PART 4

TRAIN AND DEVELOP CULTURALLY AGILE TALENT

I’ve emphasized throughout this book that developing cultural agility is a continuous process, not an achievement. Professionals gain cultural agility through an ongoing learning system, not a single event, such as a one-time training course or single experience abroad. As professionals move from being novices to culturally agile experts, they internalize the pieces of knowledge they gain, developing an unconscious, internal “grammar” of cultural differences. And the more they use this grammar in their professional interactions, the more “fluent,” or culturally agile, they become.

This is where you come in. You will need to design your organization’s learning system for developing cultural agility to expand along with professionals’ increasing fluency. To help you achieve this, the next three chapters will provide the foundational components for your organization’s learning system. The learning system includes two parts: cross-cultural training (Chapter Six) and experiential developmental opportunities (Chapters Seven and Eight).