interculturaltoolbox.org

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I say “our” new podcast, but really the Intercultural Toolbox podcast belongs to the guests and the audience. The guests are the stars of the show and the audience are the community of interculturalists we are proud to play a part in.

The Intercultural Toolbox guests include our much-loved Cultural Correspondents as well as many others who are contributing to the intercultural field. One of the great pleasures of my role running Argonaut and developing the CultureConnector service is getting to meet the fascinating people who do intercultural work. I feel privileged to hear their stories, see the impact they have and often to collaborate with them.

But one thing has always bothered me. So many ideas are exchanged and freely shared in private or semi-public conversations, but those ideas are lost to the community who were not present in the moment. The Intercultural Toolbox is a way to capture the best of those conversations and to make more useful, inspiring and sometimes just fun stuff available to more interculturalists.

What would you put into the intercultural toolbox? Who would you like to see appear as a guest? You can register and get involved at https://www.interculturaltoolbox.org/register

Image info: “David Adamec Interview with ABC News” by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

But it wasn’t always so easy. Back in 2007, Erin was working in a remote village in Latin America enjoying her work as a teacher but living an insecure economic situation, paid in beans and rice – and not advancing up any career or business ladders.

A self-imposed intercultural challenge

The bridge between these two contrasting situations was intercultural. Erin set herself an intercultural challenge to immerse herself completely in a culture and a language very, very different from her own. Erin’s chosen country was Jordan, a relatively conservative Islamic kingdom with borders to Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia and more. Soon, with her close friend Jennifer, a new goal to build a business was set into motion.

Mission impossible?

The business challenge seemed to embrace the impossible. The mission appeared to ignore the realities. How could two Americans create a business of a kind which had never before scaled in Jordan, where people are openly suspicious of your motivations and earnestly question the soundness of your business idea, where personal connections are everything, and where some familiar bedrock concepts of American business, such as a generally dependable and transparent legal system, were simply not present?

Imported ideas won’t work

Erin’s response to this challenge was a combination of her own methodology and a voracious appetite for insights and approaches from the intercultural field. Within a short time living in Jordan it was obvious that you could not import your home-culture’s model for business success into this country. You’d need a business approach far more rooted in the local culture.

تعلم اللغة العربية

First, Erin invested fully in learning the language at a very deep level. Language skills opened doors and turned acquaintanceships into friendships which in turn opened doors to a world of social connections, a multiplying network of people willing to help a friend or a friend of a friend.

Suspicious activity

Life is rarely so simple, and learning the language aroused suspicion too. In this tense and volatile region of the world, local people may have in mind that there could be foreign spies in the country, and if true, those spies might look and sound like you do. Gaining acceptance here in Jordan would demand so much more than just knowing the language.

Success was not coming easy, but some early wins with her expanding and deepening network of local friends convinced her to continue to strive on the path she had set herself.

Out of the cultural comfort zone

With the help of intercultural literature, Erin trained her eye to see important details of culture in everyday situations. She noticed that other people were not seeing – nor not responding – to those cultural differences.

Erin found a way to stay true to herself while adapting authentically to the culture she was in. As their business grew, Erin began to convert her experience and the collected research from the intercultural field into cultural-competence components at the language centre.

Their Shababeek language centre was gaining a reputation as a forum for facilitating relationships between Arabs and others. The centre’s development model was based on the idea of nurturing students. The service provided support as students gained language skills and passed deeper into authentic intercultural experiences, further out of the comfort zone.

Diversifying the management

Within a year, the business was at a scale and complexity where more local talent was needed in the management. Drawing on famous American entrepreneurial characteristics of hard work, persistence and a “we can figure this out” attitude had taken the founders a long way, but recruiting talented local managers for the business was a game-changer.

Recruitment of staff, which was almost entirely by social media and personal networks could now accelerate and expand access to new sources of talent.

Erin continues to be part of the leadership of the Shababeek language centre and has more recently developed an independent business, CultureDive, which focuses 100% on her intercultural practice.

Stepping back from personal crisis

With the CultureDive brand, Erin is delivering a compassionate service to expatriates who are facing challenges often so intense that their entire expatriate assignment is threatened. “I had seen so many early returns from my expatriate circle of friends” says Erin, “I created CultureDive to ensure that people had a way to step back from crisis when they are hurting on an overseas assignment.”

CultureDive is more than a preventive to expat failure. According to Erin, CultureDive exists to enhance people’s lives as expats. The methodology gives clients cultural lenses, helping them adapt to extreme difference while retaining their own strong sense of self.

“We’re here to help expats thrive”, says Erin. “We know that it is hard to live and work in another culture. When people start working with us, they may feel that they are also surviving on a diet of rice and beans, so to speak. My story, and many other stories like mine are proof that stepping whole-heartedly into a new culture can bring the energy and inspiration which turns your whole life around”.

Erin Reyes is CultureConnector’s Cultural Correspondent for Jordan.

Image credits: Erin Reyes

News reports also give us the Covid-19 sporting tragedies, as new countries suffer a humiliating collapse in hospital bed vacancies or care-home survivals. Policy-makers also look to other countries as a measure of how well they are meeting the Covid-1 challenge.

International comparison: a new Olympic sport

The intercultural profession offers valuable expertise here. This is a community of researchers, trainers and consultants specialised in the successful adaptation of people ideas from other cultural contexts and the forming of global solutions in local circumstances.

With nothing to report in the newspapers’ sports-reporting sections, the new sport of international comparison has emerged to fill newspaper columns.

Comparing Country A with Country B sounds simple, and learning from other countries sounds like the obvious thing to do. But what if we are misunderstanding the experience of other countries and taking the wrong lessons from those international comparisons?

International rankings are filling a gap in the science

We have 150 years of epidemiological science and decades of research into the socio-economic determinants of health, but we yet don’t have the peer-reviewed science of Covid-19. With the new science lacking, and traditional epidemiology too mathematical and complicated, simplistic conclusions from international comparison are having a disproportionate impact on political decisions.

Simplistic conclusions from international comparison are having a disproportionate impact on political decisions

Presidents, Mayors, Prime Ministers and Secretary Generals come under pressure to show leadership and “do something” or be more like South Korea, “Do what the Chinese did”, take the example of New Zealand, or follow the Germans.

Effective leaders think interculturally when facing global challenges

What are these comparisons presented to us so confidently by journalists and repeated by politicians? While the smart policy-makers and business leaders these days use sophisticated intercultural models for rolling out global programmes with local sensitivity, this is rare among the media and politicians under pressure.

Mark Twain famously warned that comparison is the death of joy, but there is great advantage to international comparison, done well.

We need to approach international comparison with humility and caution. What principles would inform an international comparison, given the benefit of coaching from interculturalist?

An interculturalist in the coronvirus response team

What contribution might an interculturalist bring to a top coronavirus crisis response team? Some of the best-prepared government bodies, NGOs and businesses have been adapting to the new situation equipped with cultural intelligence developed by intercultural professionals.

Here are ten things to keep in mind when comparing countries in the coronavirus crisis.

Check the stats

Dig down to find what each number represents

Of all things in life which seem to have no grey areas, death seems to be the ultimate example. Counting deaths would seem to be an objective, inarguable exercise. But even here, we have to ask what does each country mean when it records a Covid-19 death?

We could also ask what do we mean by “tests”, “beds”, “deaths among frontline health workers”?

While France seems to be one of the worst-hit countries, its death figures include large categories – such as deaths in care homes – which are excluded in other countries’ death figures.

In many countries we know that official figures report what the authorities wish to report. The numbers reflect political decisions more than transparent reporting.

It is useful to consider how much trust the official figures traditionally earn among the country’s own residents, and how the country performs in rankings such as Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

We also need to look under the skin of the national figures. Is the data collected consistently or is there internal regional variation? Are there categories of inhabitant conveniently overlooked by the statistics or communities with wildly different outcomes, masked by average numbers?

Don’t get personal

Look at the whole country, not just the leader

The Secret to Germany’s COVID-19 Success: Angela Merkel Is a Scientist, wrote the The Atlantic on 20^th April 2020. Political leaders are sometimes useful symbols of the way a country’s general population thinks and acts.

In this crisis, Emmanuel Macron is painted as the thinker, pondering the epidemic’s meaning for globalisation and Western society. Donald Trump as (at best) the electioneering liberator from overbearing public authorities. President Xi as the firm hand assuring stability of Chinese society, at all costs. Leo Varadkar as the caring doc, Jair Bolsonaro as the provocateur.

But as the disease sweeps through country after country, what is having far greater effect than the personality of the leader are the hard epidemiological realities of household size, geography, age profile, health system, access to clean water and long-established cultural practices.

Germans are no doubt benefitting from having a federal leader who is comfortable with numbers, but it is beyond the influence of one woman to have created a society that falls so naturally into the role of cautious, systematic, hygiene-conscious, law-abiding, mask-wearing expert distancers.

Measure success against the goals in each case

Check what each country is trying to achieve

The standardised tables ranking countries in the corona virus crisis seem to put all countries into the same race, like a league table of football clubs all chasing the top spot or sprinters listing for qualification into the Olympic 100m final.

But in the coronavirus crisis and other national projects, different countries have different goals. While one country may be competing in the 100m sprint, another country is playing the relay race amongst its regions, or merely warming up for tomorrow’s marathon.

From population studies such as the World Values Survey, we know that values vary significantly between nations. And between governments, operational priorities vary. Public authorities manage within different constraints of health service resources, economic resilience, long-term thinking, short-term survival.

In the corona virus crisis, we see the very different ways that nations approach the uncomfortable task of putting value on human life as they experiment with various lockdown tightening and easing actions.

In Denmark, a country not afraid to run social experiments, we see policy-makers finding a “Danish balance” between maintaining democratic freedoms and risking higher levels of infections. The balance is different in countries where authorities place a higher value on certainty and security.

In Germany is it the same self-confidence and determination that helped them absorb the shock of reunification in 1990 and in the migrant crisis of 2015 which today gives them the belief that they can engineer themselves out of almost any problem and so beat the virus? The goal here is to win by well-coordinated technological and social action.

Meanwhile in Haiti, a country which has suffered recent epidemics of AIDS, cholera and TB, where clean water is a privilege enjoyed by the minority and crowded, insanitary living conditions are normal, should we be surprise to find fatalistic acceptance that the country’s weak health system will simply not cope? Here the goal is not to beat the virus but something more modest. NGOs and local organisations are aiming to increase access to water and soap for hand-washing.  With workplaces re-opening even before the first wave of infections had passed, many Haitians expect to keep the rhythm of normality, which is the only way for most families to ensure that they can continue to put food on the table.

When we’re comparing performance in the corona competition, the fairest metric is how well each nation is achieving its own goals.

Don’t make countries into symbols of something

Allow some complexity and some internal contradictions into your understanding of each country

Countries differ, but they are complex and we must resist the temptation to caricature national cultures.

For the bloggers and journalists, Sweden has become the symbol of the carefree business-as-usual approach, Italy’s hospitals the symbol of crisis management, the USA the symbol of top-down chaos. Germany is given the role of supremely-confident Best-Prepared Western Country. China is painted as the victorious regime where the disease is beaten. New Zealand gets the role of quiet backwater which the virus never really reached. And Singapore is praised as the over-achieving Asian nation which administered the disease out of existence.

In each case the myth is false or hides a far more complex situation. In Germany, fear was a major motivator, as Die Welt put it “Politik der Angst”. In Sweden, everyday life has seen dramatic changes.

In the USA charismatic and competent leaders are shining at State, City and enterprise levels. In Singapore, the cracks in the country’s immaculate image are showing, in the desperate situation in the dormitories of low-wage workers and the emergence of a second wave of infection.

When a country is presented to you as a simple case of Category X or Category Y, there may be some truth or even hard evidence to support the story. But drill deeper and you’ll find plenty of confounding exceptions.

Italy’s Coronavirus Response Is a Warning From the Future
The Atlantic

Italy’s Nightmare Offers a Chilling Preview of What’s Coming
Bloomberg

Know the communication styles

Interpret what people say according to the culture from where the speaker comes

Foreign correspondents of news organisations typically report with deep insight and empathy for their host nation. But the coronavirus crisis has given us journalism based on short-term assignments or even internet research where are articles are penned with very little understanding of the countries which are the subject of the article.

When a travelling journalist sent on a corona virus mission into an unfamiliar culture, or even a Zoom meeting, the signals can be misleading and confusing. Are those journalists equipped with cultural filters to interpret what their interviewees are saying?

While Iranians and Italians may talk of their corona virus experience with colourful, hyperbolic language, stoic Estonians, cautious Russians or fatalistic Indonesians may report similar experiences in very different ways.

Aside from words, actions also need a cultural lens.

Impressed by the strict rules and harsh punishments in Poland, journalists may wonder why in the Nordics the authorities offer mere “recommendations”. In fact, expert recommendations carry enormous weight in the Nordic region. The effect on behaviour of expert guidance in the apparently soft regimes of Northern Europe can have similar force as the “harsh punishments” of Asian countries.

The Polish and Nordic approaches seem to differ, but in each case the action is appropriate to the culture. These different methods may in fact be very close in their intention and effects.

Don’t declare victory 3km (2 miles) into the marathon

Give more attention to the direction, speed and the route and less to the current position

As the virus moves relentlessly through the global population, it arrives, accelerates and sometimes slows at different moments and different paces and different places. Live comparisons of the racers in this marathon are meaningless. Looking at how countries move along the Corona curve is more informative.

In fact, some countries specialise in a wait-and-see approach, seeking “last-mover advantage”. Luxembourg, for example, has a long pre-epidemic tradition of conservatively waiting to see the trials and failures of its bigger, trend-setting neighbours before deciding what to do, and then usually doing it better than any other country.

In some national cultures, political and factional debate seems like delay, but then implementation is swift and effective. In others, nothing much happens until the shit hits the fan, then resources are mobilised at impressive speed (yes, we are looking at you, US and UK).

International comparisons need to be adjusted for time and place. In the sporting world and in many Paralympic events, we give attention to personal bests. In the international coronavirus competition, a good measure of performance is how each country is faring in comparison to its own normal fluctuations in mortality or earlier crises. Instead of looking at who is leading the international rankings, a better question is in which country is achieving new “personal bests”?

The Netherlands was one of the first countries to draw attention to the variation on its own historical death rates, rather than looking across borders at how the neighbours are doing. The New York times used this as the basis for a more sophisticated comparison of self-comparisons.

Whether a fast-moving crisis or in slower, longer-term development, appreciating the phases of development is essential to evaluating the performance of different countries.

International comparisons which are 10x more intercultural

These ten ways to make your international comparisons more intercultural, and more accurate, are built with the toolkit of the intercultural profession.

If your coronavirus work involves taking lessons from the experience of other countries, or giving epidemic guidance across cultural boundaries, consult an interculturalist and borrow some perspectives from the field of cross-cultural research.

More than ever, a clear-sighted view of other cultures could save lives in your own.

It’s been very satisfying to see interculturalists switch into supporting individuals and organisations through this new crisis situation. But to my knowledge, no interculturalist or institution from the intercultural field has yet been called into service to work directly with strategic national- or supranational policy-makers in a covid-19 crisis response team. The pandemic requires a team of all the talents: epidemiology, medicine, social policy, economics, communications, security, logistics and project management, analytics and risk, and more.

What contribution might an interculturalist bring to a top coronavirus crisis response team?

When the crisis is over, we need a strong community of interculturalists to help businesses and society to adjust to new ways of doing international collaboration.

To help intercultural trainers stay in business and their customers continue to benefit from interculturalists’ expertise, we’re providing our service for free.

Applying to use CultureConnector for free during the Covid-19 Corona virus crisis is easy. Shifting from in-person to online training delivery may not be so easy. We’re here to help you help your customer through the transition.

Apply to use CultureConnector for free

To qualify, you must be switching to an online model from a previously-agreed face-to-face training.

Practical answers to the everyday questions of globalisation are provided by the members of the intercultural training community. Let’s keep it strong.

Looking to the year 2025, Manuela Marquis sees a world where priorities have shifted. New skills are in demand: intercultural competence, virtual collaboration, participative leadership. She founded CrescenTalent to help key individuals and organisations who are already targeting the skills needed in the mid-2020s.

Targeting change in the real world

CrescenTalent is beginning a major initiative to make coaching the trigger to change. Coaching, according to Manuela, goes far beyond skills. “The concept of coaching is fundamentally different to training” says Manuela. “Skills may be activated or developed through training, but the target of coaching is direct change in the real world. This is a solution to the oldest problem of training: transfer from the classroom into work.”

Research-based intercultural coaching

Manuela follows published research on business competences. “The World Economic Forum in 2016 was a particular turning point in my thinking,” she reflects. “Since then, the WEF and other organisations have produced important trend data on current developments and predictions about business skills. We are starting to face the realities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is why I am in collaboration with other intercultural coaches and consultants who want to offer a constructive response to that challenge.”

IMC-coaching, Ceran, ICF, SIETAR, CrescenTalent, ICF and SIETAR

Manuela’s connections to several leading networks mean that she can exchange and develop ideas with fellow professionals from the widest variety of cultures and industries.

IMC, or Intercultural Mobility Coaching is the network of professional coaches with expertise in communication and international management. Ceran is a large training organisation providing intercultural training and consultancy services, with a particularly large community of intercultural consultants. CrescenTalent is a consultancy founded by Manuela. The term crescent originates in the Latin word crescere, which means “to grow”. CrescenTalent focus on developing talent, creating bridges of understanding between humans to boost performance and thus increase competence in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous VUCA world. CrescenTalent help businesses to adapt to organisational and technological change in an international environment. The International Coach Federation (ICF) is the world’s largest organization of professionally trained coaches, where Manuela is actively engaged in organising international events for the members in Paris. Finally SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research), an association for interculturalists, is another inspiration for Manuela.

“Teamwork and collaboration come naturally after working in an American corporate environment” says Manuela “and independence and agility are essential to my business. As the founder of a specialised consultancy firm, we need to be agile in order to conduct change-management fast and effectively”.

Serious intercultural business at Disney

Manuela’s intercultural journey began when she left her native Germany at the age of 20. After some time in hotel and event management in London, Cannes and Luxembourg, she took a role at Disneyland Paris, in their giant conventions business. “Opened in 1992, Disneyland Paris was at first known for its theme parks but not for the convention business. An internal training was organised to explain the difference to the employees as the clients’ expectations were totally different. ”

From her position in Disney’s business event management, Manuela soon found herself managing multi-lingual, multi-cultural teams with similarly diverse clients where all the normal challenges of international business are heightened: integration and diversity, high-profile, quality-conscious, on-schedule delivery of complex projects, layers of national and organisational culture, fast-paced formation of new teams, and a focus on recruiting and developing talent locally and internationally.

Training for a multi-cultural business environment

“Disneyland Paris was a good school for me” says Manuela, considering her ten years in the business-convention field. “With guests from all over the world, we dealt with every possible kind of intercultural interaction. But in our business, hierarchy was the cultural difference we experienced most sharply. I moved into training and became fascinated by the concepts and the pedagogy. Training methodology has a big impact on success.”

In harmony with changes in technology

After leaving Disneyland Paris, Manuela trained as a professional coach, got an ICF Certification and dived deeper into the blending of skills and technology. “Today there is less expatriation, more virtual collaboration. This often divides the generations and different individuals on a team. A personalised approach is important to achieve results.” Manuela enjoys getting hands-on with technology and works creatively with teams to implement new tech and establish successful working practices for online collaboration. “These are becoming essential intercultural skills” she suggests.

Measuring the impact of coaching

“My clients, who are often executives, Directors, VPs or HR people, have always had a clear view of what to expect from intercultural coaching”, claims Manuela. These clients often want their employees to listen to outside views, to get a new perspective through a non-judgemental coaching dialogue. “They want increased self-awareness, to find bridges to other people and work better together. In short, intercultural collaboration skills.”

“With technology, today diagnostics can be done very easily. We can very efficiently do “before- and after” -studies.” Many HR departments among Manuela’s clients need help converting their goals into metrics. “There is much more interest now in measurability, but it is surprising how many top leaders recognise the importance of soft-skills and do not demand a data-driven approach to coaching.”

In a typical 5-10 session coaching series, Manuela targets business transformation. She concludes “During one coaching series we can find the strengths and weaknesses in the team and put them on a path towards solving the challenges of international business they decided to address.”

• More about Elizabeth and her work on diversity in the workplace in Japan

How do you get buy-in for intercultural training in what could be the world’s toughest market?

I invest a lot of time in bringing down the barriers on a human-to-human level. For me, being based in Tokyo means doing business not only in Japanese, but also in a terminology that’s familiar to top execs. I work hard to see things from their point of view. And in practice, I make sure that I meet the decision-makers and influencers through projects, networking events and any forum outside of a traditional sales pitch. The five-point approach published on this site is a good way to capture the fundamental spirit of what I do.

What’s the core idea behind your work?

My current mission in life is to help the Japanese deal with their declining and aging population by embracing and integrating other cultures into Japanese culture. It’s fair to say that Japan is still a monoculture.

One of my key goals is to build recognition of diversity issues in Japanese board rooms. That recognition of diversity is growing, and slowly organisations are learning to walk the talk on diversity and inclusion. It’s not quick, but we are making progress.

How do you get started?

I have to give a little personal history, because it’s almost impossible to hit the ground running coming in as an outsider into Japan. Your personal connection with Japan is key. They prefer to deal with insiders and they look for people who have a deep understanding and long history with Japan. I have an Australian background and worked as a Diplomat for the Australian government’s trade commission. I worked in many Asian countries and my connection with Japan goes back 30 years. My role back then was to connect local companies with Australian companies, so I had to act as an Asia expert and a cultural interpreter.

It’s unlikely that a foreigner in Japan will ever be accepted as an insider. You may eventually qualify in the eyes of Japanese colleagues if you work for the company for 30 years, but becoming an insider is impossible for many foreigners. Your track record in Japan is your best hope of being chosen to join the inner circle.

In terms of getting a specific Board-level action started, one of my projects started with a conversation between me and a business leader about introducing CultureConnector into his organisation. I already knew the gentleman. Introducing technology, automation and reporting can really attract the attention of Boards in tech-loving Japan. You just need to connect the technology to their business goals.

Technology is part of the “getting your approach right” aspect of the five-point system for winning Board support.

Talking of the five-point system, what’s your experience of this in Japan…

…on ambition level?

You cannot push things too far, too fast in Japan, especially if that thing seems to come from the outside. The notorious case of the Olympus CEO shows how quickly ideas are squashed if “global” approaches are introduced too rapidly. Working as a board insider in Japan, I see this very clearly now. Learn to walk before you try to run.

…on getting your approach right?

As a foreigner in Japan, you’re only selected for certain roles, so you need to generate maximum advantage from the opportunities you get. The role of “cultural interpreter” may be vague and poorly-defined, but it is important and can get you a seat at the top table.

I’ve taken every chance to introduce the ideas of diversity and inclusion. The approach which is working best now in Japan is to frame culture as an aspect of management, as a management science. In fact, the term “diversity management” makes sense to people here. With a decreasing population, Japanese leaders accept the need to bring new sources of talent into the economy.

…on connecting with individual board members?

One of my many hats is as global research team leader for the Japan Diversity Network, an umbrella organisation for other associations which promote diversity, including some big companies. It’s rewarding to collaborate with so many energetic people who bring energy to the movement towards diversity in Japan.

There are some great high-profile examples here, such as the charismatic former CEO of food and snack-maker Calbee, who made huge progress in promoting gender-balance in the workplace.

…on the financial case?

Japanese boards are like boards in US and European in the sense that they want to see measurable results. They are looking for a connection with business goals and impact on financial performance.

If you manage to demonstrate the benefits in dollars and yen, then board members here are much more likely to sign up to “soft skills” initiatives. But the evidence base here in Japan is still weak and we need more longitudinal studies.

…on getting the timing right?

Few Japanese business leaders will invest their time and corporate resources into pre-empting the need for cultural competence. People here accept cultural training as necessary only when there is a specific business event that creates a “burning platform”

How to win board approval for your proposal

Five steps to preparing your proposal to board-level executives for intercultural training, with downloadable material.

How do you see the future of intercultural competence development in Japan?

Japan is starting from behind. But international comparisons are not useful here. Japan is in fact doing quite well, considering its unique history.

In Japan, we could say that diversity is gradually becoming accepted, but inclusion will be the greatest challenge. People here need to fully accept diversity in principle first before we move forward to inclusion strategies. Training has a role to play here.

You can appreciate the scale of the challenge when you realise that the Japanese believe that it is not really possible for outsiders to truly understand Japanese people.

Japanese organisations do respond to messaging from the top and fortunately I am seeing an increasing number of boards who “get” diversity as a path to future business success.

Ask a global mobility professional what the most enduring problem is with cultural training, and the answer will probably be the “transfer into real workplace situations”.

Getting return on investment in training, by ensuring that people really use their learning in their work to deliver improved outcomes, is not easy.

It’s a challenge with most kinds of training, but especially with intercultural training because of the nature of “culture” itself.

Why the culture challenge resists simplistic solutions

Culture is present in many layers of our cherished identities, right down to our unconscious habits. This makes cultural differences a complex and multidimensional problem for our clients to successfully solve, in both workplace and social situations.

Here are three examples:

1. Intercultural “friction points” can arise at different points of the day. This is especially marked in expatriation. It is said that there is no such thing as “stress-free expatriation”. Clients need to interact constantly with a culture not one’s own both professionally and personally. The unpredictability, relentlessness and range of these “friction points” can wear down the most resilient and open-minded people.
2. Culture operates at subconscious levels. As our clients encounter something that makes them feel uneasy, offended, or even violated, they may be unable to articulate why it makes them feel that way, because some cultural habits may have been ingrained so deeply that they defy rational explanation. This “below the iceberg” element of culture makes it tricky to apply effective interventions to, because most interventions stay at the level of ideas and the intellect and don’t reach down far enough.
3. Applying new learning is cognitively demanding, especially in complex situations. Our clients often need to apply their intercultural knowledge and skills in high-pressure situations that lack clarity. In these circumstances, making the extra effort to apply what they had learned on a course months or years ago is an unwelcome additional cognitive load when the going is tough, and clients are often demotivated or lack energy to do so. Many people end up defaulting back to conditioned responses and actions that feel comfortingly “instinctive” and “familiar”.

How can we deliver our training in a way that makes it easier for our clients to apply what we teach them, when they most need it, but when it is most difficult to do?

Mindfulness can help learning embed better

Mindfulness practice offers trainers a powerful way to help our clients break out of this unhealthy cycle, and embark on a new positive one that is sustainable.

This is something new in intercultural training because, unlike the cultural interventions and frameworks that form the backbone of many trainings, mindfulness works on the level of practice, not ideas.

There are many definitions of mindfulness. For the purpose of this article, we propose defining mindfulness as

the practice of calming and stilling the mind, training one’s awareness to be fully present in the moment, so that one is sharper, clearer, more focused, more stable, and less prone to the pushes and pulls of one’s thoughts, emotions and drives.

This “mind practice” functions as a truly universal tool to underpin and supercharge whichever intercultural frameworks trainers use in their interventions.

Mindfulness prepares the ground for cultural training to “stick” in two important ways:

• Bypassing thought and emotional resistances which stop cultural training from working
• Increasing awareness of the inherent pleasure and motivation for clients that comes from engaging with cultures in a way that promotes beneficial self-growth.

Done well, mindfulness could be the longed-for magic ingredient to make the training embed and flow into the day-to-day of our clients’ lives.

Ideas alone are not enough

Mind, body, breath – we all use these in every moment of our lives. What makes mindfulness such a helpful tool particularly in intercultural settings is that it is based on these three simple elements common to every human being alive.

Mindfulness is therefore one of the few truly “one size fits all” tools that applies to any culture. It can be used as a powerful unifying force to remind our learners that beneath their disparate cultures, we all possess a universally similar awareness, that is embodied in human form and constantly breathing in and out.

While we are all thinking, breathing bodies, intercultural trainers have traditionally targeted only the mind, specifically the sub-section of the mind that is the intellect, in training. This means that more than two-thirds of the fundamental ways in which we exist – non-thinking awareness, body, and breath – are untapped by intercultural trainers.

This gaping hole is particularly obvious when considering that the experience of other cultures is often physical. New cultures, encountered through meeting people or visiting a place, can be jarring physical experiences. Sounds, sights, smells and tastes, personal distances between individuals, and greeting rituals are just some of many ways in which intercultural experiences can be tangibly “alien” from one’s home customs.

When encountering something new, a person’s response can be instantaneous and physical. It is common for people to “brace themselves” against this unfamiliarity by tensing up and getting defensive.

Equally, one’s shifting inner landscape of thoughts and emotions has profound effects on mind, body, and breath. There may be ideas, values and traditions upheld by another culture that one finds hard to reconcile with one’s own. The resulting stress can manifest itself in inner turmoil or resistant body language. One might find it hard to breathe deeply and relax in the face of such unusual or even repulsive ideas.

The limitations of “idea-only” training interventions

When dealing with such physical responses to new and stressful stimuli, it is often inadequate to approach the individual with “idea-only” interventions. Think of the last time you were terrified of something. Perhaps an animal like a snake, spider, lizard, or cockroach; or you are afraid of heights and someone is trying to convince you to go on a rollercoaster ride, go rock-climbing, or jump off a bungee.

How many times have you managed to overcome that fear through “reasoning” only? Perhaps your friend who is not afraid of snakes, spiders, rollercoasters or bungee-jumping is trying to give you all the “rational” reasons why you “should” not be afraid. How does that make you feel? Does it succeed in removing the fear, or is it often ineffectual?

The same thing happens with other strong reactions, such as aversion and repulsion. Given how different cultures can be across so many dimensions of our daily lives, it is virtually a given that at some point we will come across an aspect of a new culture that we really don’t like.

Our reactions of dislike or even disgust are often instant and can last a long time. These are intense emotions that colour our subsequent perceptions and interpretations, and can be very hard to shake off. It takes mindful practice to grow our awareness of the ways in which we quickly and enduringly attach these emotions to these cultural aspects that we find hard to accept.

The problem is that these strong reactions – even those with positive affect, such as infatuation or passionate attraction – obscure our clients’ ability to perceive the full reality of their intercultural situation in a clear, calm, and objective manner. They may believe themselves to be operating reasonably and rationally, when they may actually be blind to their own emotional attachments to their own perspective.

This hampers their ability to be flexible and effective in navigating their intercultural situation, because they don’t know how to let go of their cultural bias and adopt better new mindsets and behaviours. That is, if they are even sufficiently aware of this happening within themselves in the first place.

Dissolve mental obstacles through working with body and breath awareness

Stressed body = stressed mind

The brain is exquisitely tuned to muscle tone; tense muscles produce tense thoughts. Let’s try a little experiment to demonstrate this.

What are you learning from this simple exercise about the intimate link between mind, body and breath? Can you see how interconnected they are? And how what’s happening in one dimension has a “spill-over” effect on the other two?

This is a crucial point for us intercultural trainers. It means we can use the entry points of breath and body to bring about change in the mind.

Resting the mind through calming the body and breath

Now, let’s try the opposite. Let’s focus our awareness on relaxing our breath and body, and see what happens to your mind.

What do you notice? Is it easier now than before? What is different this time round?

Can you feel the peace and clarity emerging, as your nervous reactivity and “hot” emotions, like stress, anger, irritation, and anxiety, get increasingly quietened down? What have you learnt from this simple relaxation exercise of mindful breathing, about the connection of breath, body and mind and how to use the calming of breath and body to also calm the mind?

How does mindfulness work?

Mindfulness practices, such as those popularised by the “father of modern mindfulness” Jon Kabat-Zinn, or deeper-rooted disciplines such as the various forms of meditation, use our awareness of our body and breath to help us escape the tyrannies of our overactive mind.

In our busy modern lives, we are so used to thinking that we easily fall into the trap of thinking that our minds are nothing but thought. This is because for most of us there is a ceaseless chatter going on in our minds. We mistakenly believe that if we were to stop thinking, there would be “nothing” there.

This is simply not true.

When we learn to pay close attention to what is going on in our own minds, we will realise that there are all kinds of things going on in there, including thoughts. For one, our five sensory organs are constantly providing us with a rich variety of sensations moment by moment, which our brain expertly weaves into a sensation of continuity.

Our “inner cinema”

We can liken this to watching a movie. A movie is only a series of stills projected extremely quickly one after the other, but our visual system cannot perceive the individual stills that quickly, and the result is that we feel like we are watching a smooth continuous flowing “reality”.

There is one additional dimension of sensation on top of our five physical senses, and that is the mental dimension. Within this “sixth sense”, there are all kinds of similarly temporary and short-lived phenomena. Thoughts are a perfect example of this. We have many other kinds of mental phenomena, including emotions, impulses, and moods.

The “blank canvas” on which all these various mental phenomena are coming and going is your base awareness. Connecting back to this awareness and resting in it, non-thinking and non-doing, is a central part of mindfulness training.

With practice, one can loosen one’s attachments to one’s own thoughts, emotions, preconceptions and ideas, by returning again and again to one’s underlying awareness, and realising how temporary and “constructed” these seemingly-solid mental concepts are.

The power of using mindfulness to enhance intercultural training

Mindfulness practice is therefore a universal tool that is simple, secular, and only requires that the person has “body, breath and mind” and the ability to pay attention to these three basic elements. From these deceptively simple foundations, a raft of profound benefits to the individual can start to be unlocked.

If we were to pick just one – loosening one’s attachments to one’s own ideas, as described above – we can start to see how powerful it is in enhancing intercultural training.

One of the most stubborn obstacles intercultural trainers face in bringing our clients to open themselves up to a wider scope of cultural ideas and behaviours is the simple fact that everybody is naturally attached to their own perspectives and ways of doing things. “Old habits die hard”, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and other similar sayings testify to the persistent difficulty of even the most noble-minded individuals in overcoming this deep attachment to “the way we are”.

Think about the multitude of problems this “attachment to self” causes in a typical intercultural context. At the start of this article, we examined some of these reasons why the biggest problem intercultural trainers face is getting their clients to transfer the learning into work situations. These included the multitude and variety of ways in which cultures differ from one another, in professional and social contexts, across all six senses (i.e. the five physical senses and the sixth “inner” sense of the mind, which includes things like ideas and values).

We looked at how encountering a new culture can produce strong reactions of like and dislike, and how these reactions can skew a client’s ability to perceive things clearly and objectively, and therefore make sound decisions based on these clear, objective perceptions and a balanced frame of mind.

Therefore, a tool that can come in to address this problem at its root, which is our clients’ inability to shake free of their own perspective and to embrace other ways of looking at things and behaving, is of critical importance.

The reason for this is obvious. By allowing our clients to start realising just how trapped they had been in their own thoughts and emotions, and showing them how to apply awareness of their breath and body to calm the conceptual turbulence of the mind, mindfulness delivers a universal and effective solution for our clients to this exact problem.

It allows the mind to settle into its natural stillness, stability and clarity. From this position, assessing situations and making decisions is significantly improved, without the corrosive influence exerted on their awareness by the push and pull of their thoughts and emotions.

With consistent practice, further benefits are unlocked for our clients as their minds, breaths and bodies get increasingly aligned, allowing them to practice new behaviours more easily and successfully, and increasing their mental and emotional agility and resilience. The positive effects of this will spill over beyond our clients’ intercultural interactions into other key aspects of their lives such as leadership, parenting, or cultivating friendships.

The biggest tip we can give you is to start practising mindfulness yourself. Mindfulness is a tool that cannot be captured by explaining; its essence can only be grasped once you try it out for yourself and observe its benefits first-hand.

This is easy to understand why when we reconsider the fact that intercultural trainings that focus overly on concepts and ideas are doomed to fail, because these do not address the often visceral component of intercultural conflict.

Teaching our clients through engaging, hands-on activities like simulations and role-plays is a big improvement on theory-driven trainings for this reason, that our clients are able to “try out” different behaviours which allow them to become aware of cultural differences at a physical and emotional level and not merely an abstract intellectual level.

However, these activities are doomed to be partially effective at best unless we prepare the ground for them by raising their awareness of their own inner states in the first place. For example, some clients may hold strong opinions about something or have a stubborn or dismissive attitude towards the training. At the extreme, they may be stuck in the “denial” phase of for example.

Clients like these are extremely attached to their own thoughts and emotions. They lack awareness of other points of view, but worse than that, they lack the motivation to step outside their frameworks. To them, their reality is the only reality that matters.

With clients like these, simply addressing their resistance with an intellectual argument is ineffective. There will be no traction. Their resistance is at a much deeper level. At this level, relying on tools from the “realm of the mind” is not going to help these clients with the necessary step of getting OUT of their mindsets in the first place.

Mindfulness exercises reduce resistance to positive change

In challenging situations like these, here is where mindfulness works well as a preparatory exercise, by gently guiding their awareness towards the states of their own bodies and breaths. Resistance often takes the form of tension in the muscles and breathing patterns. Getting clients to taste the relief and comfort that mindful relaxation brings can help render them a little more open and receptive.

Mindfulness exercises that focus on breath and body awareness are also very simple. Anyone can follow the instructions, and they do not need any other equipment other than oneself. This simplicity can be very attractive to a client, as it is uncomplicated and approachable. Most importantly, “the proof is in the pudding” – the client should be able to feel the difference within himself or herself. This will help reduce their scepticism, tilling that stony soil for the gradual introduction of ideas to stimulate intercultural adaptability.

However, it is impossible for you as a trainer to be able to teach these mindfulness exercises unless you have tasted for yourself the positive changes that come with training your awareness this way.

Consider the interconnectedness of mind, body and breath we learnt about in How mindfulness can transform intercultural training. We all can sense it when we meet someone who is calm, centred, and grounded. It is a whole-being display, that goes beyond a merely intellectual attempt to “sort out your thoughts” and “think clearly”.

We all know people, including ourselves at times, when we think we are behaving calmly and rationally, when those other people who are with us can see how our angry or nervous body language contradicts that self-belief.

As a trainer, standing in front of your clients leading the intervention, can you imagine how they will respond to you when you are teaching them a mindfulness exercise, when they can sense that you yourself do not know what it feels like to have a calm, clear, and stable mind?

Therefore, embarking on your own personal practice of mindfulness is really an unavoidable step if you are looking to harness the profound power of this tool to boost your intercultural training.

The good thing is that you stand to benefit in multiple ways. Not only will it increase your effectiveness as a trainer, you will experience increased personal wellbeing and effectiveness that will manifest in other parts of your life.

Kickstart your mindfulness practice

Try out a mindfulness or meditation app

Some good ones include

• Headspace
• Insight Timer
• Imagine Clarity
• Calm.

Some apps like Imagine Clarity offer structured courses that you can follow step-by-step to progress yourself. Others like Insight Timer offer a smorgasbord of different meditations, plus the chance to plug into a community.

Join a class or group, or take a course

An increasing number of centres offer mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and other related disciplines. Many of these have introductory offers, such as class passes that allow you to try out different types of mindfulness practice, meditation, or yoga. Take advantage of these to find out which one suits you best.

There may also be informal groups that meet up in your neighbourhood, or longer and more structured courses offered by these centres or other institutions of learning such as community colleges and adult learning schools. Retreats are a fantastic way of immersing yourself in a tailored and nurturing environment designed to provide conducive conditions for mindfulness practice. They range from a day to several weeks and even months. Have some fun exploring what’s on offer near you that suits your budget.

Read up

Three excellent introductions are:

• The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Practical Mindfulness: A Step by Step Guide published by Dorling Kindersley. 

 Get a mentor or teacher.

As you broaden your knowledge of mindfulness taking a course or reading up for example, you may come across individuals in your classes or specific authors whom you really like. Alternatively, within your workplace there may already be leaders or colleagues whom you recognise as being particularly good at applying mindfulness at work. Seek out these individuals as formal or informal mentors or teachers. An individualised relationship like this can be tremendously powerful to your progress.

If these are well-respected teachers, they may have a community of students following their teachings. Being part of this community and sharing its energy, learnings, and mutual support is of tremendous benefit in and of itself.

Try it out!

Let yourself get curious about ways in which you could do your everyday tasks more mindfully. Catch yourself being impatient, learn to notice signs such as gripping the steering wheel more tightly, tapping your pen hard on the table, or noticing your face flushing or your voice rising while in a tough conversation.

Watch the thoughts and emotions fleeting across your mind at times like these. For the next breath, take it slowly, and recentre yourself. Release tension with the outbreath, and inhale relief and nourishment with the next breath. Repeat. See how this changes your inner state and external behaviour.

The problem is that we too often fail to get leaders, organisations, HR colleagues and clients excited by the opportunities from intercultural competence. We are not succeeding in demonstrating the true value of intercultural training. It’s the challenge of selling intercultural training.

Participants in intercultural training may expect to walk away with some answers. Intercultural training provides answers which are sometimes difficult to grasp and seemingly impossible to quantify when transferred into the workplace.

For a Learning and Development manager, the outcomes of intercultural training may be a hard sell internally.

When participants arrive at a training, they may not be expecting to commit to a new mindfulness task in their already-busy schedule for the coming weeks or months. Like everyone, training participants have the challenge of finding time/space to implement mindfulness.

Fortunately, mindfulness adds to the long list of benefits of intercultural training. Here are some that can help you build your business case for a mindfulness-enhanced intercultural training programme.

Better results in international work

There is now an increasing body of evidence around the cost of mindless business operations:

• Bad decision-making
• Mistakes
• Oversights
• Knee-jerk reactions

Meanwhile, mindful managers are different from their colleagues. Mindful managers are no longer responding inappropriately to the situation because some colleague has triggered them. They are able to avoid more mistakes in intercultural situations and generate a positive result where others are suffering confusion, frustration or conflict.

Business realism

Perhaps most powerful benefit of mindfulness when making the case, is the licence to recognise reality. We do not expect participants to say “diversity is a 100% good thing for me”, and “I love cultural differences and always enjoy working with our foreign clients”. Mindful intercultural training comes at this from a different angle.

The mindful intercultural training session allows the negative as well as the positive responses to come out. Honest negative, positive and mixed emotions are our starting point for getting skilled at dealing with future cross-cultural tensions, and turning emotional flashpoints into an on-going series of insights and tests passed.

Pleasant feelings

The list of benefits includes pleasure. There is a lot of pleasure to be unlocked from cultural difference, if you allow yourself. Imagining a world where diversity really brings fun, fascination, discovery, opportunity, without many of the familiar frustrations is a very attractive idea to many people.

This is not oversell, because mindfulness is not about eliminating the downsides. Instead mindfulness is about accepting and gaining insights and strength from cultural difference. And yes, it promises to unlock more pleasure for people working in globalised environments, leading to more successful international projects and completed expatriate assignments.

Many more personal benefits

People who use mindfulness techniques report a heightened state of involvement, better memory and attention levels and a greater feeling of being present in the moment. The training and the techniques are not cold and calculating.

Mindfulness often brings a greater liking for the task, and by extension, more happiness from intercultural projects. In short, it makes intercultural work more satisfying and fun.

For organisations, mindfulness has been shown to increase employees’ openness to new information and improve problem solving through awareness of multiple perspectives. Applied to intercultural competence training, the list of potential mindfulness-enabled skills is impressive.