The Culture Map -Some notes

 I have been reading over the last few days  a book titled the Culture Map, it is extremely amusing and a clear eye opener for me .
It is about the different culture contexts and how they can affect us in the work environment , implicitly and unintentionally sometimes. This also does not mean to follow  the different stereotypes as people from same country can different traits for sure, but also the cultural effect can have huge impacts on behaviors for sure.

The Book Defines 8 Scales /Measurements that are needed in any business environment and how the cultural differences might affect them.

1- Communication:

Low Context vs High Context : There are some cultures that start any communication without suggestion that there is a common context between different parties , that is why they tend to clearly document every step and  leave no space for speculation those are low context style of communication.

While there are some other cultures that tend to assume an existing common context between people in the business environment and so they leave a space for the in between the lines interpretations, those are high context of communication cultures.

Germany, Sweden, Denmark are example for the low context cultures while Saudi-Arabia, India are examples for high context ones.

This point has resonated with me , for at some point I was working with an Austrian CTO and he was given me the tasks in a great detail to the extent that I become frustrated and was telling my self he must think of me in a less way or that I am not that good at all, that's why he has given such details , while in reality , it is the way he do it with anyone as this is the right way from his cultural perspective!

The author made  very smart points about the reason for this and that the languages has a role (some languages are more expressive than others) and history also have another role : the two extremes for example in the above picture Japan has very long extended history where there exists a massive homogeneity between its people , shared traits cultural contexts that were passed from one generation to the other , USA on the other hand has short history -merely a few hundred years- that was build and based on immigrants from all over the world.

 2-Feedback and Evaluation:

In some cultures it is acceptable to be outright direct with your feedback and it is totally perceived as non personal , while in some others -like ours in Egypt- it is not and order to give a negative feedback you have to be very cautious put it in a more appropriate way , even the US is often though as a very direct culture , when it comes to giving a feedback they tend to be more subtle and even in the book the author details a situations where an American manager was mistakenly thought of giving a positive feedback while it was the other way around, whereas the author justified this by saying that American managers tend to give 3 positive points  for each negative point during a feedback providing session, I believe there is a more informal slang /vulgar that depicts the same idea which is a "shit sandwich"!.

The author made some really smart points about the fact that being low context in the communication scale does not necessarily means  that the negative feedback in this same exact culture would be direct/explicit, a clear example for this is Americans , British and Canadian cultures.

Another smart point was about the language used in the more direct feedback cultures , where these cultures tend to use what linguists call upgraders words preceding or following the feedback to make it more stronger/obvious like absolutely totally strongly .
On the other side the more indirect cultures would use downgraders to soften/mitigate the criticism like maybe, a bit  , a little, sort of, slightly a little, another example os a direct understatement like for example "we are not there yet" , while the intention means "we are no where close to complete".

One of the examples she mentioned is about the feedback given to her son on his assignments/homework when he was in the US vs when he was in France, in the US he would get his assignments covered with gold stars and positively affirming comments like "Keep it up " , "Excellent work" and at worst "Almost there .... give it another try".While in the french school , the positive feedback were sparingly given (mainly TB or tres bien) and the negative feedback were outright direct  the page in the notebook would be covered with Fat Xs and red lines  along with. a few works like "skills are not acquired. Apply yourself !".   

Some general notes, before continuing the other scales :

1- The Relative Perspective :
 we have to take into consideration the fact that given a certain country lies in the mid between 2 extremes of the communication time line(low context vs high context), this means that for the high context people the culture of this country would be perceived as low context and for the low context people it would be considered high context.


will continue on the other points in the  book in a different post , so that this one would not become so long.