2023-07-24 🍵 Some of my favorite reads on cross-cultural communication. Biased towards the practical.
Black box
“There may be times when miscommunications arise, and nobody will know the reason behind them. Almost nobody will tell you that you are standing too close (or far) from him or her – they will just feel uncomfortable. Few people will comment on your eye contact or lack of it – they will, however, react to it without knowing why.”
Yamada, Kelm and Victor, The Seven Keys to Communicating in Japan, (Washington DC: Georgetown UP, 2017), chapter 6 “Japanese Nonverbal Communication” Kindle ebook.
I’m going to borrow from Stanely Milgram and Ruth Benedict, and say it this way: Context defines behavior. Culture is context. Culture is not a black box.
Global Dexterity by Molinksy
- Global Dexterity, Andy Molinsky, 2013. Ebook and print.
Read Molinksy if you want to learn how to adapt effectively to a new cultural paradigm without compromising your sense of self. This book is full of practical exercises that will help you move forward, step-by-step.
While this book is written for corporate workers, I think the tactics here can be applied elsewhere, too. If you’re in a foreign culture and need to collaborate with people to get stuff done, this book can help. It certainly helped me.
“Foreign” means far away but there are lots of ways to measure distance. I used Molinsky’s book when I moved back to the US and was struggling to adapt and communicate effectively with local clients. I also liked the scripts and scenarios Jodi Glickman provides in her book, “Great on The Job.” There are ways to negotiate, to disagree, to offer criticism, even make excuses, that are effective – and there are ways that won’t work. Individual preference plays a role but culture is the benchmark.
The book includes exercises, like “Your Personal Cultural Adaptation Portfolio,” to help you identify and track challenging situations that you’d like to work on.
I particularly like Part 3, where Molinksy discusses finding a cultural mentor, and ways that your own foreignness can impact how other people perceive your mistakes.
Molinsky’s tactics are based on a decade of research, hundreds of interviews, and his work with both professionals and students. The book is written mostly using example scenarios that are based on 70-some interviews Molinsky conducted for this project. The breadth of these stories is fantastic: a German manager trying to remember that his American employees are offended when he avoids small talk; a Japanese worker raised in Italy and now navigating expectations of his “Japanese-ness” in a Tokyo office; an Asian-American exec choosing how to respond to sexist remarks from a key supplier in Singapore; an American trying to adapt his management style to better motivate his Indian team.
The ideas discussed here are nuanced. Like the rest of the books on this list, I’ve read and re-read this one several times. I gain a little more each time that I do.
Deep Diversity by Choudhury
- Deep Diversity, Shakil Choudhury, 2021. Ebook and print.
Choudhury’s thesis is that you can’t think your way out of “us/them” problems, because they’re not cognitive problems.
Choudhury wants to help you better understand cultural differences and racism. This book is focused on Canada and the US. If your social reference points are elsewhere in the world, some of the stories might resonate more than others.
This book isn’t strictly about cross-cultural communication but it might be the most broadly applicable book on my list. You can use the techniques here to better understand yourself, and the world around you. Like Molinsky, above, Choudhury offers practical suggestions to help you build better pattern recognition skills.
The first time I read this book it was with a sense of relief. Something I’ve said elsewhere is that you need to develop new heuristics to successfully work or live in a new culture. I say this because I’ve experienced it acutely. But how do you do that? The process is not always intuitive.
Choudhury, who is a corporate trainer and anti-racist activist based in Toronto, gives you all the tools you need to start improving your cross-cultural communication.
The tone of this book is open and gentle. Talking constructively about cross-cultural communication can be hard. Talking about bias and racism can be harder still. I appreciate Choudhury’s willingness to share his own experiences, even when they are embarrassing. The example scenarios are well-drawn, examined minute by minute, to help you understand each concept. The goal is to help people who want to understand. There’s no time for cynicism or judgment; This book is written to be used.
The Culture Map by Meyer
- The Culture Map, Erin Meyer, 2015. Ebook and print.
Right now, Meyer’s book is my go-to gift for friends and clients who are preparing for an important work trip.
This book is a high-level overview on what you stand to gain by recognizing culture’s role in life and work.
Meyer introduces cultural frameworks in a subsection called, “Eight Scales that Map the World’s Cultures.” She also includes helpful visuals of these ideas. Her culture maps are very handy tools you can use to navigate through a new environment, and maybe easier to start using than the tools Molinsky provides.
Getting work done in a new culture can be significantly more difficult, time consuming and expensive simply because you and your team are not culturally proficient. It takes time and effort to grapple with the notion of culture, and to understand how it influences our behavior and expectations.
Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, in France, where she focuses on cross-cultural management, organizational culture and intercultural negotiations. Early in the book, in a section called “Being Open to Individual Differences is not Enough,” she relates a story of how some of her young, American and Western European business school students are critical of the idea of culture’s influence on the individual – seeing the very idea as stereotyping. Meyer gently refutes that argument for both her students and the reader.
Like Choudhury’s book, above, the lovely thing about this book is that Meyer includes some of the best research on the topic with personal stories.
Whether you’re traveling is irrelevant, really. This is a great book. I think I’ve gifted half a dozen copies.
Trust by Khanna
- Trust: building the foundation for entrepreneurship in developing countries, Tarun Khanna, 2018. Ebook and Print.
Read Khanna if you want to understand how your cultural assumptions will impact your mission’s chance for success in a system that’s wildly different to what you’re used to.
You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to have a mission. You don’t need to be upper-level management in a large company to take something from this book. I don’t have a corporate career. And I figure that if someone in the C-Suite – with a team and company resources backing them – needs a book like this to approach deep, cultural challenges, the rest of us need it even more.
Anyway, nothing in this book takes place in an office. The territory of this book is a construction site, a neighborhood convenience store, a surgery clinic. Through a series of vignettes, Khanna shows you how money, time and infrastructure don’t work the way you expect. Customers will not follow the patterns you expect, and neither will suppliers or staff.
The examples will help you reflect on your own potential blind spots, and I think this is a practical way to start mapping your personal unknown unknowns.
In the introduction Khanna says, “A change of mindset is needed to move away from the idea that entrepreneurs should be laser-focused on the problems they want to solve… to a mindset that emphasizes that they don’t have that luxury in the developing world… they must create the conditions to create.” This idea reminds me of Jan Chipchase’s concept of Minimum Viable Infrastructure, which he describes in a booklet called “Guide to Running Popup Studios.” Let’s revisit Chipchase at the end of this list.
Test your assumptions within the cultural paradigm of the community where you’re doing business, Khanna says. Your product, your playbook, your perspective will all need to be focused on the local community. Only then can you build local trust. And only then will your organization have what it needs to succeed.
It feels like the world has changed since Khanna wrote this; Not only our perspective of the world, but the geopolitical context, and the economic flows, we inhabit. It feels like it is past time to interrogate some old assumptions about “emerging markets” and “developing countries” but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I just re-read this book, and the ideas feel as relevant as ever.
In this same vein, another resource I like is a free, 2-part podcast by Freakonomics Radio on American culture:
- Freakonomics Radio #469
- Freakonomics Radio #470
These episodes are especially interesting if you are, in fact, American. I found them thought-provoking, anyway. Here, we’re taught to think of our country as special but not different: “Different” the same way e-commerce runs differently in Suzhou than in Sydney; Different the same way that the hiring process for healthcare workers is different in Mumbai and Madrid.
The day-to-day hustle will teach you just how different you really are. Intellectually, it seems like it should be so easy to tweak your perspective and adjust to these new realities. It doesn’t feel like it should be difficult to solve.
Stimulating? Yes. Easy? No. Tourists will be forgiven for their naivety. The rest of us simply need to put in the work.
Collaborating with the Enemy by Kahane
- Collaborating with the Enemy: how to work with people you don’t agree with or like or trust, Adam Kahane, 2017. Ebook and print.
Kahane wants to teach you how to better manage your perspective. He wants to prepare you for situations that you can’t walk away from. He wants to help you learn to step into and step out of different perspectives; To adapt and to collaborate when it is the only way forward.
In chapter 7, he says, “…[W]e separate and shield ourselves by asserting that we are right and the others are wrong. We fear that if we collaborate with those others, we will become contaminated or compromised – that we will betray what we stand for and who we are.” Instead, he goes on, be intentional and reframe your approach: “I can phone home to say that I will be late ‘because I am in traffic’ or ‘because I am traffic’. The latter explanation explicitly opens up my options to work with others to change the situation.”
Kahane’s strategies aren’t specific to cross-cultural scenarios. I found they adapt well to that context, though. To that end, the book’s conclusion includes a structured series of exercises.
The ideas here pair well with Choudhury’s book, above. And the intention of this book reminds me a little of de Bono’s decision-making book, “Six Thinking Hats,” or Burn’s cognitive behavioral therapy classic, “Feeling Good.” Kahane, however, deals with systemic poverty and guerrilla wars. He’s worked as a conflict mediator and scenario planner for governments and NGOs around the world.
If you’re in a hurry, start midway through: Chapter 5 is probably a good spot. Then flip back through earlier chapters when you need to fill in.
I listened to the audiobook first. I got more out of it the second time, when I re-read the ebook version. Kahane writes well but these ideas are complex, and I often wanted to re-read sections or check the footnotes. At this point, I’ve read the book several times. It’s been very useful.
The Field Study Handbook by Chipchase
- The Field Study Handbook, Jan Chipchase, 2018. Print.
Chipchase wants to help you make sense of people, what they do, and why.
If you’re ready to level up, this book is worth your time. I think it’s an incredible tool for anyone who is trying to develop workflows and strategies to engage deeply with people, communities and cultures that are far different from what they know.
Try starting with Chapter 11: Rapid Calibration Techniques. You can learn a lot about culture by taking in “activities that are obvious and unquestioned to anyone who has grown up in that culture.”
Chipchase is a designer, writer, photographer and researcher and strategist whose work takes him to communities all over the world. While the title makes it obvious this is a professional resource, the author welcomes a wide audience.
I bought this book initially just to read Chapter 13: Data Collection. In “Examples of Handling Data” on pages 305-306, Chipchase includes examples from sensitive projects in Kabul, Hangzhou and New York. Some of these techniques were familiar to me, many were new. I was struck by a terse, 7-item list titled “Data Collection Field Principles” on page 326. I’d learned to apply a similar list of rules to myself and my images when I worked as a photographer for NGO clients. From there, I read Chapter 16: Sensemaking and, then, the rest of the book.
There is so much to learn here. I’ve re-read the book several times at this point. Personally, I don’t know of any other single resource on the topic of working in another culture that collects so much wisdom, so concisely.
Circling back to the Yamada quote from the beginning of this list, Chipchase includes the following advice Chapter 8: Interviews, in a subsection called “The Long Pause,” on page 195:
“Be mindful that cultural attitudes towards silence in conversations and meetings vary considerably, with the length of pause being interpreted in different ways… It took me years of living in Japan to appreciate silence as a highly nuanced form of non-verbal communication.”
The book is print-only but I’m hoping the author will release an ebook edition. If it is unavailable or outside your budget, you can also find some of the author’s work on his website, including “Guide to Running Popup Studios,” the booklet I mentioned earlier.
Why I keep this list
I learn more when I write things out.
This an artifact from many years of conversations with colleagues, friends and strangers on the topic of building rapport in a radically new cultural environment.
The criteria is simple: These are the books I keep coming back to, buying as gifts and recommending to others. Off the top of my head this has included: medical volunteers and NGO workers, machinists, mountaineers, designers and film producers, export-minded small-business owners, executives, expat brats, PhD students. These folks are out in the world doing interesting things. Often, they have a real tight feedback loop with the surrounding culture. They inspire me, and I want to hear their point of view. We talk about the realization that culture can make or break your mission. I’m not an expert on cultural adaptation or cross-cultural communication but these topics interest me because of my own experience. This list is an extension of our conversations.
I recognize that the books here aren’t all strictly intended for this use case. I’m happy to read widely and borrow ideas.
Let me know.
Page history
Last updated: 2023-07-24
Published: 2021-12-05