“Is France a country?” :-))

I can’t believe it!

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 :

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”?

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”…