When I landed on home soil in New Zealand two weeks ago having spent the past six months in Japan, I got on the wrong end of the bus by boarding through the back door and forgot to pay my bus fare. In Japan, you pay at the end. Here, you pay at the start. Japan had turned my bus behaviour upside down.

Upon that first experience of reverse culture shock, I must confess to thinking what a bizarre bus system New Zealand has. My initial reaction was to argue that it makes more sense to pay at the end when you know how far you’ve travelled. In all honesty, getting on the front and paying in advance didn’t sit comfortably, simply because I had become accustomed to something else.

Bus etiquette in different cultures is a fairly superficial comparison, but it does provide a simple illustration of cultural difference. I lived and worked in Japan, in a culture deeply different from my own. This was an intentional effort to shock my system of behaviour and thinking that had so far helped me navigate my world.

And here I go again, deliberately shocking my belief system by coming to work for The New Zealand Initiative. When I first saw the position of research fellow advertised, I questioned how working for an organisation largely funded by ‘big business’ would fit my own cultural belief system. That this was the first question that came to mind hints at my leanings and biases.

However, though my new colleagues and I all seem to come from different perspectives, what we have in common is a belief that evidence-based policy is best. And working with people from different perspectives helps us challenge our own biases that can colour the work of even the most well-intentioned researcher.

Culture shock on a country level, office level, or otherwise challenges our belief systems and helps us see the world from multiple perspectives. It doesn’t matter whether you pay at the start of your bus journey or the end. We all want a bus system, or policy initiatives, that get us from where we are to where we want to be.