7
A FOCUSED WAY OF WORKING WITH MACRO CULTURES

Assessing macro cultures in terms of all of the dimensions mentioned in the preceding chapter is a huge task, but it is useful only for the researcher with a particular interest in a particular country or someone who wants to compare macro cultures. For the organizational leader or the person wanting to join an organization, a more applied and focused approach is needed. The best place to start is with the observation that multicultural task forces and projects will not only become more common in the future but have even acquired a new name—“collaborations.” Such new kinds of work groups are well described in an article within the Handbook of Cultural Intelligence (Ang & Van Dyne, 2008):

Participants in a collaboration may come together on a one-time basis, without anticipating continued interaction. A core set of members may remain involved for an extended period of time, but other participants may float on and off the effort, working only on an “as needed” sporadic basis. Further, collaborations may have periods of intensely interdependent interaction, but may otherwise consist of quite independent actors. Many are not embedded in a single organizational context, but represent either cross-organizational cooperation or participants may not have any organizational affiliation at all. Participants may feel as though they share a common purpose for the duration of a given project, yet may not view themselves as a “team.” Collaborators may never meet face-to-face, may be geographically dispersed, and may be primarily connected by communication technology. Thus collaborations are more loosely structured, more temporary, more fluid, and often more electronically enabled than traditional teams.

(Gibson & Dibble, 2008, pp. 222–223)

The two prototype situations to consider are (1) a team or task force in which every member comes from a different nationality, and (2) a team such as a surgical team in which every member comes from a different occupational culture with hierarchical differences within the team. The unique factor in these kinds of groups is that we are dealing with both national and status differences. From a culture management and change leadership perspective, how can such groups learn about the many layers of culture and how can such groups be made effective?

In each of these cases, the group must undergo some experiences that enable its members to discover some essential cultural characteristics of the other members that relate to the task at hand. To do this they must overcome the rituals of deference and demeanor that curtail open communication across status levels to develop some amount of understanding and empathy and to find some common ground. In particular, they must discover the norms and underlying assumptions that deal with authority and intimacy, because common ground in those areas is essential to developing feasible working relationships. This task is made especially difficult because each culture’s social order has norms about “face” that make it difficult and dangerous to talk about these areas openly. Our own unconscious rules of politeness and fear of offending make it very likely that members will not easily reveal their deeper feelings about authority and intimacy to others nor will they think to ask about them.

We are not talking about how to manage a merger or joint venture when only two cultures are involved and where some formal mutual education might work. Instead we are now talking about how an Arab, an Israeli, a Japanese, a Nigerian, and an American, for example, can be shaped into a functioning work group even if they share some knowledge of English. Briefing the group on where each country stands on the Hofstede or Globe dimensions would do little to foster understanding or empathy. Or consider how a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, several nurses, and technicians who have to implement a new surgical technique can become a successful team, talk openly, and totally trust each other across the major hierarchical boundaries that exist in such a group (Edmondson, Bohmer, & Pisano, 2001; Edmondson, 2012). If you add the possibility that in this medical team, several of the members are from different countries and received their training in those countries, how would they find common ground? Lecturing to such a group about the culture of doctors and the different culture of nurses would only scratch the surface if the members need to collaborate constructively. What kind of education or experience would enable such groups to develop working relationships, trust, and task-relevant open communication?

To solve this puzzle it is necessary to draw on the concept of “levels of relationship,” as was explained in the previous chapter. When multicultural groups come together, they will interact in the Level 1 transactional modes of their own country and will be especially cautious not to offend or “threaten face.” I have seen multicultural classes go through an entire semester without anyone risking becoming more personal, and, as a consequence, not understanding each other’s national cultures at all. If it is a working group, staying at Level 1 risks errors and low productivity, because members will not speak up lest they offend someone with higher status. It is necessary to remember that the social order in every society creates these Level 1 norms of politeness, tact, and face saving as an essential component of culture, designed to make society possible.

Every macro culture develops a social order, but the actual norms differ from culture to culture. For example, in the United States Level 1 face-to-face criticism is acceptable as part of performance appraisal; in Japan it is not. In some cultures, hiring relatives is the only way to have employees with whom it is possible to develop open trusting Level 2 relationships; in other cultures, it is called nepotism and is forbidden. In some cultures, trust is established with a handshake; in others, it can be established only with payoffs and bribes (even the word “bribe” is culturally loaded). Differences across occupational boundaries might not be as extreme, but they are just as important when teams that cut across hierarchical boundaries and occupations have to function together.

Cultural Intelligence

One approach to solving multicultural issues of this sort is to educate each member about the norms and assumptions of each of the cultures involved. I have already indicated that this approach would not only be cumbersome because of the number of different cultures involved, but it would also have to be so abstract that the learners would not know how to apply what they were told.

A second approach is to focus on cultural capacities and learning skills, which is increasingly being called cultural intelligence (Thomas & Inkson, 2003; Earley & Ang, 2003; Peterson, 2004; Plum, 2008; Ang & Van Dyne, 2008). Because there are very many macro cultures in the world, to learn their content appears to be a much less feasible approach than to develop the learning skills to quickly acquire whatever knowledge is needed of the cultures that are involved in a particular situation. The basic problem in multicultural situations is that the members of each macro culture may have opinions and biases about “the others” or may even have some level of understanding of “the others” but operate by the premise that their own culture is the one that is “right.” Getting multicultural organizations, projects, and teams to work together, therefore, poses a much larger cultural challenge than evolving or managing cultural change within a single macro culture.

The concept of cultural intelligence introduces the proposition that to develop understanding, empathy, and the ability to work with others from other cultures requires four capacities: (1) actual knowledge of some of the essentials of the other cultures involved, (2) cultural sensitivity or mindfulness about culture, (3) motivation to learn about other cultures, and (4) behavioral skills and flexibility to learn new ways of doing things (Earley & Ang, 2003; Thomas & Inkson, 2003). For multicultural teams to work, therefore, implies that certain individual characteristics must be present to enable cross-cultural learning.

In their Handbook of Cultural Intelligence (2008), Ang and Van Dyne present a set of papers that describe the development of a cultural intelligence scale and show that teams with members that score higher on this measure perform better than lower-scoring groups. There are clearly individual differences in cultural sensitivity and learning capacity, and there is a vast psychological literature on what makes people more or less culturally competent, but selecting people for this capacity does not address two problems. First, in many work situations, we do not have choices as to whom to assign because of limited resources in the technical skills needed to do the work. Second, if a leader decides to increase the cultural competence of employees, what kind of experiences should they have? What should the leader do by way of designing learning processes that will stimulate such competence regardless of the initial state of cultural intelligence of the participants?

How to Foster Cross-Cultural Learning

Because culture is so deeply embedded in each of us, cross-cultural learning must confront the fundamental reality that each member of each culture begins with the assumption that what he or she does is the right and proper way to do things. We each come from a social order into which we have been socialized and therefore take its assumptions for granted. Intellectual understanding of other cultures may be a start in conceding that there are other ways to do things, but it does little to build empathy and does not enable us to find common ground for working together. More likely we begin by noting how the “other processes or positions won’t work or are wrong.”

To achieve a sufficient level of empathy and a context in which the group is motivated to engage in a mutual search for common ground requires a temporary suspension of some of the rules of the social order. We must be brought to the point of being able to reflect on our own assumptions and consider the possibility that some other assumptions may be just as valid as our own. This process starts with questioning ourselves, not with becoming convinced of the rightness of others. How is this to be done? What kind of social learning process has to be created to achieve such a state of reflection?

The Concept of a Temporary Cultural Island

A cultural island is a situation in which the rules of having to maintain face are temporarily suspended so that we can explore our self-concepts and thereby our values and tacit assumptions, especially around authority and intimacy. The first use of this term in the organizational domain was in Bethel, Maine, where human relations training groups met for several weeks to learn about leadership and group dynamics (Bradford, Gibb, & Benne, 1964; Schein & Bennis, 1965). The essence of this training process is based on the theory that this kind of learning has to be “experiential” in the sense that group members have to learn from their own efforts to become a group.

The groups are deliberately composed in such a way that all members would be strangers to each other so that no one had to maintain a particular identity vis-à-vis the others in the group. At the same time, the “trainers” or staff members of these T-groups (training groups) deliberately withheld any suggestions for the agenda, working method, or structure, thus forcing members to invent their own social order, their own norms, and their own ways of working together. The main impact of this kind of learning was that people confronted their own assumptions and observed how these differed from the assumptions of others.

The problems of authority, intimacy, and identity must be confronted immediately through personal experimentation and observation of an individual’s impact on others. Members become acutely aware that there was no one best way to do things and that the best way has to be discovered, negotiated, and ratified, leading eventually to strong group norms that created a micro culture within each T-group. Such micro cultures often formed within a day or two in these groups and were viewed by each group as the best way to do things—“we are the best group.” Members also discovered that they did not have to like each other to work together, but they had to have sufficient empathy to be able to accept others and work with them. A brief review of the theory underlying this learning progression is found in the introduction to the next part of this book.

What made T-group experiential learning possible was that the learning took place under conditions where members could relax the need to defend their own cultural assumptions because they were strangers to each other, were in a situation defined as “learning” rather than performing, and had the time and staff resources to develop their own learning skills. The total situation was designed by the staff to create a “container” in which the participants could feel psychologically safe.

For multicultural collaborations to work, the members must first learn about each other in a temporary cultural island. Making this work in a group that has to stay together and work together is more difficult than doing it with strangers in a T-group, but the same experiential assumptions apply. The group cannot be told how to work; it must learn from its own experience. The members must be enabled to get past Level 1 transactional norms, be encouraged to take some personal risks to personalize the situation, and begin to develop Level 2 relationships. The change leaders and managers who create such groups must therefore develop the skills to create temporary cultural-island experiences for the members to enable them to work effectively.

The basic logic is that to truly understand the deeper assumptions of the macro cultures involved in the group, we must create a micro culture that personalizes those assumptions and makes them available for reflection and understanding. I can read or be told that in the United States we have fairly “low power distance” and that my Mexican team member comes from a culture with “higher power distance,” but this will mean nothing to me until we can concretize these generalizations in our own behavior and feelings. I need to discover within myself how I relate to people in authority, and I need to listen with empathy to how my Mexican teammate feels about his relationship to authority. If there are more than two of us, we must each develop some understanding and empathy for each other.

Cultural islands that attempt to facilitate this level of mutual understanding are sometimes created when we send teams to Outward Bound kinds of training and when we put teams in simulations, in role playing situations, in post-mortems or after action reviews, where a review of operations or experiences deliberately tries to minimize hierarchy and maximize open communication across the status levels of the participants (Conger, 1992; Darling & Parry, 2001; Mirvis, Ayas, & Roth, 2003). What these situations have in common is that they put participants into the cultural island, but then what they do within the cultural-island setting varies widely according to the purpose of the exercise. To focus the activity within the cultural island on obtaining multicultural insight and empathy, the participants need to create a conversation in a dialogic format (Isaacs, 1999; Bushe & Marshak, 2015).

Focused Dialogue in a Cultural-Island Setting

Dialogue is a form of conversation that allows the participants to relax sufficiently to begin to examine the assumptions that lie behind their thought processes (Isaacs, 1999; Schein, 1993a). Instead of trying to solve problems rapidly, the dialogue process attempts to slow down the conversation to allow participants to reflect on what comes out of their own mouths and what they hear from the mouths of others. The key to initiating this kind of dialogic conversation is to create a setting in which participants feel secure enough to suspend their need to win arguments, to clarify everything they say, and to challenge each other every time they disagree.

In “normal” Level 1 conversation in the United States, we are expected to respond to questions, to voice disagreements, and to “actively participate.” In a dialogue the facilitator legitimizes the concept of suspension. If someone has just said something that I disagree with, I could hold back voicing my disagreement and, instead, silently ask myself why I disagree and what assumptions I am making that might explain the disagreement. Suspension thus facilitates learning about oneself, which is crucial in cross-cultural dialogues because we cannot understand someone else’s culture if we cannot “see” our own cultural assumptions and discover the differences in an objective non-evaluative manner.

This form of dialogue derives from native cultures that made decisions through “talking to the campfire,” allowing enough time for and encouraging reflective conversation rather than confrontational conversation, discussion, or debate. Talking to the campfire is an important element of this dialogue process, because the absence of eye contact makes it easier to suspend reactions, disagreements, objections, and other responses that might be triggered by face-to-face conversation. The purpose is not just to have a quiet, reflective conversation; rather, it is to allow participants to begin to see where their deeper levels of thought and tacit assumptions differ. Paradoxically such reflection leads to better listening in that if I identify my own assumptions and filters first, I am less likely to mishear or misunderstand the subtle meanings in the words of others. I cannot understand another culture if I have no insight into my own.

For this to work, all of the parties to the dialogue have to be willing to suspend their impulses to disagree, challenge, clarify, and elaborate. The conversational process imposes certain rules such as not interrupting, talking to the symbolic campfire instead of to each other, limiting eye contact, and, most important of all, starting with a “check-in.” Checking in at the beginning of the meeting means that each member in turn will say something to the group as a whole (the campfire) about his or her present mental state, motivation, or feelings. Only when all of the members have checked in is the group ready for a more free-flowing conversation. The check-in ensures that everyone has made an initial contribution to the group and thereby has helped to create the group.

An example of discovering our own culture typically arises immediately around the instruction to talk to the campfire and avoid eye contact. For some people this is very easy, but for others—for example, U.S. human resource professionals—this is very difficult because in U.S. culture looking at each other is considered “good communication,” and this is reinforced by the professional norms in the human resource field that “eye contact is necessary to make the other feel that you are really listening.” It is often shocking for U.S. participants to learn how hard it is for them not to look at someone who is speaking because we consider that rude, not realizing that in many other cultures to look someone in the eye can be seen as disrespectful.

Talking to the symbolic campfire serves several important functions. First of all it encourages group members to become more reflective by not getting distracted by how others look and respond. Second, it preserves the sense of being one whole group by symbolically contributing each comment to the center, not to one or two other members, even though the comment may have been triggered by them. For example, if I have a specific question based on what member A has said, there is a consequential difference between my saying directly to A, “What did you mean by that?” versus saying to the campfire, “What A has just said makes me wonder what she meant.” The second way of saying it raises the issue for the group as a whole. Third, the campfire avoids the common phenomenon of two members getting into a deep discussion while the rest of the group becomes a passive audience. The goal is to suspend many of the assumed rules of interaction coming from all the different cultural social orders and to create a new container within which members can talk more openly and can verbalize their reflections.

Using Dialogue for Multicultural Exploration

The norms created in a dialogue group lend themselves to the explorations of critical cultural differences, because the dialogue process allows for the articulation of macro-cultural differences at a personal level so that the participants not only learn how macro-cultures differ at a general level but can experience those differences immediately in the room. This learning is achieved by using the check-in to focus on the critical issues of authority and intimacy.

 

Analytic Comment. The learning goal was to show members that cross-cultural understanding can be achieved through a dialogue process and that they can set up such a process whenever they get stuck in the future. I emphasized the importance of getting personal experiences from everyone on how the specific problems of authority and intimacy were handled by them in their culture. Other dimensions of the macro cultures could come into the discussion, but the critical issues for the group to be able to work together were authority and intimacy.

This form of conversation is powerful because it personalizes the cultural issue. Instead of talking about how a particular country has evolved its approach to hierarchy and authority, it brings the issue into the room among the individuals who will have to work together. Personal accounts shift the conversation from Level 1 role-related transactions to stories with which every member of the group can identify. Imitation and identification are fundamental learning processes that become available when we shift to Level 2, where we treat each other as persons rather than as roles. In work with groups that have been historically in conflict with each other it has been found that the only way to begin any kind of conflict resolution work is to get each side to tell its story (Kahane, 2010).

Legitimizing Personalization in Cross-Cultural Conversation

I have pointed out that in a cross-cultural conversation people usually choose to stay in a Level 1 transactional, role-related mode because it is safe. I observed in my classes of Sloan Fellows, which often included as many as 20 non–U.S. members of the class of 50, that even after many months of attending classes and social events together, I had the sense that they had not broken through to any deeper level of understanding of each other’s cultures. We assumed that if they were at MIT for a full year with their families that Level 2 and even Level 3 relationships would arise, and indeed some intimate friendships had been made, but overall I felt that a more systematic process for mutual cultural exploration had to be provided as part of their education. I tried an experiment along these lines.

The Paradox of Macro Culture Understanding

Both of the cases I reviewed reinforce the paradox that to understand another macro culture, you and your counterpart have to violate a deep rule of your own culture: “Be careful not to offend people in another culture,” which translates into “stay at a safe Level 1 transactional level.” The implication for multicultural working groups within organizations is that they need to experience cultural islands in which the rules of etiquette and face work can be suspended to enable mutual learning to occur. A cultural island can be deliberately created by leaders and facilitators or sometimes is created by circumstances such as work crises.

An excellent example was provided by Salk (1997) in her study of a German–U.S. joint venture. Each parent company had provided lectures on the main characteristics of the “other culture,” which equipped everyone with clear stereotypes. Each group quickly discovered evidence in the other group that the stereotype was accurate and settled into adapting to it, even though it made collaboration awkward. This mutual adaptation at Level 1 went on for several years when a major problem arose with the union that threatened an immediate strike. Both parent companies said to the subsidiary: “Solve the problem and solve it now,” which created crisis conditions and forced immediate emergency action. Suddenly the two groups had to get together under crisis conditions, which revealed them to each other as whole people rather than as employees in formal roles. They solved the problem, and from that point on they had a much easier time collaborating with each other. As they put it, “We finally got to know each other!”

Echelons as Macro Cultures

The discussion so far has focused on national cultures, but the problems of miscommunication and misunderstanding can be just as severe between rank levels in hierarchically structured organizations. White supervisors not understanding Bantu employees refusing to look directly at their superiors is an extreme example, but especially in the high-hazard industries that I have worked with I have seen equally dramatic cases of misunderstanding even when the same national language was spoken. The reason is that culture forms around shared experience, and in most organizations the shared experience of being an operator on the line is different from being a supervisor, which is different from being a middle manager, which is different from being an executive.

Going down the hierarchy, the main problem is misunderstood instructions and orders; going up the chain of command, the main problem is lost information, which causes productivity, quality, and safety problems not to be noticed or addressed effectively. The more technical and complex the industry, the greater the potential problem. I am addressing this issue in this chapter because I believe it is a problem of macro-cultural misunderstanding but has not been recognized as such.

For example, in the arena of safety in high-hazard industries such as nuclear power, airlines, and health care, the biggest obstacle to effective performance is the failure of upward communication. It is sad to see how many fatal accidents over the years have resulted from communication failures that have cultural roots. When it comes to multinational groups, the problems are, of course, worse, because there may not even be a common language with which to have a dialogue. In such a situation, the actual learning of a common language can itself be a facilitative cultural island.

As Gladwell (2008) points out in his reconstruction of the Colombian airlines disaster in 1990, at the root of it was (1) the failure of the Colombian co-pilot to understand that the JFK controllers did not translate “we are low on fuel” into “EMERGENCY,” and (2) that the co-pilot did not know that being put at the head of the line for landing occurred only if you declared an emergency. The traffic controllers pointed out that there might at any time be four or five aircraft that reported “running out of fuel.”

Gladwell further reports that the Korean airline had a series of disasters in the 1990s because of communication failures across rank levels within the cockpit and that this eventually was ameliorated only by shifting the cockpit language to English. The change in language provided the cultural island that permitted the introduction of new rules that led to better communication in the cockpit but, tragically, did not reveal the subtle occupational semantics of the difference between “running out of fuel” and “emergency.”

Along these same lines, “procedures” and “checklists” are devices that can function as cultural islands in the sense that going through the list is a culturally neutral process. The subordinate is licensed to ask challenging questions of the more senior person if it is a checklist item without thereby threatening the senior person’s face. Checklists and procedures have been very helpful in the medical context in that they neutralize the dangerous status gap between nurses and technicians on the one hand and doctors on the other hand, especially when they are also likely to be of different nationalities. The checklist or procedure can become a superordinate authority that puts the doctor, nurse, and technician on an equal status level as they go through the procedure. Insisting that dialogue conversations be “to the campfire” in a multinational group serves the same neutralizing function in implying that each culture is of equal rank and validity.

 

Analytical Comment. The analysis of safety issues in high-hazard industries and in the health care field has revealed several important facts that need to be highlighted because they operate both within and across cultures. Let me put these into a sequential logic:

  1. Many failures in the safety arena could have been prevented if there had been better communication across cultural boundaries.
  2. Some of these boundaries are technical; people did not understand the jargon and subtle meanings and hence either failed to understand or misunderstood.
  3. Some of these boundaries are rank levels where communication breaks down because of cultural norms of deference and demeanor, leading to face protection rather than open sharing of task-relevant information.
  4. Some of these boundaries are macro-cultural, reflecting national or occupational norms and values that lead either to not communicating things in the first place or dismissing communications from culture members who are viewed as “wrong” or “not knowing” or “having the wrong values.”
  5. These three kinds of cultural boundary problems are highly visible in multicultural groups that involve either nations or major occupational groups, but they operate just as much in organizations within a given national culture because of the subcultures that evolve around ranks and functions.
  6. Theories of organizational effectiveness emphasize the importance of trust and open communication vertically and laterally, but they fail to acknowledge that such communication has to occur across cultural boundaries and requires some learning in cultural-island settings to ensure understanding and empathy. Exhorting the surgeon and the nurse to be open with each other is not enough; they have to have some kind of mutual cultural-island experience that builds common ground and mutual understanding.
  7. A cultural perspective that acknowledges the existence of national and occupational macro cultures, functional subcultures, and subcultures based on rank and common experience is an essential component of organizational leadership.
  8. The organizational leader must therefore become aware of when and how to create temporary cultural islands to enable various members of the organization to reach Level 2 relationships in which they can communicate with each other more openly.
  9. When and how this is done is itself a function of the macro culture in which the organization and the leaders are operating. For example, a culture in which time is measured in very short units and is considered a key to productivity might have to speed up some version of the dialogue process. The important point is not how long it takes but the creation of the climate of neutrality and temporary suspension of the rules of the social order.

Summary and Conclusions

As organizations and working groups become more multicultural, new ways of building workable relationships will have to be invented, because just training everyone to be more culturally intelligent and composing groups with the most intelligent will not be practical. Existing groups will have to find experiential ways of learning through creating cultural islands and learning new forms of conversation such as dialogue. The most essential characteristic of these new conversational forms is that they be personal stories, because only through such stories can people from different cultures identify with each other.

As organizations become more decentralized and electronically connected, some new versions of cultural islands will have to be invented to enable people who have not met face-to-face (and may not ever meet each other) to develop understanding and empathy. It is quite possible that the dialogic format can work well in a network if the participants tell their own stories of authority and intimacy to each other by email, Facebook, or whatever technology is extant at the time. The world is changing rapidly, but the issues of how we treat each other and how we handle status and authority remain remarkably stable. Perhaps more dialogues around these issues will stimulate some new ideas on how to get along better.

Suggestion for the Change Leader: Do Some Experiments with Dialogue

How to Set Up a Dialogue

  1. Identify the group that needs to explore intercultural relationships.
  2. Seat everyone in a circle or as near to it as possible.
  3. Lay out the purpose of the dialogue: “To be able to listen more reflectively to ourselves and to each other, to get a sense of the similarities and differences in our cultures.”
  4. Start the conversation by having the members in turn check in by introducing who they are and answering the relevant question about authority relations as they see them—for example, “What do you do when you see your boss doing something wrong?” Ask each person to talk to the campfire, avoid eye contact, and prohibit any questions or comments until everyone has checked in.
  5. After everyone has checked in, launch a very general question, such as, “What differences and commonalities did anyone notice?” Ask members to continue to talk to the campfire even if they are addressing a particular member. Encourage an open conversation on what everyone has just heard without the constraints of proceeding in order or having to withhold questions and comments.
  6. When the topic runs dry or the group loses energy, introduce the second question—for example, “How do you know whether or not you can trust one of your coworkers?” Again, have everyone in turn give an answer before general conversation begins.
  7. Let the differences and commonalities emerge naturally; don’t try to make general statements because the purpose is mutual understanding and empathy, not necessarily clear description or conclusions.
  8. After this topic runs dry, ask the group to poll itself by asking each person in turn to share one or two insights about his or her own culture and any other cultures that he or she has heard about during the dialogue.
  9. Ask the group to identify common ground and what, if any, problems they see in working together, given what they have heard about authority or power and intimacy or trust.
  10. Ask the group members what next steps they feel they need to work on together.

Suggestion for the Recruit

Get a group of friends together, sit in a circle, announce the rule about just talking to the campfire, put some symbolic object in the center, and begin with a check-in with “How are you feeling right now?”; go in order around the room; then just let the process go for a half hour and see how you feel at the end of it. What was different? What did you learn about conversation?

Suggestion for the Scholar or Researcher

Set up the conditions for a dialogue with a few friends, brief them on the concept and the rules, do a quick check-in, and then take an hour to practice just talking to the campfire. The topic does not matter; in fact, it can sometimes be most illuminating if you say, “Let’s just begin with our check-in, turn to the right and say, “Why don’t you begin.”

Suggestion for the Consultant or Helper

When you are working with a group that consists of members of different cultures or status levels, ask them to talk about experiences involving authority and status in a dialogue format.

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