For a curious mind, it’s thrilling when something unexpected happens. There’s something new to be probed and understood. So it was with our project to model the real-world economic impact of intercultural training.

After years exploring the available, relevant research and testing different approaches to the mathematical model, I expected diminishing returns from each addition research sprint. The law of diminishing returns is the observation which says the deeper you dive into a new thing, the less reward you get for each additional kick.

The opposite happened. As the model started to spit out results to our research questions, the answers became more interesting and more enlightening.

Here are three striking observations from this work so far.

1. The power of an intercultural lunch and learn

What is the gold standard training format for intercultural competence? A full 3-day module on a year-long leadership development programme, perhaps? A multi-year relationship with an inspirational coach? A multi-channel, multi-session blended learning programme, based on adaptive online learning tech? Yes, these promise impressive results for the learner. Gold standards indeed.

By comparison, a lunch-and-learn intercultural briefing, delivered to busy executives under heavy time pressure, seems like the poor cousin of those Gold Standard formats.

But wait, our training impact model is telling a different story. Based on a new analysis of the cost-side of the ROI equation, a rapid injection of new intercultural knowledge can generate excellent return on investment for organisations which use this method. While the absolute returns on a lunch and learn may be smaller than a full transformational intervention, the rate of return on investment is one of the best, and certainly a good pathway towards more ambitious forms of competence development.

2. An intimate training for 508 participants

The joy and the challenge of modelling intercultural competence are the network effects inside organisations. When a freshly-trained participant starts a collaboration with a colleague who has a low level of intercultural competence, some of the benefit of the training is enjoyed by the non-participant, who gains from more effecient interactions with the trained colleague, and potentially other benefits in achieving their mutual goals.

In this way, intercultural training can impact hundreds of non-participants, who are colleagues of participants. The number in the pool depends on the diversity of the organisation and the participants, the level of isolation of clusters of participants and other assumptions, such as the amount of outward-facing interactions. There can even be benefits of intercultural training for people of the same culture where differences are individual, not cultural.

When your training class attracts just an intimate (small) number of participants, keep in mind that potentially hundreds more who don’t attend will also benefit.

3. The trainer’s bill is a small part of the investment

You can charge the top-end of your price range for your time and provide a gourmet lunch for participants, perhaps with travel and comfortable accommodation, but still the trainer’s and logistical expenses are likely to be dwarfed by the cost of taking productive employees away from their core work tasks, while they participate in your training.

Line managers and anyone with profit and loss accountability knows this. There is some price sensitivity in the market for intercultural training, especially when the procurement department get involved (they are probably not at your meetings to learn about icebergs or onions …). However, what we can see from our model is the importance of looking at the impact side, when an organisation chooses a supplier or selects its own internal training methodology.

Squeezing the trainer’s bill down will have little effect on your return on investment rate. You can truly shift the needle on your return on investment by working together with the intercultural consultant to set the training up for success in achieving performance gains.

The CultureConnector intercultural training impact modelling tool is now available as an early-access programme for customers and contributors in the CultureConnector community.

This was long in the pipeline. Its goal is that trainers, coaches and organisations can develop intercultural skills much, much faster.

Faster outcomes

The model is set of algorithms which work with cultural data under-the-hood as part of the CultureConnector engine. It supports trainers and learners to find an efficient path to success in the real world. This makes possible an acceleration of the impact trainers and coaches can achieve with learners. It’s not a traditional standalone model or a framework for training.

Flexible implementation

We’re proud that CultureConnector’s flexible toolkit supports a wide diversity of training, coaching and self-directed learning approaches. The new Achievements feature, which is built on the DDD model enables trainers to continue to design and deliver training expertly targeted to their customer needs and to local market conditions. Achievements help stakeholders track and optimise the learning journey.

We’re all looking to achieve more in less time. Now CultureConnector can help interculturalists fast-track their business results.

Available for all

Check out CultureConnector’s Achievements feature now by clicking your next step. If you don’t have an account with CultureConnector, create one today.

Your next step

It’s included at all licence levels, even the Free licence. If you’re training with CultureConnector, you’ll also see the new feature embedded in your one-to-one training view.

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 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.

Intercultural training is not like most other training. Getting a return on investment is hard. This is because we often need to apply our intercultural knowledge and skills in the most stressful and confusing of situations, when many people fall back into instinctive, familiar responses and actions, not what they learned on a course months or years ago.

A standard aim of cultural training is to “transfer new skills and insights into real workplace situations”. This is a worthy goal. The next level of ambition is for cultural training to begin a personal transformation which returns the investment many times over a long period and overcomes the barriers to successful transfer.

Mindfulness can be the multiplier which turns training into a lasting resource. Mindfulness offers trainers a way help employees break out of the special limitations of intercultural skills transfer.

In short, mindfulness helps participants internalise the learnings in training, removing some blocks which stop cultural training from working.

Ideas alone are not enough

Body, mind and breathing, we all use these a lot. We are all thinking, breathing bodies, but trainers have traditionally reached only for the mind in training. Two thirds of the items on this list are under-used by intercultural trainers.

Experiencing other cultures is very often physical. people get tense, they intuitively sense disconnection or resistance. They may get feelings of comfort or discomfort. Thoughts and emotions are all happening within a thinking and sensing/feeling body. International assignments are stressful. In the most extreme cases there may even be a feeling of violation.

Mindfulness addresses the overwhelming experience of cultural difference directly. It tackles stress reduction.

Incorporate into intercultural pedagogy

An intercultural trainer using mindfulness techniques has a duty to review and prepare for those reactions. How deep is this felt? Where does it come from? In a mindful intercultural training, we review how we’ve locked ourselves into habits and we review the values we’ve been taught.

Stepping out of the safe zone

The trainer may take training participants beyond safety of ideas into a space where training does not traditionally go: into emotion, physical reactions and reflexive responses. It’s more visceral and sensitive than other kinds of training. And the trainer, being mindful him/herself, needs to be entirely present with the other participants, with full attention on the emotional content of the training situation.

A starter exercise

This sounds like a dramatic departure from traditional intellectual forms of intercultural training. But it is possible to start with just small steps. Trainers may sprinkle mindfulness into training, see success and then go further.

One popular exercise as a first step into mindful intercultural training goes like this:

• with the participants, find the cultural habits and values to which they are most attached
• breathing exercise
• run a realistic simulation where those attachments come under pressure
• repeat the breathing exercise, and discuss the thoughts that come up

Enriching not disrupting the work of interculturalists

Mindfulness is not in conflict with other models in the field of cross-culture. There is a little overlap with ideas of cultural fluency and cultural intelligence, but in general mindfulness is content-neutral. Mindfulness underpins cultural competence. It is not an aspect of cultural competence.

An intercultural trainer may bring in mindfulness techniques, without a wholesale replacement of existing approaches.

One of the great pressures experienced by many intercultural trainers is time: the limited contact time available with training participants. A mindfulness intervention in training may be a just a few minutes. Real change can begin in less time than required by the traditional 1-2 day training.

Studies show that there can be positive impact even with very short interventions, though more research is needed on the impact of different formats of training specifically in the intercultural field.

Drip, drip, drip…

In cultural training, there’s often so much content. A typical format is a full training day plus some online activity in the 1-2 weeks before and after. There’s a lot to absorb in a short time. List of Dos and Don’ts is too long for most people to store in their heads or keep in training handouts.

Mindfulness supports an approach which is about long-term engagement, is shorter bursts of learning and shorter episodes of live connection with the trainer.

Risky business

If a training practitioner can achieve more in ever-shorter training sessions, can we as an industry sustain this? Is there a viable business here? These are good questions and the answers are not yet clear.

However, the ease with which trainers can stay connected with participants today suggests a future direction. Mindfulness gets its power when adopted mindfully yet habitually in everyday life.

Trainers and their clients need to explore new ways of collaborating, where the trainer becomes an on-going resource for people and organisations, sustaining participants’ commitment to mindful practices and offering access to those databases of Dos and Don’ts.

Walking the talk as a mindful, culturally-sensitive trainer

There are other questions for mindful intercultural trainers to answer too. Naturally, as intercultural trainers we must walk the talk. We must be respectful of cultures and beware that mindfulness may be perceived as competing with some religious practices.

According to the hype, mindfulness is for everyone. But it would not be a smart move to require mindfulness of absolutely all personnel who need intercultural training.

Intercultural trainers as students of mindfulness

We’ve provided some downloadable slides which can help intercultural trainers integrate mindfulness into their current training approach. But if mindfulness is entirely new to you, the best place to start is by experimenting on yourself.

How to get started with mindfulness in your intercultural training

Leading clients through a mindfulness exercise as part of intercultural training makes you, as trainer, the model for mindful practice. If you are early in your journey with mindfulness, our best tip is that you become deeply familiar with mindfulness in your own life. We offer five steps for getting started.

Practise patience, catch yourself being impatient, learn to notice signs such as gripping the steering wheel tighter, tapping your pen hard on the table or noticing the literal heat rise inside your clothes when you’re in a tough conversation.

Try some breathing exercises, reflect on situations immediately after, and then increasingly do that reflection when you are in the moment too.

A tool for intercultural trainers

So for intercultural trainers, mindfulness builds the business case, integrates smoothly with existing approaches, enables more impact in ever-shortening training sessions, opens new possibilities for on-going involvement with clients, sends training participants away after a memorable training experience empowered with transferable techniques and good prospects for more satisfying intercultural work.

Now breathe, and imagine using mindfulness in your intercultural training.

Business almost by definition is about agreeing a price, investing and getting the return. It is about risking real money, not about gratis exchange. Heck, wise business people even pay money to save money.

Intercultural training is a business too, mostly. Cross-cultural trainers and consultants generate value – lots of it, in the case of the best in our profession. So we should be surprised to find an intercultural service like CultureConnector that’s free. How can it exist and why does it?

The more you pay, the better it gets

If you’ve got great skills as a buyer (or an efficient procurement team to back you up), you’re already matching price with value. You should be in a world where the more you pay, the better service you get. For every extra step up the price scale, you’re getting a greater return on your investment. This is the classic idea of price.

So why should you be interested when you find something’s free?

Fast and free

It’s time to update that classic view of price. Zero price no longer means zero value. Thanks to our experience with Google’s search, WeChat, Twitter, Wikipedia, SurveyMonkey, WhatsApp and many more, we now know that free-to-use business services can be high-value business services.

These free services are a good option when there is no time for a procurement process or if your organisation’s licensed tools don’t fit your needs.

For short-term, tactical and local needs, a free tool has the advantage that you probably do not need to make a business case or to wait for a decision before you can start using it. But it has been hard to find the equivalent in the intercultural field.

Why we run a Free intercultural e-learning service

Since 2016, CultureConnector has included a free intercultural training tool. It’s our Free service and it’s one click away. Anyone working with other cultures can sign up and get started immediately.

As a business, we exist to raise the chances of people succeeding in other cultures. We do this by removing the barriers to entry into intercultural competence programs, whether through price, accessibility, motivation, training or availability.

For specialist practitioners, we offer the free service as a chance to engage new customers, to showcase their work, build up the business case in collaboration with their client and charge appropriate fees when that business case is accepted.

For L&D managers with a vision but no budget we offer the free service as a frictionless way to kick-start online intercultural learning for their organisation.

And for anyone with an interest in developing themselves, we offer instant high-quality insights into whatever cultures they choose.

How it works

CultureConnector’s free service is designed for anyone who could benefit in their work:

• you need no authorisation or special access codes to sign up
• you get a profile which you can unlock for free
• unlocking your profile enables not only full country comparisons but also peer-to-peer or coach-to-client comparisons, breaking down national stereotyping by offering a frame of reference which is not tied to country archetypes
• in a face-to-face situation the workshop leader, teacher or coach can sit with participants and discuss the meaning and strategies arising from the personal cultural profile
• there is no trial period: access to your profile stays open

Check out our licence options to decide whether CultureConnector’s free cross-cultural training tools are right for you.

Of course you’ll run into some limitations which can be removed by upgrading. In CultureConnector, the two key advantages of upgrading will be:

• To aggregate a class’s results to create a group profile
• For the trainer to have access through CultureConnector to participant profiles, rather than the need to physically sit with participants and look at their own logged-in accounts.

When is the right time to invest in intercultural training?

Our free online service makes it easier for you to make the investment decision at the right time for your business.

You can use the free service to build your business case, set clear goals, target a measurable return on investment and pilot some processes in collaboration between client and provider or internal stakeholders.

Your free-to-use period can be as long as you need it to be and you may even find that you can grow the value during this period, as you set up ways of working and learn from each pilot case.

When you get the final investment decision, we move back to that classical model of price: it’s important now to invest a realistic figure in a great service and best available partner.

Beware low prices

You may rightly say “free is my favourite price” while you are exploring and innovating with intercultural competence development. But free is probably not a great long-term strategy for you, if you have ambitious targets for business results. Investing more really will get you the best partner, the best experience for your participants and the best impact for your business.

Don’t make “low-price” your next step from “free”. Consistently low prices indicate low value. Your zero-budget period on a free service should have given you a strong business case and brought you to a decision to fully fund your intercultural competence development. If you are stuck in the low-price, low-value zone, we invite you to use our free service as a stepping stone to raising your game and taking your intercultural training to a new level, high on the classic price-value line.

Blending is more than just mixing

Next time you finish a training course with a drink at the conference centre bar, try to find the drink to match the experience you just had. Will it be a half-litre glass of heavy, dark Guinness that seems to steal your energy and your ability to move? Or super sweet liqueur with a magic ingredient that seems to promise instant social success? Or an alcohol-free beer that looks like the real thing but produces an empty feeling of disappointment? Or will you choose as your end-of-training drink a series of shots that leave you with a headache and no memory of the previous few hours?

To symbolise and celebrate the training you just had, I would like to think you’ll choose a blended whisky (or delicious cocktail, if you’re not a drinker). It should have just the right amount of different ingredients to produce the perfect flavour and still beat the luxury drink brands on price.

Your training should work in a similar way as the perfect blended drink. Blended learning is not just about mixing training methods: face-to-face, online, classroom. We need to be more ambitious than that. Let’s make blended learning mean getting the mix right.

Two examples of blended learning

I want to share with you two contrasting ways of doing blended learning successfully for intercultural training and coaching.

These are not fixed designs which must be followed strictly in all relevant cases. These are simplified processes built on the key steps. You can compare or apply these approaches to your own training and coaching scenarios.

The process diagrams are available for download in Powerpoint format, so you can customise for your own situation and brand identity.

Single F2F event intercultural training

A very common scenario is when the trainer meets the participant or group just once during the process. In traditional training without an online element, the trainer has one shot to make an impact, perhaps with just a few hours of contact time. Extending the process by email in advance or follow-up discussion is costly in terms of the trainer’s time, with questionable value.

The solution is to use custom technology to extend the process and deepen the impact in a smart way.

This example shows how we can engage the learner early through the signup and profile-creation stage. We are already answering participant’s questions about the scope, goals and content of the coming training.

This is also a chance for the trainer to efficiently introduce him/herself through the invitation, welcome notes and instructions.

Optional self-study gives self-motivated participants a chance to get online and start researching, preparing thoughts, questions and ideas for the training. They become aware that there are rich resources of information available online and that it is not necessary to wait for the trainer to answer basic practical questions about cultural difference.

Needs analysis and customisation is the first time the trainer needs to commit real resources of time to understand the specific group and their needs. We assume that the trainer already knows or has researched the organisation, business goals, industry and other contextual factors. In blended learning, the online platform makes it efficient for the trainer to get familiar with the group overall and each individual in the group even before they meet.

Live session with the trainer is the key moment in the whole process. This is an opportunity for intensely powerful experiences which drive real change in future behaviour. The trainer may choose to project insights from a laptop generated by the online learning platform to kick-off discussion and to help the group members position themselves among cultures, colleagues, customers and other contacts. But a bold trainer can keep the Powerpoint and browsers closed for much of the session. It’s an ideal chance to simulate or confront participants with real (classroom) situations of cultural difference using interaction, movement, discussion, physical closeness and group exercises.

Before the participants leave the room, the trainer can take a moment to check that the participants know enough about the online tool to continue their learning online.

Continuous learning following the face-to-face event may be sliced in different ways, but tends to include a review/reminder of action points, encouragement to research information and to explore new situations and cultures not covered so far. Keeping the participants engaged in intercultural topics (through alerts, additional advice, new social comparisons, hints and links) helps to reinforce transfer of learning to real work situations.

Intercultural coaching

Another scenario we run into a lot in the Argonaut team is one-to-one intercultural coaching. Like with intercultural training, there are as many real-world variations of coaching programme structure. Coaching is less standardised. Of course, that’s partly the point of coaching.

A coach who uses an online profiling tool in advance can be very focused on specific cultural issues already in the first session, if needed. The client also gets potential action points from the cultural profile early so is able to quickly take ownership of practical changes in working style.

When the number of coaching sessions is limited, online tools can accelerate the speed at which the client is ready to transfer new ideas into work situations. Between coaching sessions, the online tool provides reminders and contextual information for action points which the client committed to.

From here on, the process may repeat, applying the ideas generated during the coaching to new situations and new cultural differences with each cycle. The coach and client may focus their time together on reviewing impact, confronting resistance to change and renewing commitments or agreeing new action points. The coach does not need to provide “information desk” or “country expert” services so much. The coach can instead build the relationship, inspire, support through emotional and practical challenges and celebrate success as real change happens.

Technology-enabled intercultural training: blended learning programme structures

Download these intercultural training and intercultural coaching programme structures in PPTX format.

Find the areas of greatest difference

First, review the dimensions of culture which may be the cause of reduced success in intercultural situations. Maglia Anthony Davis You can get a clear start at tackling the problem if you can identify dimensions within which your employees or clients are significantly different. Introducing new techniques for building on cultural diversity is the key to intercultural effectiveness.

What is a cultural dimension?

Cultural dimensions matter if you are trying to achieve results across cultures. They are categories of behaviour heavily influenced by both culture and individual aspects which impact success across cultures. Let’s take Power as an example. new balance 996 homme pas cher It concerns the relationship between senior and junior people. Air Max 2017 Rosso Uomo If your employee comes from a culture where respect for authority is absolutely dominant, you may find the employee is:

• uncomfortable being trained or managed by a less experienced or younger person
• confused by a senior or junior person interacting in collaborative style
• unwilling to question your methods.

Targeting the manager’s time

Tools like CultureConnector give us the possibility to create personalised cultural profiles of clients and employees in order to target management attention. In some cases the tool moves beyond diagnosis towards giving techniques for improving personal intercultural effectiveness. Nike Air Huarache There are various tools on the market. Nike Free Run 5.0 Blu Uomo We chose CultureConnector (formerly Argonaut) for the ease with which we can locate several individuals on a scale and preserve the value and uniqueness of each person’s cultural profile. Managers can even start for free, getting to know the cultural dimensions most relevant in their teams and receiving some suitable methods for dealing with them.