Reflections on culture and technology

31st July 2008

Reflections on culture and technology

I find that the only way I really deepen my cultural competency is when I am immersed in a process with people who are in some way different than myself. I can read about diversity and inclusion, and benefit somewhat, but it’s only when I am challenged by being in-relationship with others that I reach those deeper places where resistance lives

I spent last week in a class at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC) in Portland, Oregon. This is my fifth year at SIIC, and like every other year, I learned a lot about my limitations and how much I don’t know. The classes range from a couple of hours to five days, with my favorite being the five days. It’s enough time to dig deep into a topic while taking advantage of the diversity in the room to experience walking up to my edge.

Terry Brake, of tmaworld, taught the 5-day class on Culture, Technology, and Communication in the Global Workplace.

Lessons about Global Virtual Teams

Virginia Yonkers stopped by this blog each day with very helpful insights. She wrote a blog post, entitled Lessons Learned in Working with International Virtual Groups, which summarizes insights that she and her classes have gathered over the years about working with global teams. It’s a great resource list and very little is about the technology itself. Curiosity, resiliency, and patience seem to be at the center of the required skills.

I also had the pleasure of interviewing the faculty for the class, Terry Brake, for the ASTD-Cascadia podcast. We talk about his upcoming book, Where in the world is my team: Making a success of your virtual global workplace. I’m really looking forward to it, because we got a preview of the material in class. It has a lot to offer anyone who is building diverse teams.

Moving beyond the class

The class has a Facebook page where we plan to continue sharing resources. We have also chosen a delicious tag (siic2008cct) for collecting things that may help. If you are interested in the intersection between culture, technology, and communication join the Facebook page or tag some resources.

Reflections on my participation

Facilitation skills + technology skills + some cultural competency ≠ competent participation on virtual global teams.

I’ve been a facilitator for a long time. I know that the process is foundational, and must be operating smoothly for the content to be effective. Why then, did I jump right in with everybody else to focus on content/task/outcome. Did I leave my facilitation skills at home?

We kept hearing about continuous partial attention, the state many of us are in while we are managing multiple tasks. We would encounter a challenge in class, have to come up with a way to use technology, navigate the cultural differences, listen to very fluent but accented voices, and achieve some kind of outcome in a short amount of time. Not to mention checking email and answering inquiries from the office.

Kermit Pattison’s article, Worker, Interrupted: The Cost of Task Switching in Fast Company wonders about the impact of our behavior:

I argue that when people are switching contexts every 10 and half minutes they can’t possibly be thinking deeply. There’s no way people can achieve flow. When I write a research article, it takes me a couple of hours before I can even begin to think creatively. If I was switching every 10 and half minutes, there’s just no way I’d be able to think deeply about what I’m doing. This is really bad for innovation. When you’re on the treadmill like this, it’s just not possible to achieve flow.

I learned a lot in the class. Way more than I could have by reading about how to be successful. I don’t think our project output reflects the depth of the learning. I found myself taking shortcuts and aiming for “good enough”. Which is a much lower standard than I usually aim for.

The other thing I noticed is I did not get to meet many other people from the other classes at the Institute. It took all my focus to participate in the global teams’ class. There was so much audio processing from simulating conference calls, and having to listen very carefully to the variety of accents, I was totally exhausted by the end of the day. Usually I will attend the evening socials, which start at 9:30 PM. Not this time, I had to go home and go to bed. I have colleagues who were there who I did not even get a chance to talk to.

Blogging each day

This was a stretch for me. First because the days are long and I was really tired, but also because I am fairly reflective, and it’s hard for me to experience something new and then turn right around and write about it. I usually try to be clearer and spend more time on my posts, so it was new to throw unfinished ideas up on the blog.

Which technology?

I was surprised to see much of the class was about using conference calls, chat and email. It seems that these tools are what is still most common for many virtual teams. Certainly the people in the class who were working with organizations often had other web conferencing tools, but I saw way less social media tools than I expected. I realize that is still true in the larger whole, but I thought people who were involved in virtual teams would already be using the whole gamut of collaboration tools available. Instead, people were sharing tools and signing up in class for the ones they weren’t already using. It was also nice to see some of the older class members were using more of the tools than the younger members.

Photographs? Not under pressure

I’m not a snapshot photographer. It seldom occurs to me to take pictures unless I am specifically out on a photo shoot. So here I am in a visual company writing a blog without photographs again. I also realized I have a lot of things in my office to help me with the visuals like fancy software, digital tablets and a network drive full of photos. Away from the office on a strange laptop, suddenly everything seemed hard. So I just ignored it. The pressure to perform the tasks to get the assignments done superseded my need to illustrate my posts. I have a lot more empathy for people who don’t know where to start with photographs.

Take aways?

Building teams takes time. Over technology, it takes way more.

The process of how you will communicate, and even more how you will sense and respond when people are not communicating is really important. Dare I say, the most important?

The cost of not attending to all aspects of process is losing potential input that can be critical to move the outcome from good enough to high performance.

Cross cultural, technology, and communication skills separately will help you, but you have to learn all over again when you are combining them.

In order to work on a global virtual team regularly, I would need to come up with some way to have visual inputs. Shared visuals, and ways to draw on a whiteboard is really important to me, and central to the way I make meaning.

I’m left with a question posed by one of our class participants Miki Yamashita:

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 8:03 am and is filed under Diversity & Intercultural. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On August 1st, 2008, Virginia Yonkers said:

Christine, great post. Just two comments: when you mention that you created a product that was “just good enough”, whose standards were you using? In fact, this is something that many international teams say. But in fact, the standards are “just good enough” for individual cultures, but may be outstanding on a global basis. One thing that happens is that basis for judgment are modified. Some people look at this as “lowering standards”, but in fact, a product that is created in one culture yet not modified for another is really the lowest standard.

When I was auditing, we found many mistakes that a previous unicultural team had made. This group, made up of an American team with no foreign language or previous international experience identified “mistakes” in inventory counting, for example, that while appropriate for the American context, were against the laws in France and Germany. We modified out audit so it would fit French and German law, and were told that we were compromising “American corporate” standards. However, the fact is that by understanding French and German law, we were able to identify a real problem not captured by our American standards.

Repeatedly we were complimented on the quality of our work, which some might have said were “just good enough” but in fact were outstanding in a global context.

Secondly, I feel it is very difficult to have “partial attention” when you are focusing on understanding others. I wonder if you feel you improved your listening skills over the course of this training (I loved the visual Miki provided above). How do you think that might improve your work in the future? I find this is a skill my students really lack. They are so busy trying to think of the point they are going to make, that they really don’t listen to other people. As we move to greater focus on knowledge within the workplace, this means there is the potential to “lose” that knowledge or the opportunity to cocreate knowledge.

2 On August 1st, 2008, Ken Allan said:

Kia ora Christine!

Aren’t standards odd things?

Y’know, the learning object has had it’s fiercest fight purely because of standards. In fact, some would say that it has been standardised to near extinction. Yet the most stringently standardised learning object may not necessarily be any more effective than the simplest learning object that’s designed to teach the same objective.

It is an inherently human thing to use standards to determine whether something is acceptable or not, no matter how effective it may actually be in its function if used (standard needs aside).

Culture plays a major part in all this, but it is not just confined to acceptable cultural function and behaviour.

Tolerance goes a long way to assist in ‘connectivity’ between people, culturally, racially, whether gender, status or age related. And while many people put a lot of store in saying things the ‘right’ way, whether on twitter or in an email or F2F, perhaps we really should be putting energy into learning some tolerance as well.

The adage “When in Rome . . .” summarises this very pertinent trait. Why should a woman learn to perform a communication according to a specific culture rather than that same culture learns to accept the way her culture says it? Shouldn’t it work both ways? It has to with technology, after all. Otherwise connectivity becomes an issue.

Ka kite

3 On August 2nd, 2008, Christine Martell said:

Virginia,
I was referring to my own standards— did I fully show up to participate? And I would say I was fully present, but due to my attention being split between the task, the technology struggles, and listening across accents, the task was the place that I felt I did not contribute at the level I do when my attention is not so split.

I’m fascinated by the concept of global standards. I suspect I have a lot to learn in this area that will involve me giving up the perfectionist part of myself to be willing to redefine what quality means in a larger context.

I agree that listening is challenging for many people. I may be on the other end of the spectrum, and was listening at the levels I usually do (for what is being said, what is not being said, nonverbal inputs, other ways of knowing). I was also taking notes for the class on the Google Doc, where I usually take notes by hand. I think what I learned is that I can overload my channels, and how I need to be able to step back to a place where I can listen effectively as well as mindfully.The details of what makes that possible need to change from situation to situation.

4 On August 2nd, 2008, Christine Martell said:

Ken,
The fierceness that is displayed around standards does seem to strip the life out of so many concepts. Virginia’s point about whose standards is really important. Especially as a Euro-American. I cringe at how often I see values and standards from the US culture being forced onto other places in the world.

I suspect the juicy mix happens when people are able to create a new cultural space that includes aspects from each. Where we seek “our” collective culture. Not trying to melt them together, but leaving the individual parts intact. Making a space for tolerance and learning to greet each others difference with curiosity.

5 On August 8th, 2008, Tom Tiernan said:

Ken

The standards thing is really mixed. On the one hand not just anything will do. Yet on the other helping people with the ability to communicate more humanly, at deeper levels, and to know thyself better are much needed, not readily standardized, and I don’t believe are listed in Bloom’s Taxonomy. I can’t imagine how old Bloom missed those.

Wholeheartedly agree with you that tolerance is a core trait for communication especially across cultures. it’s not a nice to have but a need to have. Whenever I travel, I chant to myself ‘When in Rome, when in Rome’. Pays off sometimes and sometimes the ugly American leaps out. Progress not perfection I guess.

6 On August 23rd, 2008, Ken Allan said:

Kia ora tatou!

I’m afraid I’ve been a bit tardy getting back to comments lately! Sorry.

I had trouble with coComment a while back and had to de-install it etc. I re;ied on it a lot to find my way back to comments I’d left and have only recently been getting on top of it again (sigh!)

@Christine @Tom - Thanks for your support! I find that I often don’t think the way many other people do (not criticising one way or the other here) but being a INTJ (if you know what THAT is) is supposed to make things difficult for me anyway - I’ve learnt to live with it :-).

Ka kite!

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