What multiple days of structured international debates taught me about cross-border collaboration, why discussing complex topics with people from seventy countries builds different skills than local discussion, and how this changed how I approach distributed teams.

Core insights:

Econnected 2023 brought together participants from seventy countries for structured debates on sustainability topics. The format was deceptively simple. An expert presents a controversial environmental topic for thirty minutes. Then we engage in discussion for forty to fifty minutes, managed by bilingual facilitators who keep dialogue productive across language differences.

Day one covered national diplomacy versus concrete business actions in green technology. Day two addressed international relations and how regional differences affect environmental policy. Day three explored the ethics of sustainability and whether developed countries owe environmental debt to developing ones.

I was selected from over four hundred applications to participate, and later received recognition as one of three ENTER Fellows from the participant group. But the numbers mattered less than what the format revealed about how we communicate when shared context disappears.

The first session exposed something I had not considered. How much normal discussion relies on shared baseline understanding that stays invisible because everyone holds it.

When I discuss sustainability with people from my region, we share foundational knowledge about how government functions, what economic constraints exist, what counts as realistic policy. These assumptions never surface because they do not need to. Everyone already agrees on them without saying so.

International discussion removes that shared foundation immediately.

Someone from Brazil proposes a green business policy that assumes a certain government structure. Someone from South Africa points out that structure does not exist in their context. Someone from Spain explains why both approaches ignore European regulatory reality. What seemed like straightforward policy discussion became an exercise in recognizing unstated premises.

Every proposal contained assumptions about what is politically possible, economically feasible, practically achievable. Those assumptions worked locally. They collapsed internationally.

This taught me the first crucial lesson about working across borders. You cannot assume shared context about anything. Not government. Not economy. Not social norms. Not even what counts as an environmental priority in the first place.

After the first session went sideways because of unstated assumptions, I changed how I structured proposals. Instead of referencing concepts I assumed everyone understood, I defined terms explicitly. Instead of building on shared knowledge, I stated premises clearly before building anything on top of them.

This felt inefficient initially. Why explain things everyone should know. But in international context, they do not know. Your baseline is not their baseline. What feels like unnecessary explanation is actually the foundation that makes everything else possible.

The bilingual facilitators modeled this throughout. They consistently asked clarifying questions when participants made region-specific references. They rephrased proposals to strip out local context and expose core logic. They caught miscommunication stemming from different meanings of the same words across regions.

I started doing the same. Before presenting any proposal, I would ask myself what I was assuming everyone knows. Then I would state those assumptions explicitly rather than leaving them implied.

This discipline made communication clearer even when everyone was from the same region. But it became essential when working across borders.

When I later built the Not Too Young platform with teams from Slovakia, Greece, and North Macedonia, these lessons transferred directly.

We could not assume shared understanding about youth activism. What motivates young people. What obstacles they face. What resources actually help. Each country had different political realities, different youth environments, different relationships to activism itself.

The international debate training taught me to catch when we were talking past each other because of unstated regional assumptions. To ask clarifying questions instead of assuming comprehension. To state explicitly what I was taking for granted.

It also taught me that diversity in perspective is not just beneficial but functionally necessary for building things that work across contexts. A platform designed from a single regional perspective would have embedded assumptions that only work locally. Input from multiple countries caught those assumptions early, before they became architectural decisions that could not be undone.

The value of international work is not the content knowledge about sustainability or diplomacy. It is developing communication discipline that functions across contexts where nothing can be assumed.

You learn to recognise your own regional assumptions as assumptions rather than universal truths. You develop habits of explicit communication that prevent misunderstanding before it starts. You build comfort with diverse perspectives challenging positions you thought were obvious.

These skills matter beyond international settings. Even local teams benefit from communication that does not rely on shared unstated premises. But international contexts force you to develop these skills because collaboration does not work without them.

The hardest part of distributed teamwork is not managing time zones or coordinating schedules. It is recognising what you are unconsciously assuming about how things work and learning to state it explicitly so people from different contexts can actually collaborate with you.

This discipline became the foundation for every international project I worked on afterward. Not because it made collaboration easy. But because it made collaboration possible.

Until next time,