Treasure

You think you treasure it because it’s precious, but it’s precious because you treasure it

High context

In high context cultures, you learn as much from what people don’t say than from what they do say. (”Ruggles of Red Gap” –Leo McCarey : “It’s very big!”)

Fleeting thought

“I’m a tool waiting to be used” [?]

“Is France a country?” :-))

I can’t believe it!

“How do you best learn?”

The only question worth asking at this time is “How do you best learn?”.

Isn’t it?

Non native speakers?

Trying to build a team with people who have very different levels of English : native speakers v. non native speakers, who might be native non speakers actually ;-)

How to make native speakers understand we always make an effort when we speak English; I’m forever watching myself speaking when I speak English. (& I’ve been working in English for the past ten years; I lead seminars in English, I coach people; I translated conferences in real time).

“It’s a cultural thing”

When you hear “It’s a cultural thing”, it’s most of times about the other’s culture; you and I don’t have a “cultural thing”, we’re the norm of normalcy ;-).

Buying BS law

I discovered a ‘law’ I’d like to share with you; it goes like this:”if you buy somebody else’s bullshit… then you own it!” ;-)

Away from it all

I’m on holidays till AUG24.

See you.

Perception slants in intercultural contacts

A thought about inter-cultural experiences (inspired by a comment on Superfrenchie, very interesting blog by a French living in the USA):

Part of the experience US people traveling to France is –first & foremost– the experience of someone coming from a small city (let’s say: Boise, Idaho) to a big city (let’s say: Paris, France).

Now my contention is we have a typical Laffitte’s Law at work here: many of the things that strike them as French are probably more ‘big city’;maybe they would have the same experiences in –say– New York, New York.

Hence the following diagram :

Laffitte’s law

The XIX^th century French banker Laffitte is renowned –between other things—for saying: “a rich idiot is a rich; a poor idiot is an idiot”.

I suggest we call this structure “Laffitte’s law”.

Examples: for a French, a disciplined French is disciplined; a disciplined German is German… right?

Or: for an American, an American idiot is an idiot, a French idiot is a French—no?

This kind of “contamination” we do all the time, unknowingly.

An example of intercultural ‘misunderstanding’

A Japanese manager is complaining about her French boss “What I expect from him is to be an example, guide me, inspire me in my job life”. My reaction to her “Well, I for one don’t expect any of these from a boss… and it seems to me you have Japanese expectations towards a French boss, which might explain a lot of your mishaps!”

Among other things, a culture deals a lot about expectations. Maybe we should introduce this as a cultural awareness tool: what do I expect from this or that situations? What do I deem normal?

When do I think “I shouldn’t have to explain this in the first place”?

Leadership & cannibalism ?

I used to think with Robert Dilts that “leadership is a commitment to create a world to which people want to belong”.

After some experiences with certain clients of mine I have to update this.

It certainly is “a commitment to create a world to which people want to belong” but it also implies going on taking care of people when they have joined & giving them a chance to grow; instead of munching them alive when they join & spitting them out when you’re quite finished with them.

A new meaning for ’social software’

A fabulous demo & a radically new meaning for ’social software’. A must see!

When is it available? I want it now!

How not to use PowerPoint

it’s here; and it’s spot on!

Enjoy!

Comments are open, free, etc.

I turned off the feature ‘in order to comment, you must be connected & registered’, which was on I don’t really know why (must be me, though…).

A shared space ?

[Via design_at_the_edge]

Michael Schrage sums it up when he said “I wrote a book on collaboration about a decade ago. I thought that I was going to discover issues regarding the collaborative temperament and find personality traits that make collaborators effective. But my key finding was that the real necessity for effective collaboration is the existence of a shared space.
Shared space is the dominant medium for collaboration; it takes shared space to create shared understandings. Indeed, the properties of the shared space shape the quality of that understanding. And models, prototypes, and simulations are shared spaces.”
So the drawing board is a effective shared space but a screen is not much use for more than a couple or three people.

I encountered this lots of times in team-efficiency seminars. The wildest memory I have was a group whose members had to draw common proposals for improvement; & they ended up showing -each in turn- a .ppt slide on the screen…so I turned off the videoprojector, & asked them to get all around a flipchart with markers… & all of a sudden, cooperation/collaboration was there!

:-))

[second thoughts about previous post]

What I didn’t think of in the aforementioned case, was to tell the group that the game’s presentation was “you will be in three teams”…

Cross-experiences (’chiasmus’)

Curious experience in a seminar I led some time ago.

The seminar is about Team Efficiency; takes place within a company; attendees are a real-life team starting an ambitious project. This exercise I have led 60+ times in the past 10 years, in French & in English, in EMEA, AP & N-America. It needs the group to be split in subgroups (3 in this case); the subgroups have to organize (independently) to achieve a common goal (re-constructing a physical object, with constraints that lead them to split the tasks & cooperate) -no competition is implied between the subgroups nor usually happening.

What happened this time was, the 3 subgroups organized as a whole (subverting the rules in certain way) in order to produce the results, without getting at all through the game phase, nor interacting actually with each other within the subgroups; in a way they devised a ’solution’ that was essentially centered about a ‘Taylor-style’ work division & execution; without any fun (other than —maybe— subverting the rules).

The debriefing was rather akward. What I felt was a misunderstanding. The game was supposed to be about having fun in subgroups. Maybe the group’s reaction showed their impatience to get down to business.

But in my experience, the (few) groups that had that kind of reaction in the past had either a legal specialist among them, or a strong rebellious streak i.e. they did it as a challenge towards the facilitator (me).
So the whole discussion turned around ‘what happened?’ and all of a sudden they commented about “In the last seminar I had they insisted on ‘thinking out the box’ so I looked for the trick around the rules”, “In another seminar ‘they’ had insisted on the fact there was no competition but it finally appeared that there was (i.e. ‘they’ had lied)”

So there we went. Put the past in the past. Build a future. Build possibilities. Instead of coming from the past restraining ourselves into believing what’s possible is what we already experienced, can we come from a future where things are possible even when we never experienced them before, even if we don’t know whether they are possible?

Now why was this so curious for me? Because at a point intime, I later felt I was the one who was coming from the past (past experiences with other groups who had done this in a rebellious way) & they were coming from a future where they would have to re-invent & tweak rules; & beware of double-bind messages from their organization…

[Chiasmus: a reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases, as in “He went to the country, to the town went she.” Websters Unabridged Dictionary – might also mean 'you thought they were there and you were here; but they were here & you were there']

First steps

I’m a consultant, trainer & coach, working from Paris, France; I’ve been working for the past 10 years with multicultural groups, in French & in English, in Europe & abroad (N-America, EMEA, Asia).

I’m mostly interested in intercultural relationships. My job is training & coaching managers & executives in interactions management : one to one relationships, & group relationships.

My French-only blogs are there & there.