Insight Cultural intelligence
An instruction can be clear to the person giving it and ambiguous to the person receiving it
An instruction can be perfectly phrased and still produce several readings. What is missing is not the wording: it is what the wording already assumes is shared.
THE SITUATION
The instruction was given. The result does not match.
The work submitted does exactly what was asked, and no more. Or it goes further than intended. In both cases, the instruction was clear to the person who framed it, and the result proves it was not clear to the person who received it.
The immediate reading is often a judgment about the person: lack of initiative, or conversely overstepping. Both readings are about an intention. They skip a step.
WHAT IS ASSUMED TO BE SHARED
An instruction says what has to be done. It rarely says what it permits.
How far can you act without coming back for approval? Is a question asked along the way a sign of engagement or an admission that the instruction was misunderstood? Are you expected to flag an obstacle immediately, or to solve it first? What happens when you get it wrong after taking an initiative?
Those answers almost never appear in the instruction. They are inferred from the context, from previous experience, from what colleagues have been seen doing and from what happened the last time someone asked. Two people can therefore receive the same sentence and draw two different permissions from it.
The clarity of an instruction is measured by what was understood, not by what was said.
VERIFYING WITHOUT PATRONIZING
The useful question does not ask whether it is clear.
“Is that clear?” almost always gets a yes, and that yes tells you nothing: no one knows they have misunderstood at the moment they misunderstand.
A useful check is about the content, never about the person: ask how the person plans to go about it, what the first step would be, at what point they would come back to you. Those questions do not test attention: they reveal, very quickly, the precise place where the readings diverge.
How do you plan to go about it, and at what point would you come back to me?
THE PERSON WHO DOES NOT ASK
The absence of questions is not proof of understanding.
Asking for clarification assumes several things at once: knowing you have not understood, believing the question will be received as legitimate, and judging that this is the right moment. None of those three conditions is a given, and they do not depend on the person alone: they depend on what happened the last time someone asked a question in that team.
Someone who has recently arrived, is on probation, or is working in a second language weighs an additional risk: looking like they are not keeping up. Silence then becomes the least costly answer in the short term, even when it costs everyone dearly afterwards.
That is why verification cannot rest on the initiative of the person receiving the instruction. It belongs to the person giving it.
This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The full mechanism, the demonstration that makes it visible and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.
Cultural intelligenceCONTINUE
Other insights on cultural intelligence.
- Insight Before correcting a behaviour, you need to know what you are looking at What we observe is a fact.
- Insight Silence does not always mean what you think A few seconds of silence can trigger a conclusion.
- Insight Not everything is cultural Looking for a cultural explanation too early can keep you from seeing the real problem.
- Insight Adapting without lowering the bar The objective can stay exactly the same while the way you bring someone to it changes.