A recent meeting with a potential client finally reached the point which most such meetings inevitably do. The client expressed a wish for a list of rules, some steps to follow, behaviors to adopt department wide which would effectively eliminate culture-based miscommunication in a large department home to many nationalities.
Despite plenty of intercultural consultants selling you lists of dos and don’ts to ensure business success, this sort of handbook for cultural competency is wishful thinking.
Real life involves much more nuance.
I have come across a couple of items in the last few days, reminding me of one of the concrete points I DO share in my seminars. An article in National Geographic described a tribe of people living on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. This tribe has become famous for killing any outsider who dares try and come ashore there. They are, in fact, so hostile that we really don’t know anything about them. As the article pointed out, we don’t even know what they call themselves. We can only refer to them by the name we outsiders have chosen for them. We don’t know why they respond to us so violently. Are they angry? Or afraid? Or something else entirely?
In an interview, broadcaster and historian Michael Wood was asked what Chinese people see as some of the most important events in their own history. He replied that a lot of us in the West see the Cultural Revolution as very important in China’s history, but that when asked, a lot of Chinese mention the economic opening in 1978. These are two very different points of view. One focuses much more on what we consider relevant to freedom and the other… well I don’t know. I don’t have deep ties to China to be able to ask, but maybe it has something to do with fairness or quality of life or future prospects. Clearly they value something differently than we in the West if they assess their own history so differently than we do.
I remember when I moved to Germany as a naive 20-something that Autobahn etiquette made an impression on me. In New York State, where I’m from, the law states that we are to pass on the left and we get this information in the driving manual, but you would never know it when driving on a NY highway. We don’t follow this rule. We pass as we see fit, wherever we can find a space big enough, for long enough. I laughed at my German husband, dutifully driving much more slowly than he wanted to on a stretch of road without a speed limit, stuck behind someone in the left lane. I urged him to just go around, but he wouldn’t. I valued our comfort and freedom to do as we pleased, but my image of Germans as unthinking rule followers conflicted with his image of his own culture as calculatingly responsible. And then he explained to me that there are statistically few incidents on German Autobahns, but that when crashes happen, they often involve helicopters and airlifts. High speed accidents leave a different kind of wreckage.
In the absence of better information, we humans tend to fill in the gaps with assumptions. (It has to do with the observer’s illusion of transparency.) We may assume we understand a culture’s hostility, what historical events shape cultures most significantly or why people from another culture perform the most mundane tasks in ways that we disapprove of. We could end up judging the front desk manager at the hotel, a shopkeeper, a colleague or business contact just because we’ve looked from our own point of view and found their approach lacking. But there’s a good possibility we’re wrong.
So if you want a rule to abide by in intercultural interactions, here’s one for you: Let’s not be satisfied with an absence of better information. Do your best to find out how your counterpart sees themself in the situation. What is their intention and what do they think is going on? There’s almost certainly a favorable motive behind it, even if that motive got lost in translation.
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