The entire Cultural Detective Team would like to thank you most sincerely for being part of our community, and wish you much joy, health and success in the new year!

2014 was a big year for Cultural Detective, as we celebrated our 10th anniversary! We are thrilled to have grown into such a large and talented community of people worldwide, committed to making our world more respectful, collaborative, just and sustainable. Thank you for joining us on this very important journey!

This year we were able to achieve another milestone: launching our best-selling Cultural Detective Self Discovery (currently in beta) as part of our Cultural Detective Online platform. This is a huge step forward for our small business.

We are proud that our online tool encourages people to look at themselves and others as beings that are influenced by various cultures, not just nationalities. Now, people are able to explore their individual values as well—their uniqueness—and how they’ve been personally influenced by the cultures around them.

After developing a Personal Values Lens, users can then compare their values with those of any other Values Lens in the online system. This offers a way to investigate aspects of a new culture they might resonate with or find challenging. And it provide a way to strategize about how best to adapt for success cross-culturally, while preserving their sense of self and, also very importantly, their ethics. If you haven’t yet given CD Online a go, you are certainly missing out! Nearly every day I hear a new customer tell me they can’t believe how powerful Cultural Detective Online is, and how affordable. So what are you waiting for?

One additional huge milestone in the CD Online system is the improved group functionality. We are thrilled that users within a group can now collaborate on writing critical incidents and debriefs. Think of the possibilities: your learners working together on cross-cultural stories, told from each person’s perspective! Individual learners can choose to share (or not share) their incidents with the group by submitting it to the group administrator—trainer, coach, professor or team lead. The group administrator can then request the learner to edit the incident and debrief further, or can share the incident and debrief with the entire group. This functionality is transforming the way customers use our system and develop intercultural competence. It is thrilling to witness!

Because of these two huge enhancements to our online system, we will be adding a couple of standard webinars to our lineup. As you know, we already conduct monthly complimentary webinars introducing people to this powerful process for cross-cultural collaboration. In 2015, we will add to that lineup by offering a webinar on Cultural Detective Self Discovery, and a second one on Using Group Functionality in CD Online.

The first quarter schedule is live at www.CulturalDetective.EventBrite.com, and additional webinars will be announced throughout the year. One series we are hoping to add will deal with race and power issues, with the intent that by the end of the year we will have some constructive ideas on how to dialogue more effectively with friends, family and colleagues, and how to promote societal change and healing.

Check back frequently and please let your friends and colleagues know about these terrific professional development opportunities. We have people joining our webinars at all hours of the day and night. More importantly and unbelievably, they actually THANK us for keeping them up at 3 am! (We do schedule our webinars at different times to allow for time zone differences, by the way. It’s just that some people are more eager than others.)

In 2014, we added 5000 new readers to our blog, with readers joining us from 167 countries this past year. I find that very encouraging! Our social media reach has grown extensively. Cultural Detective has an active presence on Twitter, LinkedIn (group), Facebook (page), YouTube (channel) and GooglePlus, as well as a Pinterest board of proverbs, several ScoopIt boards, and a weekly Paper.li Intercultural Competence News Feed.

Are you curious what sorts of posts attracted all these new readers? Here is a list of the top ten most popular posts we published this year:

1. The Nasty (and Noble) Truth about Culture Shock Published in August and already outranking posts published earlier in the year, this post contains a wealth of information, debunks a common myth, and includes free downloadable training materials.
2. Another Intercultural Research Paper Supports the Cultural Detective Approach Published in January 2014, this post soared to the top of our list and proves you are hungry for research. This study came from Bertelsmann, Stiftung and Fundazione Cariplo.
3. New Year’s Gift: Oldie but Goodie—The STADIApproach An excellent, tried-and-true design piece, this freebie is still yours for the downloading.
4. Are You Nice? A guest blog post by Carrie Cameron from May, 2014, recommending to our readers the excellent work of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson. Congratulations and thanks, Carrie!
5. We Are Not (Just) Our Nationalities A very important post from June of this year, we hope each and every one of you will read it and pass it around. None of us has just one story, and Cultural Detective helps us learn about the multiple cultures that influence us, while reminding us we are each unique individuals.
6. Lack of Diversity Correlates with Religious Hostility This post looks at the powerful results of a Pew Research study and was published in April of this year. If you missed it, be sure to take a look now!
7. Cultural Detective as a Facilitator’s Magic Tool This guest blog post by facilitator and joke-teller extraordinaire, Tatyana Fertelmeyster, is from June 2014. Congratulations and thank you, Tatyana!
8. User Tip: Bridging Cultures Offering advice for getting the most out of Cultural Detective, this post was shared with us by long-time expert user Meg Quinn, and just published in October. Congratulations and thank you, Meg!
9. Clean House and Change the Bedding to Greet the Lava A terrific post that came about because an esteemed colleague, Tim Sullivan, shared the video with us. TERRIFIC training material and an excellent resource on the cultural dynamics of current news! Do not miss this one.
10. 4 Methods of Learning Culture A short and very powerful excerpt from Cultural Detective Self Discovery, published in early September and quickly gaining in popularity.
11. Are Emoji the World’s Newest Language A world language quiz and Beyoncé video subtitled in emoji accompanied this post, published in October.

We are thrilled that our blog is now read by over 20,000 people worldwide! We would be proud to showcase the work you are doing to promote intercultural competence, so send your draft article or idea to: blog@culturaldetective.com.

Five of the posts that made it into the top ten list of most-read posts this year were actually written in previous years. Those posts include:

1. Ten Surefire Ways to Divide into Groups Originally published in June 2013, this post hit its height of popularity in September and October 2014, with over a thousand hits each month—proving that trainers love new ideas!
2. Five Top (Free and Easy) Virtual Collaboration Tools You May Not (Yet) Be Using Published in November 2013, this post has been a consistent reference tool for our readers ever since.
3. Can you read this? Originally published in July 2012, this post has slowly but steadily gained popularity every month since. It takes a popular Facebook image created for Spanish readers, accompanied by a similar one created for English readers, and asks you to reflect on the definition of culture and its role in what we perceive. If you haven’t read it, you are overdue.
4. Research Findings: The Value of Intercultural Skills in the Workplace Published March 2013, this is the post with the most popular video we have ever produced, and presents the findings of the British Council study. Videographers we are not, but even the British Council added our video to their web page.
5. Want to Feel Ukiuki, Pichipichi and Pinpin? Japanese Food Onomatopoeia One of my personal favorites, this post has gained popularity among our food-related posts, and we know you love food!

From the list above, there are four posts that were not in our top ten for 2014, but still make the blog’s overall top ten list. Those include:

1. Bicycling in the Yogurt: the French Food Fixation, a terrific guest post by Joe Lurie. If you speak French or enjoy eating, give it a read. Thanks again to Joe for his terrific collaboration in so many ways.
2. “Belief Holding” as an Intercultural Competence: Religious less motivated by compassion One of my all-time favorite comics and one of my all-time favorite cross-cultural competencies (Michael Rokeach’s Open and Closed Mind), plus the findings of a UC Berkeley study.
3. Using Film in Intercultural Education I’m very grateful this post is still in our all-time top ten, because it helps me feel our dear colleague and friend Kevin Booker is still with us.
4. More Cultural Appropriation: The Swastika Also grateful to still see this post up high on the list, because it’s about my all-time favorite critical incident. I shouldn’t play favorites, but I absolutely love this story; it’s just so typical of what happens in Global Diversity work.

Finally, when you write a blog, you love it when someone comments. Otherwise, you can easily get to feeling you are writing in a vacuum. Hearty and heartfelt thanks, therefore, to our most frequent commenters in 2014, each of whom are extraordinary builders of intercultural competence in their own right: George Simons, Vanessa Shaw, Shan McSpadden, Anna Mindess, Jenny Ebermann, and Olivier Marsily.

We look forward to having you join us in a webinar, to reading a guest blog post you might submit, or to dialoguing with you via comments on the blog or social media. Bless you for your commitment to building respect, understanding, collaboration and justice in this world of ours! May 2015 bring you health, joy, love and success!