Culture club

I remember a very voluble American acquaintance of mine, Dan, who used to describe spring in his hometown. "It always reminds me of how many amazing cultures co-exist in my country," he marvelled while we were on a trip to Sri Lanka. "Within a span of one or two weeks, we celebrate Cinco de Mayo (a Mexican festival), an indoor expo called Festival of Nations, and a lavishly produced May Day parade. We also had an Irish festival the same weekend until it was moved to later in the summer."

What stayed in my mind was the fact that while Dan used to enjoy these pageants for their novelty, on retrospect he had begun to appreciate them for another reason: "They marked the traditions of my neighbours and people I may work with or serve." These days, it seems increasingly important to understand the traditions of others, if only to safeguard against costly misunderstandings in personal and public decision-making.

In a multicultural environment like the UAE, our workplaces are changing all the time. Mastering multiculturalism at work is not just a matter of learning quirky facts, such as which nations consider it rude to point. On a more meaningful level, it's the absolute knowledge that there are multiple approaches for determining what is right and wrong and that there are innumerable ways of tackling a problem.

As a journalist, I've enjoyed the challenge of understanding people from different nationalities I come in contact with, and their thought processes through the way they express themselves. But I didn't realise there was a science to it till I met Marco Blankenburgh, the international director of KnowledgeWorkx. He is the founder of the company and has worked in the Middle East for the past 15 years. A cultural specialist, he works in the areas of strategic consulting, change management and leadership development. Naturally, he speaks many languages: Dutch, German, English, Afrikaans and Arabic.

"What started us on our way at KnowledgeWorkx was the fact that the workforce here has been challenged with the inter-cultural variety of living and working in the UAE," begins Blankenburgh. "When I first started speaking to people about inter-cultural intelligence, I realised that they were looking for this - to build cultural standards that worked."

Blankenburgh and his team thought they had the wherewithal in the form of research already done in the field. They did find many books on the subject, but "we realised that the books were written from the American or the British perspective. They are all based on the classical Western way of looking at diversity. The American way of doing it is all about groups: African American, ethnic American, Asian American, expat America. On top of that diversity has become a political issue over the last 15 years. It is now a legal requirement. The same standard exists in the UK." Blankenburgh realised that it was not going to work for this part of the world. "We had to come up with something else to deal with the issue of inter-cultural dynamics. So that is where our journey started."

He also discovered that the real issue was that most researchers looked at multiculturalism as getting around diversity. He found the way of thinking of diversity in the Western world was wrong. "Just the word diversity in and of itself creates a problem... it puts the problem centre stage," says Blankenburgh. He feels that every time people start dealing with diversity they put it at the centre; the result is more diversity. "Over the years diversity has become more of a legal compliance than anything else. You do it because you have to." That was when Blankenburgh decided that what they needed was a fresh look at the challenge of creating synergy out of cultural variety. The first thing they did was to erase the word diversity from their dictionary!

"We started to look at what drives people, what are their deep emotional drivers, whether positive or negative. What causes them to think what they think," he says.

That was when his team made a breakthrough. "We discovered the three main drivers that are the cause of our every action. We call them the three colours of world view."

KnowledgeWorkx's research narrowed down the world view of people to three inputs that they receive in childhood. They labelled the inputs as: guilt-innocence, honour-shame and power-fear.

The colour of guilt-innocence

Blankenburgh explains them thus: "We are a sum total of what our culture teaches us. It is how children are raised. Some parents bring up their children in a ‘right and wrong' sort of an environment, it is all about discovering what is right and what is wrong. The children would be taught what is right, and not allowed to do what is wrong. So, in this sort of environment parents try to initially guide the child and then eventually equip the child, leaving them to figure it out themselves. It's about if I choose this, what will be the consequence. So, cause and effect, deductive reasoning, critical analysis, asking a lot of questions is encouraged even in schools. It's good to raise your hand, it's good to ask why. Because in a right-wrong, guilt-innocence set-up, everybody is constantly hoping to be equipped to make the right decision to be able to contribute to society."

This world view of guilt-innocence is more common in north western Europe and North America, says Blankenburgh.

Blankenburgh has a simple yardstick to measure the extent of a nation's world view - look at their legal system. "They [north western Europe and north America] have huge libraries, because everyone wants to know what is right and what is wrong, and they want to know it upfront. They don't want to figure it out as they go along. I want to know before I get into a relationship what is allowed and what isn't. The same with contracting. Generally, the contracts are thicker in the guilt-innocence cultures because before they shift, or start delivering, or producing goods, they want to know what is permissible and what is not."

The guilt-innocence cultures are also very process driven, he says. The people from such cultures have figured out exactly how to do things which is important to them in the right-wrong way of thinking. "A change would be very difficult for them."

The colour of honour-shame

"Other countries have the honour-shame system of imbueing values," says Blankenburgh. "In the honour-shame environment you continuously ask yourself what is the most honourable thing to say/do. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with me as a person. It has everything to do with the family name I carry, the tribe that I belong to, and the country I represent. As it depends on the situation, it might require the roles of engagement to be more flexible."

The question that is a constant here is what is the most honourable thing to do. "If you grow up in that type of a culture, you know exactly what is expected of you, you know exactly what would bring shame and what would be the most honourable thing to do," he says.

But for an outsider this would be difficult to figure out. "Nothing is written down. Everything is situational, based upon who you are dealing with and what would be the most honourable thing to say or do at that point of time," explains Blankenburgh. "So, if you have somebody from the guilt-innocence culture working with a person from an honour-shame culture, it is very likely they won't understand each other. Once a person from a guilt-innocence culture understands the rules of right and wrong, they stick to that. A person from an honour-shame environment, on the other hand, would find that hard to understand, because in his culture, relationship is much more important. That is why an honour-shame culture typically is more flexible."

The colour of power-fear

The third colour that completes the spectrum is the power-fear theory. A person raised in a power-fear environment learns to assess who is the most powerful person in a given situation and how to access that power. "They learn how to relate to that person and how to gain that power in an appropriate way," explains Blankenburgh. "In the process they also learn how to deal with their fears."

For example, in a country where there are inner-city gangs, "very often, these gangs operate in the area between the power-fear and honour-shame environments; you step out of line, you have something to fear. There is an honour-shame equation as well: you belong to the gang, you are a member."

Dubai, the cultural spectrum

What Marco and KnowledgeWorkx have done is apply these findings in their ‘laboratory': Dubai. "As Dubai develops the sophisticated systems of a cosmopolitan city, culture requires that situations be more flexible. As life becomes more complex, the rules have to become more defined.

The interesting thing about the UAE is that it is the meeting place of these three very different world views. "You have people who firmly believe in the ‘right' and ‘wrong' way of life, driving processes forward, adhering to the rulebook and how to do only what is ‘right'. There are other people coming from a different background who are thinking differently. Then there is power-fear factor to be considered too."

So which is the point of resolution?

"Certainly, the first thing that has to happen is that people need to understand the problem," says Blankenburgh. "Addressing inter-cultural issues is tricky. We know something is wrong, but we don't know how to explain it. So the first thing to do is to formulate a language we can use to start explaining, and also take the emotion out of it."

Corporates and multiculturalism

He sees many multinational companies struggling with compliance issues. "Ordinary techniques don't work because if you push more rules towards people from a one kind of a culture, they actually read it as a distancing tactic: they feel the principal doesn't want a relationship with them. When they are forced to comply with rules they don't understand or agree with, they will comply on the surface but do things their own way. The head office lays down the rules and when the people from the head office visit, the local office will just pretend to adapt to those rules."

What the corporate world has to understand is that local operations need to succeed within a local context, says Blankenburgh. "I see that the younger generation are learning to do this better.The other big issue Blankenburgh sees emerging out of this cultural synergy is that of ‘losing one's culture.' If one of the facets of the culture we are born into is undergoing a change, "then critics immediately say that we are losing our culture," he says.

"It's not true. It's evolving culture. Lifestyles may differ but the core of it is up to you to decide. That is a big issue these days. Because we see people insisting that traditional methods be followed in all aspects. There is another group of people who realise that the way we do it, the way a place looks like, the cocktail of people living in a place is going to cause that place to change. It's going to cause more of the right-wrong components coming into the picture… because life is getting more complex and we need to know the rules and we need to stick to them."

Blankenburgh believes that "people are standing between two worlds and are embracing both. We have been able to equip quite a lot of people to start thinking on those lines."

He's learnt the hard way however that there are people who learn, and those who may never will. "There are cultural learners and cultural critics (see sidebars)," he says.

"A cultural learner understands that there are many other ways to look at life; they want to explore and learn. A cultural learner will assume that if something doesn't work they've not been able to trigger the right response. For a cultural critic, it is never their fault. Learning to say it's my responsibility to trigger that response, is the key to success."

Says Blankenburgh. "Educational institutions need to prepare students to become emotionally intelligent. Self-awareness, self-motivation, and self-regulation are requirements that are needed to be able to deal with the complicated cultural environment.

"For instance, I gave a guest lecture recently, in a course on project management. The curriculum follows project management institute standards. While the people component is there, the inter-cultural component is totally missing. Take studies on human resources (HR) for example. My vision is that inter-cultural intelligence will become an integral part of courses like HR and project management."

What Blankenburgh is saying is that it is time to start thinking inter-cultural intelligence. According to him, this goes way beyond anything diversity has been trying to preach so far. "It takes you down the road of true synergy that can be achieved in an inter-cultural team dynamic," he says.

Inter-cultural intelligence is not about legal compliance, it is not about learning to co-exist or become better about dealing with ‘the others'. "It's a re-wiring of the brain, of the mind, of the attitude we have towards one another," says Blankenburgh. "It is truly a form of intelligence that some people intuitively develop, and others have to work on really hard to acquire."

Cultural critics

A cultural critic has a very different way of operating, says Blankenburgh. Common traits:

Cultural learners

Marco Blankenburgh lists some common behavioural traits of a cultural learner: