Tag Archives: cross-cultural skills

Early Bird Rate Closing Soon!

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cdfc-grad-5You have two more chances in 2017 to become certified in the use of Cultural Detective. The early-bird rate for the certification in San Diego ends 30th September!

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    San Diego, USA, 21-23 October 2017
    Post-conference workshop of the SIETAR USA Conference. Profits benefit SIETAR USA.
    REGISTER OR FIND MORE INFORMATION HERE
  2. logo.jpg
    Vienna, AUSTRIA, 23-25 November 2017
    Sponsored by and with profits benefitting SIETAR Austria, this is a lower price than normal, so take advantage!
    FIND MORE INFORMATION HERE
    REGISTER VIA SIETAR AUSTRIA

Below are some comments from participants in previous Certification Workshops:

  • “Excellent, customizable tools will help me effectively address and restore my clients’ problems.”
  • “Cultural Detective helps me be a better manager.”
  • “This will assist me greatly in building partnerships in other organizations and with newly arrived communities.”
  • “We will roll Cultural Detective out across the organization to develop a shared model and language for leveraging our differences.”
  • “A teachable model that is a simple approach to a complex subject.”
  • “This helps me to better work with some co-workers and not be so quick to get angry or criticize, which is rarely productive.”
  • “Cultural Detective provides the structure and process for the deliberate intent required to understand others from their point of view and collaborate with them.”
  • “CD helps me see a clearer picture and find resolutions when I’m dealing with complex, sensitive issues.”
  • “Cultural Detective is an excellent conflict resolution tool.”
  • “CD has given me a greater understanding of the way people tick and the tools to recognize them. It’s a way to handle issues that makes sense!”
  • “I will use Cultural Detective with our international students as well as during our department training. It changes mindsets.”
  • “Cultural Detective opens doorways to more effective design and learning.”
  • “CD transforms team productivity.”

We very much look forward to having you join us and to helping us develop intercultural competence for enhanced respect, understanding, collaboration and justice in this world!

Free and Effective Intercultural Assessment Instruments

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The Freebies page of our website contains a plethora of downloads and resources we hope you’ll use. Today I’d like to focus your attention on one small portion of that page: Assessment Instruments.

There are, fortunately, loads of terrific intercultural assessment instruments on the market today. The instruments that we share do not compete with those but, rather, fill a different niche. There are just four of them, but they are important, IMHO.

  1. First, and most important, is the Diversity Collegium’s Global Diversity and Inclusion Benchmarks. With contributions from 95 Expert Panelists including me, this complimentary download is a tremendous resource for any organization or community aiming to improve the quality and caliber of its diversity and inclusion.
  2. Second, but also of great interest to our community, are the two Cultural Detective Competence Assessments. These tools are still in beta-testing and require your use and refinement, please! If you use Cultural Detective and would like to conduct pre- and post-tests to verify how well your learners have integrated the methodology into their daily thoughts and habits, give these instruments a go. And be sure to provide us your feedback and improvements/refinements!
  3. The final assessment tool is a quiz on world maps. It could be useful in training, or for your personal professional development. Maps obviously reflect the world views of their creators, and this quiz is aimed to help users realize that.

There are loads of other complimentary resources available from our site. Please put them to good and frequent use! Together we can make a difference, promoting respect, collaboration, innovation and justice.

Complimentary Resources

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Last month I shared with you the newest page on our website, a list of some of the Free Resources we are eager to have you use. In that post I focused on Tools for Training and Education.

In this second installment, I’d like to focus on the resources we have to help you reflect on the approaches you take and the biases inherent in them. You’ll find them in the section entitled, Resources and Articles, and they include:

  1. A terrific piece written by Peter Isackson called “Beyond Cultural Dimensions.” Dimensions of culture are superb tools for understanding and comparing cultures using universal categories. They also, as does any tool, have downsides. Peter discusses both. If this topic is of interest, you may also want to register for our complimentary webinar, “How is Cultural Detective Different from Other Intercultural Tools?“
  2. A brilliant article by Cultural Detective Malaysia co-author Asma Abdullah, “Indigenous Contributions to Global Management.”
  3. Links to a series of articles on food, language and values, including Chinese, French and Japanese. Perhaps you’d like to add one of your food fetish languages to the mix? Send your article to us and we’ll consider it!
  4. The inside scoop on “Tiger Moms,” written by the co-author of Cultural Detective South Korea, Eun Young Kim.
  5. Free downloads of several (expensive) journal articles, including:
    1. Productive Behaviors of Global Business Teams from the International Journal of Intercultural Relations
    2. Three entries in the SAGE Encyclopedia for Intercultural Competence

Please use these complimentary resources frequently and well, so that together we can develop intercultural competence in our organizations and communities, thereby building respect, understanding, collaboration and justice!

Free Resources, all in one place

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Freebies.jpgCultural Detective is very committed to building respect, collaboration, equity and justice in our world by developing intercultural competence. To that end, we publish extremely effective and affordable materials, we conduct an extensive series of free webinars, and we frequently share activities, designs and resources on this blog.

In order to make it easier for members of our community to access these complimentary resources, we’ve done our best to gather most of them into one place: the “Freebies” section of our website. Gathering all of them is rather untenable, as we’ve been giving stuff away since 2004, but if you find something on our sites that you feel deserves a listing in the Freebies section, please let us know.

I plan to do a series of blog posts about this new page, and I’ll start at the bottom, Tools for Training and Education. There you will find some truly incredible things.

  1. The Four Phase Model for Task Accomplishment in multicultural teams, taken from the classic Ecotonos: A Simulation for Collaborating Across Cultures. It provides a proven model for using differences as assets that combines well with and supplements your use of Cultural Detective.
    There are an additional three articles on ways to use Ecotonos in various settings, including in a business class, for conflict resolution, and in a science laboratory.
  2. A terrific article by one of the intercultural field’s most respected researcher/practitioners, Jackie Wasilewski, titled “Collide-o-culture or Kaleid-o-culture? GPS for Human Beings.” If you haven’t read it, you should.
  3. An article written by Barbara F. Schaetti, Heather Robinson, and myself on our go-to approach for developing sustainable intercultural ability, EPIC: Essential Practice for Intercultural Competence.
  4. Powerpoint slides and information on Interculturalidad in Latin America, and how it compares to similar concepts in North America, Europe and Asia, written by Adriana Medina-López-Portillo.
  5. Link to download a terrific learning game on the refugee and migrant experience, developed by Caritas France and called “On the Road with Migrants.” The game is available in French, English, German, Greek, Italian, and very soon in Portuguese and Spanish.

I am proud of the generosity of our team of authors and our community of certified facilitators and users, to help us make these tools available to all of you. Please use them frequently and well. Together we can promote respect, understanding, collaboration and justice!

2017 Professional Development Calendar

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smartphone-1445489Do you work in a multicultural, geographically dispersed team or organization? Do you lead one? Are you charged with developing diversity and inclusion competence, or intercultural competence, in your students, colleagues or clients? Would you benefit from an intercultural competence tool that looks at people as unique individuals influenced by multiple different cultures (organizational, professional training, age/generation, spiritual tradition) and teaches critical thinking in context?

If so, you will want to attend one of our Cultural Detective Facilitator Certification programs. Use of Cultural Detective does not require certification—the Cultural Detective Method and materials were designed with the idea that they could be used by interested non-specialists. However, the Cultural Detective Series is so robust that users often ask for in-depth workshops to learn more about the many applications and strengths of this approach, and to network with peers using the Cultural Detective Method.

Cultural Detective Facilitator Certification Workshops are designed for small groups who share two-and-a-half days of intense, guided interaction; current schedule of workshops is below. We explore what “intercultural communication competence” means and offer ways to use Cultural Detective to enhance intercultural effectiveness in your organization or community. We have three public sessions on the calendar for 2017:

  1. IRELAND, Dublin, 22-24 May
  2. USA, Portland OR, 22-23 July
  3. AUSTRIA, Vienna, 23-25 November

Register now to secure your seat as spaces are limited. Certification Workshops are a wonderful way for the advanced practitioner to reflect on the things that matter, and develop the ability to combine and integrate various theories, approaches, and tools in the field. We explore the impact of multiple cultures on each of us, the idea of layering Value Lenses to visually represent these influences, and a variety of ways to incorporate Cultural Detective into your training, teaching and coaching.

Virtual Teamwork in Latin America

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Our friends over at Iceberg in Buenos Aires have completed one of the first surveys I’ve seen on global virtual teams in Latin America. I’d like to congratulate them and thank them for this effort!

An astounding 88% of respondents to the survey confirm that the advantages of working in a global team outweigh the challenges! Their major reason? The diversity of perspectives, knowledge, and expertise among team members, which in their experience can generate innovative solutions and outstanding results.

Over 30% of the respondents reported spending more than half their work days interacting with colleagues around the globe; another 56% spend between 10-50% of their work days interacting with global clients. 68% of their global teams get together face-to-face at least once a year but, surprisingly, they prefer video conferences over live meetings! Even though respondents view video conferencing as their best coordination tool, only 32% of them use it in all their virtual meetings.

Survey results showed that diversity on these teams arose due to functional necessity, rather than because of its inherent benefits. Over half of those responding report their companies have lost opportunities due to cross-cultural misunderstandings. Despite this fact, only 21% of them report having received training to improve their virtual team’s productivity! Even sadder to me is that 53% of those who have received training did so in a webinar, 32% via e-learning, and only 16% had the opportunity to attend a face-to-face training or team-building session. Come on, Latin America! OJO! We’ve got work to do!

What did the respondents say is most complex about working in a global virtual team? First is including colleagues that don’t participate, then sending messages that are adequately understood, following up on what teammates are working on, and achieving agreements and decisions. 69% said the lack of co-location makes it more challenging to create trusting relationships, 68% said the distance makes it difficult to understand the context of colleagues’ communication, and 60% noted that distance can therefore generate conflict.

What qualities do they feel are most important for success on a global team? Communicating with clarity, adapting to cultural differences, and demonstrating a collaborative spirit.

Below is a visual that Iceberg created to summarize their findings.

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While there were only 86 respondents from four countries included in the survey, it is a good start. Respondents were representative of what we might expect in Latin America: 54% work for enterprises with fewer than 5000 employees, and 25% work for organizations with over 20,000 employees worldwide. 27% of the respondents were manager level, with 16% at director level. Most were from the IT industry, followed by consulting, education, and consumer products. The full Iceberg report (in Spanish) can be downloaded here.

Overall, the sample is fairly small and rather skewed, however it is useful for gathering ideas on how to make our virtual teams more effective, and some of the uniqueness we might find with teams and team members based in Latin America. If you work with global or virtual teams, be sure to check out Cultural Detective Global Teamwork, a powerful developmental competence tool that is included in every subscription to Cultural Detective Online.

 

Communicating with US Americans

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P1280467Last year was a watershed for the field of intercultural communication, as it brought the publication of the Sage Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence. Edited by Janet Bennett, the very heavy and extremely useful two-volume set includes about 350 entries by a broad international, multi-disciplinary cross-section of professionals. I am proud to be included among them.

While the first entry I was asked to write delighted my soul, the second and third ones were much more of a challenge. I suppose Janet asked me because there are few people foolish enough to take on a topic as huge, as broad, and as problematic as Communicating Across Cultures with People from the United States. I am USA-born, currently living in Mexico. I love and am extremely proud of my birth country. I am also perplexed and dismayed by it. Such is, perhaps, the nature of a culture that includes 320 million people and nearly 4 million square miles!

The USA is so very misunderstood. Any of us born there, who travel abroad, know how it feels to wear the “brand” on our foreheads, to be seen as a “representative” of that “crazy” and yet “incredible” nation. Most people internationally feel a complexity of emotions about the USA and its culture. Many hold stereotypical views, and I saw the encyclopedia as a chance to help explain US culture a bit.

In the Cultural Detective series we have the excellently written Cultural Detective USA, written by the incomparable George Simons and Eun Young Kim. The Cultural Detective USA is a tool for developing cross-cultural competence and teaming; an encyclopedia entry is information and knowledge. Thus, the two work together and complement each other very well.

I highly recommend you purchase the complete two-volume encyclopedia, published by Sage in 2015, or ask your librarian to add it to their collection. It is a hugely valuable reference, one I’ve consulted extensively since it arrived last May. Here’s what Sage says about the full volume:

In 1980, SAGE published Geert Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences. It opens with a quote from Blaise Pascal: “There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees that are falsehoods on the other.” The book became a classic—one of the most cited sources in the Social Science Citation Index—and subsequently appeared in a second edition in 2001. This new SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence picks up on themes explored in that book.

Cultural competence refers to the set of attitudes, practices, and policies that enables a person or agency to work well with people from differing cultural groups. Other related terms include cultural sensitivity, transcultural skills, diversity competence, and multicultural expertise. What defines a culture? What barriers might block successful communication between individuals or agencies of differing cultures? How can those barriers be understood and navigated to enhance intercultural communication and understanding? These questions and more are explained within the pages of this new reference work.

Key Features:

  • 300 to 350 entries organized in A-to-Z fashion in two volumes
  • Signed entries that conclude with Cross-References and Suggestions for Further Readings
  • Thematic “Reader’s Guide” in the front matter grouping  related entries by broad topic areas
  • Chronology that provides a historical perspective of the development of cultural competence as a discrete field of study
  • Resources appendix and a comprehensive Index

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence is an authoritative and rigorous source on intercultural competence and related issues, making it a must-have reference for all academic libraries.

My entry had to be very brief, as the 2-volume set includes over 300 entries. The publishers have given me permission to share my three entries, so here is the link for you to read Communicating with US Americans. I’m sure you’ll find many points you would have worded differently or added in, as nearly everyone has a unique experience of a nation with such a powerful presence on the world stage. I look forward to hearing your comments and additions!

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence

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P1280469I’ve been intending to write this post for a long time. Back in early 2012, longtime esteemed colleague Janet Bennett called me to ask a favor. I knew she was editing a new Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence, a volume that should be in every serious library, so I was curious what she might ask of me. I was thrilled to hear that she wanted me to write an entry on “Creativity in Intercultural Training.”

Decades ago, colleagues would make fun of me for bringing into my training room yarn, masks, clay, scissors, colored paper, and glue. They swore to me that business people, executives in particular, did not like “crafts.” They would see us listening to music, moving, making human sculptures or films, and again swore that business people, especially executives, did not want to get so “creative.” Most of them were still lecturing or, perhaps, using critical incidents or cultural assimilator quizzes. While they wrote books, I created simulations and games. We all have our differing gifts.

The reason I felt so much passion about whole-body learning is that we all know intercultural competence involves our full selves: our mind, body and spirit, our emotions, brains, and hands. When entering a new place, we need to be able to hold onto our self esteem while letting go of what we “know” to be true. That involves super-human levels of wisdom, intuition, and flexibility. It involves “Super Learning,” and reinventing ourselves in a newer, more interculturally capable, edition. It involves creativity.

Things have obviously changed in our field in the intervening years. When Janet asked me to author the creativity entry for the Encyclopedia, I felt acknowledged for that uphill battle from so long ago. She instructed me that the entry would have to be short (five pages), as there would be over 300 entries total.

I very much enjoyed writing the piece, and am incredibly appreciative of my good friend Barbara Kappler, Assistant Dean, GPS Global Programs and Strategy, UMN Twin Cities at the University of Minnesota. She is perhaps the absolute best facilitator of intercultural learning I know, and she kindly reviewed and commented on my draft before I submitted the final version.

I highly recommend you purchase the complete two-volume encyclopedia, published by Sage in 2015, or ask your librarian to add it to their collection. The publishers have given me permission to share my three entries, however, so here is the link for you to read Intercultural Training Creativity.

Below is what Sage says about the full volume:

In 1980, SAGE published Geert Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences. It opens with a quote from Blaise Pascal: “There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees that are falsehoods on the other.” The book became a classic—one of the most cited sources in the Social Science Citation Index—and subsequently appeared in a second edition in 2001. This new SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence picks up on themes explored in that book.

Cultural competence refers to the set of attitudes, practices, and policies that enables a person or agency to work well with people from differing cultural groups. Other related terms include cultural sensitivity, transcultural skills, diversity competence, and multicultural expertise. What defines a culture? What barriers might block successful communication between individuals or agencies of differing cultures? How can those barriers be understood and navigated to enhance intercultural communication and understanding? These questions and more are explained within the pages of this new reference work.

Key Features:

  • 300 to 350 entries organized in A-to-Z fashion in two volumes
  • Signed entries that conclude with Cross-References and Suggestions for Further Readings
  • Thematic “Reader’s Guide” in the front matter grouping  related entries by broad topic areas
  • Chronology that provides a historical perspective of the development of cultural competence as a discrete field of study
  • Resources appendix and a comprehensive Index

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence is an authoritative and rigorous source on intercultural competence and related issues, making it a must-have reference for all academic libraries.

Announcing Our New Website!

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new website 2We are thrilled to be able to announce the launch of our new and improved website!

Thanks to your commitment to building intercultural competence in our world, Cultural Detective has been privileged to grow. We now have over 70 packages in the series, 140+ authors worldwide, and are available via online subscription or licensed PDF.

Our original website grew with our community. It was like an old, beloved house, onto which new rooms have been added as the family grows. After so much adding on, light switches become hard to find, as do links to the information you might desire on the website.

Our new website is fast, easy to navigate, and easy to use. I want to very much thank our IT team, Rajat and Mahasweta, who made all the magic happen! It is no overstatement to say we could not have done it without you. Over the years, you both have become invaluable members of the Cultural Detective team. I also want to thank staff members Greg Webb and Kathryn Stillings, who helped me enormously, by uploading data, editing text, and providing feedback on design and functionality. We are blessed with talented people on this team!

I am confident we will find bugs and errors in the upcoming weeks, and we appreciate your help letting us know if you find any so we can correct them. Thank you!

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We hope you put this speedier, more organized and engaging website to good use! Now let’s get out there and build some intercultural competence!

Join Us for Some Awesome Professional Development!

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SIIC interns of the “Banana Crew of ’82” including Cultural Detectives Dianne Hofner Saphiere front and center, and Kathryn Stillings, half-standing with the curly hair. Also in the photo are the founders of the Stanford Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC): Cliff Clarke (back row, second from left) and King Ming Young (behind Dianne’s head), along with Jack May (back row, far left), administrative assistant.

My initial involvement with SIIC—then the Stanford Institute for Intercultural Communication—was in 1982, as an intern for Michael Paige. It is where I first met Kathryn Stillings, also an intern, who remains a dear friend and plays a crucial role with Cultural Detective. Several years later, the Institute relocated from Stanford University to the Intercultural Communication Institute, Portland, Oregon, keeping its “SIIC” acronym and changing its name to the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication.

The Institute has been an annual professional touchstone for me in the 34 years since. In 2016 it celebrates its 40th anniversary! Teaching over the years beside such pillars of intercultural communication as Dean Barnlund, Jack Condon, LaRay Barna, and Stella Ting-Toomey, among so many other incredibly talented, passionate souls, and having the privilege to call many of them friends, has been one of my professional life’s most treasured blessings.

BarnlundRenwickDianne

Some SIIC faculty circa 1990: Dean Barnlund, Nessa Lowenthal, George Renwick, Sheila Ramsey, Dianne Hofner Saphiere

This year, I am privileged to repeat a course I first conducted last year with Daniel Cantor Yalowitz, which was a hoot to deliver and extremely well received, called Gaining Gaming Competence: The Meaning is in the Debriefing (Session II A, Workshop 12). It will be a five-day course held July 18-22.

I am also thrilled about a brand-new course that I will be facilitating with Fernando Parrado, entitled Latin America and Its Place in World Life (Session I, Workshop 6), scroll down on the page). Latin America has so very much to offer today’s world, and is so very misunderstood; I cannot wait to work with participants to help develop our understanding of the region and the ways we teach about it. The topic is both timely and crucial.

Dianne_SIIC_FlyerI very much hope you will join me for either or both of these workshops; click here for financial information and a link to the registration page, or download a brochure for printing or sharing: SIIC_Flyer_Dianne. Here is a link to the full SIIC schedule.

Cultural Detective is also working in conjunction with the Intercultural Communication Institute to provide a 2-day facilitator certification workshop. This workshop receives kudos from even the most experienced intercultural trainers and educators. It will be conducted by Tatyana Fertelmeyster, July 23-24, in between SIIC Sessions II and III. We look forward to having you or your group join us! Click here for registration.