Based on my observation, I have created for myself the stereotype that native English speakers are welcoming and friendly. Later on, I would learn to nuance my stereotype when moving to the UK.

My observations have led me to attribute behaviour to individual members of a group according to the group characteristics or traits. In other words, each member of the group will behave as per the description of such behaviour of the group.

That is the essence of stereotype, a word which comes from the printing world. It was in 1798 that Firmin Didot coined the phrase to describe a printing plate that duplicates any typography. The duplicate printing plate or stereotype was used instead of the original. It was first used in its modern psychological sense in 1922 by journalist Walter Lippmann.

The well-known iceberg analogy used in intercultural to illustrate the national cultural values in which the visible part of the iceberg represents the conscious actions, and the much bigger and hidden section represents the subconscious and cultural values, can be used for stereotypes.

We can distinguish between explicit stereotypes and implicit ones.

An explicit stereotype is the one in which individuals are aware of holding and use it to judge people. Reverting to the iceberg analogy the explicit stereotype would fall in the visible portion of the iceberg. Individuals may try to mitigate the stereotype they hold but they often fail to be impartial by either overestimating or underestimating the amount of bias created by the stereotype. The stereotype created in the example above would fall in the category explicit stereotype.

Implicit stereotypes are those that are in the subconscious of the individual and therefore they have little awareness of it, if any at all, and thus have little control over it. Such stereotypes are frequently assumptions about members of out-groups, such as other cultures.

Meeting a member of an out-group for the first time may trigger a cognitive process during which the individual will either have his or her assumption in the stereotype confirmed or refuted, or the individual can resist the recognition of the assumption and reject it. In the above example, if I meet an American and I note that he or she is welcoming and friendly my assumption will be reinforced and in so doing strengthen my stereotype. To the contrary, should the American I meet clearly not be friendly and welcoming, my assumption will be challenged to the point of doubt or even annihilation.

Stereotypes impact not only the individual holding the stereotype but also the member of the out-group subject to the stereotype. This happens in very many ways, it can be ambiguity, threat, self-fulfilling or even self-evaluating.

We are told over and over again not to use stereotypes, but we keep doing it. Why is that?

Stereotypes are an efficient tool to create categories and to make sense of the world around us. Our senses are constantly bombarded with information. If we try to retain all of it, our brain would explode, so it is for the brain a matter of survival and the way it does that is by retaining only the information that is relevant to its survival, discarding the rest and organising what is kept into some sort of order including creating categories into which content can be added.

There is a dual danger with stereotyping. One is that the stereotype may well not be accurate in reflecting reality, and two is that it may impede any new information on the individual in front of us differing from the stereotype from being accepted and therefore being locked-in in the assumption or belief and becoming impervious to any notion of revising the holder’s assumptions.

Stereotypes held by individuals are likely to impact on the social behaviour and communication with members of groups other than the one to which the individual belongs.

Stereotypes in themselves are not bad, it is the way we use them we have to be attentive to. In other words, if we meet a member from a group other than ours or out-group, and certain traits and behaviour of that individual do not correspond to what is expected from the stereotype, we must keep an open mind and accept that a group is made up of individuals who may show some characteristics of the group but these are not universal to all the member of the group.

Therefore, awareness and understanding of other cultures and an open mind to notions that may be going against assumptions in stereotypes are crucial in the framework of international exchanges.

Image licensed as Creative Commons 2.0 Share Alike by Cochese via Flickr, adapted

Interview with Victor Batista and Ana Carolina Jacinto

“It’s like a test. It’s like one, big test” cries Charlize Theron’s character in the 1997 film Devil’s Advocate. It’s a movie that CultureConnector’s Cultural Correspondent for Brazil, Victor Batista, has thought about a lot. “The Keanu Reeves character is forced to confront his principles as he chases riches in a new land of hidden deals, power-brokers and compromised principles. Sometimes in Brazil, it’s like the film. You get opportunities for short-term advantage by breaking the rules. It’s frustrating to walk away from that and see others take those opportunities.”

But now Victor is celebrating 20 years since he founded Forvm, a company which exists to build a trading bridge between Brazil and Europe. “We are doing the right thing,” says Victor. “We have kept our principles and built a sustainable business in Brazil without breaking our ethical code. It’s one of the myths about Brazil, that to do business here, you must pay bribes.”

Few people have more experience of the ocean of cultural difference and the need for a bridge than Victor Batista. Although culture and intercultural competence is often not on the radar at first for Forvm’s customers, a big part of the long-term value of the company’s service is bringing together very different mindsets.

“We give hands-on support with very practical tasks for companies setting up here, or trading. But we are also here to give insight, encouragement and to help them navigate each other’s culture,” adds Victor. Foreign companies often start out with misconceptions about Brazil. “There are myths we must bust,” insists Victor.

Myth-busting

From Victor’s team, Ana Carolina Jacinto has a professional interest in the cultural dimension of international trade. “People around the world are getting to know Brazil. They witnessed the 2016 Olympics, they know carnival, they may drink Brazilian coffee and even have Brazilian colleagues or Facebook connections. However, some myths have real staying-power and still influence how people outside think about Brazil,” she says. We asked Ana Carolina to describe some of the big ones.

• Brazil is a big country. “That’s true, and yes, there is one flag and one national language. But this is not just a bigger version of most countries on earth. At 200 million people Brazil has such diversity that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot succeed. A Brazilian from the south may feel closer in working style to Europeans than to other Brazilians from the north, who themselves may identify more closely with Spanish-speaking Mexicans than with fellow Brazilians further south. Any ‘strategy for Brazil’ is likely to need variations for different markets and regions within the country.”
• Brazil just produces the basics. “In fact, there are small, medium and large Brazil-based organisations producing world-class, high-tech products and services. Against all the evidence, many European organisations still don’t believe in Brazilian tech. The situation is made worse by Brazilian companies holding the same mistaken view. They need to believe in themselves too.”
• Business models that work elsewhere will work in Brazil too. “Sometimes a tried-and-tested formula that has worked in other countries simply doesn’t work in Brazil. We were helping to set up a subsidiary in Brazil for a foreign company one time. To succeed here we needed to introduce a major adjustment to their organisation structure, adding people just to deal with tax calculation and international communication. The roles did not exist anywhere else in the 50 countries where the company operated, but were essential here.”

World champions in bureaucracy

Victor is Swiss-Brazilian and has worked on both sides of the Atlantic. “I sometimes hear Europeans complain that the only certainties in life are taxes and death. Let’s bring a Brazilian perspective to this. Running a business in Switzerland I had to pay three taxes per year: a relatively simple tax return for the city, canton (region) and to the national government. In Brazil my company Forvm often pays forty taxes per month, each with its own calculation and paperwork.”

“Brazil is the World Champion in tax bureaucracy” Victor adds. “It’s been estimated that a typical company is required to spend 2600 hours per year just to calculate taxes, before any payments, queries and other tax administration.”

Impact of politics on working life in Brazil

Politics matters in Brazil. For people working in Brazilian organisations, the priorities of the government can have far-reaching consequences on everyday life. “The change from Fernando Henrique Cardoso to Lula in 2004 was a big one,” says Victor. “The earlier government had built levers to manage the economy, steering Brazilian organisations softly towards development and growth, so when Lula came in with a harder, more interventionist approach, Brazilian organisations faced a big increase in regulation.”

“Things can change dramatically, and they did again in 2016 when we got a new president. Some organisations took advantage of the liberalising agenda of the new government. But many large organisations continued with old habits – even those which were privatised and moved from the public sector to become private enterprises.”

Change and no change in Brazil

Victor strongly believes in getting to know the operating environment of your Brazilian partner or subsidiary. “Based on nearly 30 years of conducting market research for inward investors, I can tell you that when you deal with a Brazilian organisation, you could find yourself in a modern working environment with innovative management practices, low hierarchies, transparency and businesslike mindset. After all, Brazil has a strong and growing tech sector. But there are also many traditional organisations who have not changed and seemingly will not change.”

Victor goes on to explain that sometimes these traditional organisations are protected from change because the normal pressures of global business do not apply. Corrupt deals in the past may mean that innovation was not required: competitors were not given a fair chance. This had some distorting effects, right through the organisation. Without the heat of competition, there was less need for innovation, efficiency or logical problem-solving. The distorting effect could repeat through the whole supply chain.

“When starting to work with a Brazilian organisation, you need to know the full context of how it operates. The desire of a Brazilian organisation to innovate, change and play by international standards depends on how much money the company is currently making. We’ve seen some large family businesses simply repeating mistakes until they run out of money.”

Change is also slowed in Brazil by what Victor calls its colony mindset. “We have a culture of passively waiting for colonists to come and show us new techniques. Oftentimes, Brazilians do not reach out to explore technologies and approaches which are already established elsewhere. They might expect the world to come to Brazil. They want to be taught.”

Resources and resourcefulness

“At Forvm we’re helping Brazilian and foreign organisations overcome these challenges every day. But let’s remember the enormous opportunities of crossing the bridge between Brazil and the rest of the world. We have amazing resources of workers and consumers in Brazil, tens of millions of whom have spending power equal to citizens of the world’s richest nations. We also have a large population of the poor, and a lot of activities for development agencies working to improve the lives of lower-income and excluded people.”

“…And that’s to say nothing of Brazil’s fabulous natural resources, protected by strict laws environmental laws (weakly enforced) which add to the richness of the country.”

In the movie Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino stands in the way of a perfect Hollywood ending, but “the results are good for our customers” says Ana Carolina. “Crossing the cultural bridge is an adventure, but in my work I get the privilege of seeing the rewards flowing back to the investors, to the adventurous personnel who make it happen and to the communities around them.”

Victor and Ana Carolina have recently updated the content of CultureConnector on Brazil.

• www.forvm.com.br
• About Victor Batista
• About Ana Carolina Jacinto
• Cultural facts about Brazil
• More on Brazil in Cultureconnector

We had a discussion: how to introduce cultural differences without making Germany to be all about big cars, arriving on time, leather trousers, Mexicans to be stylish and snoozing under big hats, Kenyans improvising low-tech solutions in Massai-bright multi-coloured clothes?

It was time to create images of difference without falling into the stereotyping trap.

Draft Two

Draft Two came back a few days later: all the people had been replaced by geometric shapes. Symbolic cultural differences. And look, no stereotypes!

Fear of stereotyping was preventing us getting to the topic: the real impact of national cultural differences on human-to-human practical work situations.

What were we afraid of? If national cultures exist and if cultural differences matter to people who work alongside other nationals, we must be able to talk about that directly.

Beyond stereotypes

In our business, we’ve far moved beyond stereotyping, but we still run into fear (over-sensitivity) and tactlessness (wild generalisation) on an almost daily basis. How have we overcome the fear, and what prevents us falling into the stereotyping trap?

Advance knowledge: good.

For a long time we’ve offered a National Stereotypes Test, as part of our intro to the whole intercultural field. The exercise requires you to operate in a culture of which you have limited knowledge. Do you succeed better building relationships by abandoning the small amount you know and starting with a completely open mind? Hint: the key to success is cautious use of that little knowledge – while treating the people you meet as individuals. Success follows when you observe carefully and drop stereotypical approaches as soon as the individual shows unique individual preferences.

Pre-judgment: bad.

One of the tools we use is a scale. You might find yourself on one end or the other, or perhaps somewhere near the middle. Which is the good end and which is the bad? Or is the middle best? Naturally, there is no better or worse position. In a team, project or company, diversity brings advantages. The only “good” way of being on the scale is developing techniques for working with people on the left or right of you.

National culture isn’t everything

National culture is important. People who work internationally will tell you that at times it can seem to define your whole situation. But we all know that many of us reflect other influences strongly too: the profession, region, language, institution, religion and other strong cultures we’re part of. Some of the maps we’ve created for Argonaut over the years identify regional and even city-level characteristics which may be just as strong as the national culture.

Person-to-person

Personality may be the overriding factor: both yours and the personalities of the people you’re dealing with. In the end, it’s all about people-to-people interaction. National culture may be a useful lens, it may offer a quick-start guide to your new boss, partner, customer or even date. But pretty soon you’ll need to get personal. Then you’ll really need to get to know the individual preferences of the people and personalities you’re working with.

We’ve recently added person-to-person profiling in CultureConnector. Stereotyping crashes out when it is so easy to explore the personal level of intercultural interactions. How closely do you fit your national stereotype? Maybe just a little. Maybe not at all. If you are not sure, check it out in CultureConnector, and invite a friend to compare.

Diversity is a fact within national cultures, not just between

Another approach we’ve taken is to draw attention to minority communities who live inside the borders of a larger nation. Communities may be almost any kind of grouping. And we know from our families, schools, neighbourhoods and workplaces that people are different even if they share very similar backgrounds.

Stereotyping: it could end in tears

It’s time to lose our fear of stereotypes and use what we know, with caution and with sensitivity to the individuals we meet. This is also a call to embrace your own national culture, to know the other influences that make you unique and to discover the other layers which make up a person.

Another image we’ve used in Argonaut material over the years is the onion. It peels so readily to reveal new layers which were not visible from the outside. Misusing stereotypes will end in tears (eventually yours). But peeling back the many layers of a individual’s cultural influences will lead to tears of discovery (eventually joy).

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions

Let’s be honest. This stretch can feel painful. Intercultural experiences offer a unique platform for self-development. But experiencing other cultures does not automatically provoke positive learning.

Only by reflecting how this experience affects our own beliefs and attitudes can we gain new insights into our own limitations. Intercultural experience does not equal competence.

Reflection sounds easy, but we often need a professional perspective to get out of our standard loop of interpretations: a well-structured expatriate coaching programme, for example, can multiply the benefits of experience through pre-departure preparation and coaching during the assignment.

Change is hard: it requires more than seeing new lands

Experience almost certainly builds knowledge, but doesn’t necessary develop behaviour. Our behaviour is usually quite rigid and repetitive. It may change only if we recognise a failure. And even then, change can be slow or non-existent. When we take a conscious decision to change existing patterns of behaviour, we still often feel resistance.

Experience may give us ideas and information about cultural adaption. Often knowledge does not transfer directly into practice, especially when the change runs against our own cultural assumptions.

Good to know

Knowledge is an ingredient in intercultural competence, but gaining knowledge can also lead to wrong conclusions and other problems, if the “learning” happens in a negative context, or without good resources for reflection and emotional strength.

Knowledge does not transfer directly into practice, especially when the change runs against our own cultural assumptions.

It can be dangerous to assume that you know a lot about how people from a different culture operate. In the worst case, experience leads to over-confidence and complacency. Negative experiences can lead to all-too-easy stereotyping, superficial conclusions, frustration.

Three key components of intercultural competence

If knowledge alone does not bring success, what else do we need? Intercultural competence has many components, and experience is only one of those. The approach of Prof. Dr. Christoph Barmeyer distinguishes:

• knowledge
• behaviour
• emotion

as the main components of intercultural competence. According to Barmeyer, experience almost certainly adds to knowledge, but will not alone drive change in behaviour.

We need a distinct set of abilities to rely on. Most of those abilities are not in essence “intercultural”, but help us to apply the knowledge and translate it into behaviour. I divides them into three main categories called the I, You and We abilities. Coaching can help us achieve awareness of the resources we already have inside us. Starting with this awareness of our own resources, we learn how to use them to enable successful intercultural encounters.

How to take maximum benefit from experience

• put yourself in situations which challenge your own assumptions
• consider how you and others behaved in the situation
• find local/expert guides to discuss your interpretations and get to the bottom of it without ignoring your emotions
• brainstorm alternative reactions and experiment with new behaviour: stretch yourself consciously in a playful way
• leave some questions open to be answered by future experience

Looking for the easy route through cultural difference? To make it a transformative experience, to truly grow your global skills, you may have to accept that your work with other cultures will involve some distress. When experience tests you emotionally and nudges you to shift your behaviour, you’re probably accelerating along the intercultural learning curve.

_{Quotation: Oliver Wendell Holmes}

This mega project has been going for over a decade and has made huge losses for the French company AREVA through delays in construction and starting electricity generation – by 2016 many years behind the original schedule.

Business goals and profession may unify us, but culture gives us diverse ways of working

There are significant differences in belief and behaviour between Latin countries in Europe on the one hand (take Italy, France and Portugal as example) and Nordics such as Swedes and Finns on the other. Northern and Southern Europe are different, when we look at population level. This is also true in international joint ventures, acquisitions and mergers – even when there are strong uniting factors such as common industry, engineering culture and business goals.

I wonder if these cultural factors have a role in the project. Have they contributed to the delays, misunderstandings and problem solving?

Different cultures, different approach to specifications

One insider view is that the specifications were not good enough: nobody knew what they were getting into.

In my experience, this is actually quite common in big infrastructure projects. The specifications have a tendency of changing during the implementation. In normal circumstances, people would meet, discuss and resolve the problems from a technical or business perspective. This is how bridges and airfields are built. The changes are managed and the project moves on.

Did the Finns and the French really recognise and manage the cultural gaps they both know exist? Were cultural issues a part of the risk management of this nuclear plant project?

Stress-testing your project plan against cultural differences

We are told that the plant is airplane crash-proof and tsunami proof (no tsunamis recently in the Baltic Sea, but better safe than sorry). I suggest that the project plan was not properly stress-tested against known cultural differences.

If AREVA and the buyer TVO had executed even some pro-active cultural competency training would we in fact be much better off with the project, costs and the production of electricity?

Whether we deal in megaprojects or everyday work of teams and organisations, we need to ask: has our project itself been bomb-proofed against cross-cultural misunderstandings?

_{Photo credit Teollisuuden Voima Oy.}

The slamming of a fist on a table, the endless layers of management to get to a decision-maker, the fatalistic defeatism of a team member – how will technology help us understand and navigate cultural behaviour?

We’re already part-way there. Algorithms are already running through culture datasets today, extracting insights into population phenomena and cultural preferences. Culture algorithms are a tool for corporations to understand consumer behaviour in different populations. Loyalty cards in the retail industry connected with tracking cookies in shop websites provide data for offers to be targeted based on algorithms which predict buying behaviour based on past purchases, locations and timing.

Cross-cultural competence algorithm

We first coded the Argonaut culture algorithm in 2001. It has been running through our data ever since. Its main task is to identify patterns in belief and behaviour and find common ground and significant gaps. Algorithms perform a wide variety of tasks in our economy and society. The job of this algorithm is to map learner input data onto different cultural situations in order to produce a personal gap analysis.

Cultural sensitivity training

Today the Argonaut algorithm is confined to personal and organisational profiling. The outputs are visualised and used in personal development programmes or in organisational development, for example in mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and subsidiary formation. The Argonaut culture algorithm generates personal strategies against data from organisational and national cultures.

The human expertise of a cross-cultural consultant provides a vital additional layer of insight and interpretation, so the algorithm becomes a tool in coaching, training and consulting.

The culture algorithm

Augmented reality will take our tech-enabled understanding of other cultures to the next level. When we can place a layer over what we see, providing interpretation of complex cultural situations, we shall truly have achieved the vision of a cultural connector algorithm. Within the past 10 years mobile computing power, large connected data-sets, crowd sourcing and new thinking in algorithm design have given us something that seemed like magic a few years ago: the translator apps.

Inside the next 10 years we will start to see the same for culture. Every day Argonaut generates data for the community of experts, customers and individual learners to use in new ways to bring personal and social insight. You will see cultural algorithms mining new sources of data, providing pocket assistants to real time complex cultural situations. That fist hitting the table? Based on data from thousands of other fists on other tables, your app could give you a probability analysis that the conversation will end in agreement.

France suffered a terrible tragedy last week. An attack against the freedom of speech has been discussed ever since all over the world, and news channels have had in depth feature with analyses from all angles about the events. People have marched on the streets, posted #jesuischarlies on social media and shop owners have taped solidarity articles on their windows. Despite the fact that hunger, disease and war kills tens of thousands of people all over the world each day these terrifying events in Paris have moved us even more because of their symbolism.

When facing something this shocking in a country and culture that is not your own I realised my reaction was different than it probably would have been back at home. I observed that the two biggest factors for this were my language skills and cultural knowledge. My French is not yet fluent enough to absorb everything I hear on TV or read from tabloids while walking past a newsstand. Also, I don’t know the social norms and codes well enough to understand where and when the locals would want to discuss the terrors. Hence, thanks to my Finnish reserved nature, I’m silent which no doubt seems I don’t care. I do care a lot and the attacks have affected me deeply. It’s just contradictory how I think I would be even more emotional in my home country than what I am here, in the country that faced the tragedy.

There are differences in encountering a crisis. In Finland I would automatically read the tabloid covers by a newsstand and hear every word on talk shows and news. Also I would know which words to use at what time when discussing how devastating the attacks were and what the consequences of the tragedy are.

Tonight I will go and light a candle in a square where people commemorate the victims of the tragedy. Even though I am not familiar with the language or all the other behavioural codes and norms of this culture, I know one thing. Candles and their light speak a universal language of remembrance and solidarity.

Our thoughts are with the victims’ families and we hope France can emerge stronger and more united from these attacks,

Hilla