

He worked through it the way most people do, on experience and instinct, and it was expensive. Years of it. The tools that would have shortened that learning curve did not exist, so eventually he built one.

CultureFlow is the result: an engine that measures the distance between two cultural profiles and turns it into something you can act on before the meeting rather than after it. His three decades in the field inform the behavioural layer that makes the research actually usable.