Insight Cultural intelligence
Not everything is cultural
Looking for a cultural explanation too early can keep you from seeing the real problem. An organization that explains everything through culture stops examining how it actually works.
THE REFLEX
As soon as backgrounds differ, the cultural explanation becomes available.
A team runs into a difficulty. The people in it come from different backgrounds. The cultural explanation then imposes itself with particular ease: it is immediately available, it seems to explain a great deal, and it has the advantage of calling into question neither how the work is organized nor how it is managed.
That is precisely what makes it risky. An explanation that suits everyone is rarely examined.
THE OTHER FAMILIES OF EXPLANATION
Before culture, nine simpler hypotheses.
The role : is the responsibility actually defined, and defined the same way by the people concerned? The process : does the step exist, is it known, is it workable under real working conditions? Skills : has the person been trained to do what is expected of them? Workload : does the available time allow what is being asked?
The rules : are they written, known, applied the same way? Communication : did the information circulate, at the right time, to the right person? The team : is the difficulty relational rather than cultural? Structure : are several authorities asking for contradictory things? Management : has the expectation ever been stated, and what happened the last time it was not met?
An origin is at best one element of the context, never an automatic explanation.
THE ORDER OF EXAMINATION
The cultural question comes afterwards, and it then changes in nature.
Once the simpler explanations have been examined and ruled out, what remains is not “a cultural problem”. It is a situation where two people do not share the same implicit answer to a specific question: what counts as a legitimate contribution, how far you can act without approval, how disagreement gets voiced, which part of the message is assumed to be explicit.
Framed that way, the question becomes workable. It is about a situation and about expectations, not about people and where they come from.
Has this difficulty already been examined from an angle other than culture?
THE OPPOSITE ERROR
Refusing to examine the question is no more rigorous.
Out of caution, or out of fear of appearing to reduce people to their origins, some organizations rule the question out on principle. The result mirrors the previous one: a real difficulty, rooted in unshared implicit expectations, stays unexplained and ends up being attributed to the people themselves — to their motivation, their rigour, their willingness to integrate.
Examining the question commits you to no conclusion. It consists of checking whether, in a specific situation, two people share the same implicit answer to a specific question. Sometimes the answer is no, and that can be dealt with. Often it is simply not relevant, and you move on.
Neither the automatic explanation, nor a refusal to examine. One hypothesis among others, checked like the others.
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 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.
- Insight Adapting without lowering the bar The objective can stay exactly the same while the way you bring someone to it changes.