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• Why we use the term 'Inter-Cultural Intelligence'
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  The long journey to a new field, with new language. 

  Over the last 10 years we have thought a lot about what to call what we do. In the end, 'Inter-Cultural Intelligence' is the best combination of words we could find to server as shorthand for what we contribute to the world.

  Why "Inter-Cultural" instead of "Diversity", "Inclusiveness", or "Cross-Cultural"?

  The first thing we decided to do is not to use existing language. Our work has a lot to do with “Diversity,” which already has a large body of thinking around it–and there is already emotion attached to it. Our work also has a lot to do with “Inclusiveness," - but that term also has a certain body of knowledge, much of it coming out of the USA, which also has its own emotions attached.

  Our work has a lot to do with, "Cross-Cultural," but just staying at “Cross-Cultural” would give the impression that though we may be crossing cultural lines, we are not necessarily creating something new. “Cross-Cultural” doesn't give the full essence of going back and forth to work something out together. Hence the term "Inter-Cultural." 

  Why do we use the word “intelligence”? 

  The services we provide are not about a few tips and tricks or do's and don'ts. It is not about how to present your business card appropriately, or how you are not supposed to show the sole of your foot, or how to be respectful in a certain cultural context. All of those things are important, but what is more important is to equip your staff with the skills and attitudes that will allow them to succeed no matter what the cultural context is.

  It is more than just “Emotional Intelligence.” You need to look for different things, and evaluate situations in a way that goes beyond emotional intelligence. Self awareness, self-motivation, self-regulation are wonderful starting points, but there is more to it.

  If you are Inter-Culturally Intelligent, you might still make some mistakes in the “do's and don'ts,” since you can't memorize all of them. But when you do make a mistake, you will have the competency to very quickly figure out why that wasn't appropriate, and adjust your behavior accordingly.

  We want to emphasize the “Inter" part of "Cultural" 

  Why don’t we call it “Intercultural Intelligence” then? Why do we hyphenate it?! We want people to pause and think about it, instead of just learning it as another piece of jargon. You could have a PhD. in Korean Language and Culture and still not be inter-culturally intelligent when dropped into a fully Korean environment. Knowing a lot about a culture does not necessarily give you the attitude and skills needed to succeed within a cultural setting. It’s not just cultural, it’s inter-cultural. 

  How the whole thing comes together

  Inter-Cultural Intelligence consists of the attitude and skills that enable you to succeed in the global workspace. These skills include the ability to create a new cultural space for you and your colleagues to work in, the ability to create win-win solutions when you interact interculturally, and the ability to anticipate, correctly interpret, and adjust to the culturally defined behavioral habits of people around you.

  New Cultural Spaces are absolutely essential for long-term sustainability. We need to all own this space, we need to have a dialogue about creating it together, and we need to make sure that that dialogue results in a cultural space that we feel at home with. We must a feel part of, and we must feel that it allows us to be successful, to win as an individual, as a team, as a department, and as an organization. You can learn more about this in our series, “How to build a Third-Cultural Space."
  

  KnowledgeWorkx has programs that develop Inter-Cultural Intelligence for both individuals and organizations. To learn more about how you can develop your Inter-Cultural Intelligence, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
• Graduate Development Program Repositioning in the Middle East
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  KnowledgeWorkx continues to revamp and reposition the Graduate Development Program of a large globally operating company with revenue in excess of US$19 billion.

   

  
  

   

  During the summer, KnowledgeWorkx is helping the company to invest in the right type of learning and development for 100 fresh candidates joining the organization from across MENA. The program will be a pilot for all Graduate Development Programs across the emerging market regions to make for a more Inter-Culturally Intelligent staff that can out-maneuver the competition. 
• Excellent Inter-Cultural Presentations
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  The four elements of successful presentations in the global workspace

  The challenges of presenting internationally

  I still remember the first time I went to Hong Kong to do a presentation. A 'traditional' Chinese audience awaited me. They gave little away, were un-emotive, and I could not tell if they understood - or even if they were interested or engaged. I could not draw any energy from them! This is not a problem if you know what to expect, but I was used to drawing energy from the audience and I had prepared and sequenced the presentation based on my expectations.

  Not being able to read the audience threw me off completely. It made me very insecure. I found the energy within myself to finish the presentation somehow, but I realized then that my level of self-awareness, self-regulation and self-motivation was not high enough to deal with complex intercultural environments.

  If you’ve done work internationally you’ve probably been in situations where your introduction doesn’t receive the desired response and your funny slides don’t cause any emotion -  sometimes even cause negative reactions in the audience. You can’t read the audience well, and you feel that you’re not communicating. When you receive questions they are unexpected and you are not prepared for them. Or worse still, there are no questions at all and you are unsure if anything you have said has been received or understood. Presenting in an unfamiliar setting can be incredibly daunting for any presenter.

  Thankfully, there are straightforward guidelines that will help you ensure that your presentations and communications are received in the manner intended.

  Three universal principles of presentation and communication skills

  The following principals for presentations are likely to be familiar to most executives. When preparing for international presentations it is important that these elements are reconsidered and factor in the environmental context and cultural dynamics of where you will present .

  1: Four fundamental principles to consider in Presentation Skills:

  a) Present in such a way that adults, participants in the program can connect with your presentation.

  b) The more you prepare and the more research you do, the more you will discover about your audience and the more likely you are able to connect to them.

  c) Your job is to trigger the right response from your audience.

  Your presentation may make sense to you - but does it make sense to them?

  d) When using presentation aids make sure you talk about what the audience can see.

  Never include illegible or complicated spreadsheets or graphics, when you use slides, video clips, animation etc., which will distract your audience.

  2. Behavioral styles

  Understanding your own personality / behavioral style will ensure that you are able to adjust the way you present to cater for multiple behavioral styles in the audience. We recommend DISC as the least complicated way to start in inter-cultural situations, or other more comprehensive psychometric tools to help with this.

  3. Emotional Intelligence

  Understanding what motivates you and regulates your emotions is just as important as knowing how to motivate or interpret your audience. When presenting to a Mono-Cultural audience that is different from our own we will not instinctively trigger the right response.  To achieve the right response we require a higher level of self-awareness and a higher level of self-regulation and self-motivation.

  The Fourth Element: Looking at presentations from an Inter-Cultural perspective

  While the three universal principles will help your delivery, there is only one true way to achieve excellence in presentation and communication with people who have a different worldview from yourself.

  Inter-Cultural Intelligence gives you a heightened level of  cultural understanding, ensuring you can read any culture and figure out how to act appropriately regardless of the situation.

  In our view, this is more useful than the established way of dealing with Inter-Cultural issues where people are coached using stereotypical views of a nationality, often in the form of a "do’s and don’ts" list. We have seen it on numerous occasions.

  Executives who need to fly to Japan to make a presentation spend hours editing to ensure they are doing a presentation in a Japanese context, by adhering to a strict list that includes jokes you shouldn’t tell, slides you shouldn’t use and sequences of activities that are better than another sequence of activities. 

  Whilst this can be helpful it doesn’t prepare you for the real scenario.  We cannot stereotype individuals according to their passport. A Japanese national, born and raised in Germany will not respond in the same way as a Japanese national, born and raised in Japan.

  This scenario is even more challenging is when you are faced with a Multi-Cultural setting from a wide range of cultures. There is no way to go through a list of "do’s and don’ts" for every single culture you will face in a multi-cultural gathering.

  The most effective way to deal with this is to understand the different factors at work through tools like the Three Colors of Worldview and the 12 Dimensions of Culture. With these models in your head, you can learn how to read the audience for clues about the range of cultures that they represent, and format your presentation to communicate effectively. 

  The KnowledgeWorkx Inter-Cultural Presentation Process

  Here at KnowledgeWorkx we have developed a framework that walks you through the process of presentation integrated with Inter-Cultural Intelligence from the start. The framework shows you how to:

  • Gather your material
  • Do your audience research (universal)
  • Make sure your material is aligned with the best thinking on adult learning, different learning styles, and the processing and anchoring of information
  • Connect using your behavioral style
  • Structure your material, talk, and stories in such a way that others can connect with it
  • Know how much self-awareness,  self-motivation and self-reflection you are displaying and how you can develop this to become a better inter-cultural facilitator
  • Use the components of ICI to become more proficient in those environments

  Using all four elements allows you to effectively navigate complex Inter-Cultural audiences and stay on track when things don’t work out the way you thought they would. They are the key to delivering successful presentation regardless of your audience.

  Knowledgeworkx has a great framework for Inter-Cultural presentation and communication. To find out more about the tools available to help you tackle these issues more constructively, please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
• Employee Potential & Self-Awareness
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  The right tools to use in an Inter-Cultural Environment

  When we are faced with challenges concerning leadership, 'followership' and people interaction, the common solution methodology focuses on the external interface. For example, if customers tell you that you are not friendly enough, you would come up with a point by point plan to improve that. 

  The reason these action plans do not always work is because they do not allow for the people interface, an employees ability to analyze individual situations.  You need to consider that your staff might not be aware of who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are or what they’re passionate about. In short they are not self-aware, and as they cannot read themselves it is safe to assume the are also not equipped to read the customer in front of them. 

  Staff training on how to be more customer-centric therefore only works if we include the three core elements self-awareness and awareness of others:

  1. The personality side of self-awareness helps us to read and understand behavioral styles

  2. The Emotional Intelligence side helps you to learn what motivates and regulates your emotions

  3. The Intercultural side helps you to understand the unspoken, deep-rooted cultural drivers that influence behavior.

  Self-discovery is not part of the cultural fabric of the majority of emerging economies of the world

  The biggest challenge for implementing self-awareness and awareness of others is that it has been predominantly advocated by the western world. In the western world the idea of self-awareness was born in a directive destiny society where individuals tend to believe they are in control of their own future and therefore pursue individual accountability and more often have achieved status.  The latter of the world however, have grown up in a directed destiny society where your path is directed. As all the tools and developmental journeys have been developed in a directed destiny context, it creates resistance when you try and bring these tools into cultures that are not structured in the same way.

  Another challenge of introducing self-awareness lies in the word itself. The word “self” is typically either neutral or negative in community accountability, directed destiny cultures, whereas it has more positive connotations in the more western directive destiny cultures.

  Tools therefore need to be introduced in an Inter-Cultural way without relying on overly westernized psychometric testing. A more foundational construct tool such as DiSC lends itself better to use in Inter-Cultural Environments. DiSC’s  simplistic structure has been validated and re-normalized to allow for regional differences. It is less complicated than other tools and is therefore quicker to understand and implement. It is also the most widely used and available tool: over 50 million people have now used it and it is available in more than 30 languages including an Arabic version for the Middle East region.

  Example: self-awareness development in an Afghanistan telecom operator

  It wasn’t easy to convince one of the leading Afghani telcom operators that DISC would work as a self-awareness development tool in Afghanistan. Even the key director, a DiSC expert, found it hard to see how DiSC could work in this cultural setting.  He believed that the employees involved would “not embrace this tool”.

  It wasn’t easy, but using our Inter-Cultural knowledge we were able to construct a unique program, and after much persuasion they agreed to give us one chance to use it.  We introduced DiSC in a culturally sensitive manner, and the people loved DiSC and embraced it. It was a transformational experience for them. We started with the discovery of one self, then learned about your strengths and weaknesses and how to explain this to others. Once the participants were able to do that, we were able to extend beyond the work boundaries and started touching on their lives outside of work.  They result was they began to see benefits in their family, social and business life.  The ability to explain to others why you are not good at something or why you shouldn’t be taking that particular activity on your plate was crucial. It had a profound impact on team life, the way they interacted with their families and friends.

  Since this experience we have applied DiSC in Afghanistan, the Sudan, the central Middle East and Africa, and have found these tools to be extremely powerful when used with Inter-Cultural Intelligence.

  At Knowledgeworkx we believe that self-discovery is an essential part of employee development and is crucial to multiplying the investment made in the recruiting process. Self-awareness helps the recruiter to understand the candidate therefore enabling them to help the candidate become more self aware through the induction process. The candidate can then in turn start sharpening their skills and is able to set realistic targets through the personal development planning that is immediately put in place.

  To find out more about the self-discovery tools that would work best in your environment, please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
• "Cooperate, or face a new global downturn."
  in KnowledgeWorkx
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  Gordon Brown at the World Economic Forum.

  "Either we cooperate to deal with the economic problems that arise this year, or we will face a disorderly retreat into a new kind of protectionism that will damage our ability to build on the successes of globalization over recent years."  (link)

  Mr Brown noted that while the majority of production has shifted from Europe and America to the rest of the world, the majority of consumption still takes place in the west, and there is a precarious balance between those who consume but don't produce and those who produce but don't consume. He then promoted the idea of a global growth pact between the different nations to coordinate production and consumption without regressing towards the protectionism that brought the world economy to its knees in the 1930s.

  At the end of his speech, Mr Brown summarized up elements of speeches by the late US president John F Kennedy: Change is an inevitable feature of life. Never fear to negotiate, never negotiate from fear. We have to be strong but strategic in trying to cooperate around the world.

  "Divided we shall surely fail, but united there is little that we cannot do together." We have reached an era of inter-dependence with global problems that need global solutions.

  KnowledgeWorkx News Briefs summarize world events and speeches that touch on the multi-cultural, global workspace that we live in.