by Brian Van der Horst
There is a field called Inter-cultural Communication (ICC) which has existed for 33 years. The professionals in this field are interested in many of the same things that have interested those of us in NLP over the past 17 years. But they are older than we are, and study people from a different perspective.
This perspective could be described as a mirror image of NLP.
Mirrors are essential in the study of the structure of subjective experience.
A paradox: the only subjective experience we will ever really know is our own. But this experience is transparent, invisable and un-examined for many of us. Try to examine your eyeballs with your own eyes. You can't do that without a mirror.
NLP could be defined as an attitude and a set of distinctions that can allow us to become aware of our subjective experience.
In ICC, they have observed that when people get together from different cultures, they are often not as happy or evolved as they could be. We in NLP have noticed the same thing about any two people, or for that matter, any individual with himself.
ICC is a macro-disciplinary, or a top-down version of the bottom-up, micro-disciplinary approach of NLP. Whereas NLP studies how it is possible for an individual to be competent with given skills in a specific context, ICC studies the great abstractions of culture, and then later, how they may relate to the individual.
Culture is classically defined as the way of life in a specific physical and human environment: the sum total of values, beliefs, esthetic standards, linguistic expression, patterns of thinking, behavioral norms and styles of communication. One could as well use the term "model of the world."
NLP identifies the model of the world of a gifted, healthy individual and then extrapolates to generate useful generalizations. ICC studies culture as a group's model of the world.
My interest in ICC began when I began training NLP in France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, England, and in the Basque and Mediterranean regions. Directing the Centre International des Etudes Avancées Neuro-Linguistic Programming at Repère in Paris for the past 8 years necessitated my learning how to translate NLP into not just other languages, but into other cultures as well.
Five years ago, I began researching the ICC field. Not only was I motivated by my work, but also by my marriage to a Frenchwoman. Furthermore, the nascent European Community offered an unparalled opportunity to study the process of inter-cultural communication. For the past four years I have attended classes in schools specialized in teaching professionals how to teach inter-cultural wisdom and effectiveness, researching available publications, and becoming member of many of the existing professional associations in ICC.
At the beginning of my sejour in France, in 1984, I needed a lot of help in bridging a wide variety of cultural differences.
When people ask me to compare my seminars in the US with those in France, I tell them one difference is that in America, I usually talk for ten minutes and then start everyone in an exercise. In Paris, I found if you don't give them 40 minutes of history, philosophy, and theory, they'll haul out the guillotine for you. This is because in France, the basic presupposition is "If it's a beautiful theory, then it will have to work." This is different from our orientation, which is more, "If it works, then maybe it's a beautiful theory."
This was a great opportunity for me. I was suddenly obliged to hit the books-- to go back and study all the foundations of NLP, from Korzybski and Gregory Bateson, to Karl Pribram, George Miller, Watzlaick, Perls, Satir, Erickson, Norbert Weiner, Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Shannon and Weaver, Edward T. Hall and countless others in the fields of neuro-science, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cybernetics, systems and information theory. My French students would ask me sophisticated questions about these people; I had to have answers.
My vices in America-- of being more intellectual, philosophic, and informationally omnivore than the average American-- became my virtues in Europe. My unleashed penchant toward an historical appreciation of NLP was the first of a myriad of changes I effected to re-contextualize my teaching of NLP so that it would be appropriate for the European cultures. I will tell the story of exactly how I went about this, in France, in a subsequent column. But for now, I'd like to share how I discoved inter-cultural communication.
Somewhere in the middle of this hog-heaven of research, something important appeared to be missing. I was having all these problems getting some of the basic NLP presuppositions across to the French. Of course, being an American and a representative of the most successful techological, capitalistic and psychologically fascinated culture on the planet, I knew what was right. I kept right on doing all the wonderful things John Grinder, Richard Bandler, and all my great trainers had taught me to do.
And kept falling on my face. Oh, the business kept going well. But many of the NLP presuppostions simply did not exist in the French cutlural set. Occasionally someone would walk out, get insulting or insulted, argue to death, or not respond in a way with which I had been trained to cope. I was feeling stuck, resourceless, angry, and tired with the French.
I kept saying to myself, and to my marvellous wife, this has got to be cultural. But what does it mean, and what do I do?
I kept thinking, there ought to be a a field that studies all these inter-cultural differences. But nothing in my dabblings into anthropology and sociology showed the way. What was useful were some of the books on culture shock and working internationally that you can find in expatriate English language bookstores. I quickly learned I was suffering from the typical symptoms of culture shock: fatigue, irritation, helplessness, frustration. Talking more loudly instead of more slowly to make oneself understood. Watching CNN relentlessly, reading US magazines, becoming overly concerned about cleanliness, questioning the integrity and intelligence of the natives.
Add to this all the wonderful opportunities of being a new father to two French teenagers. But that's another story.
The odd thing about all this was that neither was I home-sick, nor had I "gone native," and become a faux français. I had felt "at home" in France nearly weeks after moving here.
Then one day I found a reference to the Intercultural Press. I called up its president, Margaret Pusch, and asked for a catalog. I began ordering books, and writing schools offering ICC programs. The most current reference material I have lists ICC graduate programs in 47 different universities in the United States alone. There are probably twice that in Europe, based on my experience here. I joined SIETAR, The International Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (established in l975), SIETAR France, The ASTD international section, and started attending workshops in Europe, and finally a summer of seminars at the Intercultural Communication Institute in Portland, Oregon. I learned that most people mark the beginning of ICC from the publication of Edward T. Hall's "The Silent Language" in 1959. Anyone who has read the NLP literature knows that Hall was there before we were in the concepts of modelling and non-verbal communication.
The ICC field was first established to train Americans for living, working, and studying overseas. It also served to help foreign students adjust to living in the States. When the racial strife of the l960's burst out, ICC finally caught the attention of the general public. One can predict another surge of interest following the Los Angeles riots.
With Hall's publication of "The Hidden Dimension" in 1966, cross-cultural analysis began demonstrating practical utility. The first manual on ICC published by Wright and Hammons in 1969, "Guidelines for Peace Corps Cross-Cultural Training," (their first practitioner course) oriented ICC toward a training perspective.
Until David Hoopes ( founding Executive Diretor of SEITAR, and now editor-in-chief of the Intercultural Press) started the first ICC department in 1970 at the University of Pittsburgh, ICC studies were usually the bastard child of the Speech Department in various universities that knew no other place to put intercultural researchers.
Naturally, linguistics were thought to be paramount in dealing with foreigners. But then diplomats, civil rights and peace corps works, as well as international businessmen, according to Hoopes, began reading "communication theory, especially David Berlo's Process of Communication, which was used as the theortical framework for international communictions training programs... They read Herkovitz on cultural relativism and Gordon Allport on prejudice. They studied the results of Rokeach's world-mindedness research and began to explore kinesics and other aspects of non-verbal communiation. They read anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Margaret Mead (Bateson's wife) and... many turned to humanistic psychology and human relations training, studying the work of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow."
My first discovery in becoming familiar with ICC was that this field uses much of the same knowledge base as NLP-- and that many of the exercises given to students in the two fields are identical. You could add to the above list all the founders of NLP before Bandler and Grinder that I cited in the homework I did for the French. They do, in ICC. "The intercultural and multicultural fields are of sufficiently recent development to be suffering from the multiplicity of tongues and prolixity of jargon that are almost inevitable when new concepts are discussed." Say Hoopes and Pusch in Multicultural Education (1979). "Nothing about intercultural or multicultural human relations is really new, but by putting certain ideas about communication, culture, society, education and human psychology together, a different way of looking at and learning about interaction among cultures has emerged." Don't we say something like this about NLP?
My second discovery about ICC was that because it started, and continues more as an academic discipline-- unlike NLP, which is highly application oriented-- they don't know as much as NLP does about modelling and changing people. Nevertheless, the ICC field comprises a body of imperatively useful knowledge.
Multi-cultural management, education, and therapy are popular topics of discussion in America today. I have noticed however, than when managers, trainers, and therapists start to explore this domain, they often begin to re-invent the wheel. This may be a good thing: the original wheel of creating inter-cultural understanding and competence is a bit wobbly.
But if we in NLP dare to start working in the inter- or multicultural arena, be in in the States, or working overseas without doing our homework, the reputation of NLP will suffer. I see this all the time with Americans who come to Europe to teach NLP. Much more of this would be a tragedy.
Because NLP has much to contribute to ICC-- especially in regard to ICC's limititations of knowing how to teach competence and in how to design relevant experiences which will install new cognitive and behavioral patterns in the individual.
And we have much to learn from ICC. Especially in the area of knowing how to get organizations to take you seriously. George Renwick, one of the finest trainers in ICC, analysed 30,000 cross-cultural training programs in 72 countries. Dutch anthropologist and management consultant Geert Hofstede surveyed 116,000 people in 40 countries in the '70s with questionnaires researching the equivalent of 8 meta-program distinctions.
Some multi-nationals report as high as 37% turnover in expatriate assignments. It can cost up from $50,000 to 200,000 to replace an executive sent overseas who comes come early disabled by culture shock. If a few weeks of inter-cultural training can be shown to reduce an organization's turnover, this makes the cost of training a great investment. In ICC they've done their homework, and they've got these figures.
But in ICC, they do have a presupposition that if you give a human being enough information, they'll know what to do with it. NLP's view is that if you give a human being the appropriate experience, afterwards, they'll be able to find the information necessary and know how to use it, on their own.
"Multicultual education is a structured process designed to foster understanding, acceptance, and constructive relations among people... to see different cultures as a source of learning and to respect diversity in the local, national and international environment. It stresses cultural, ethnic and racial, in addition to linguistic differences. Multicultral education refersfirst to to building an awareness of one's own cultural heritage, and understanding no one culture is intrinsically superior to another; secondly, to acquiring those skills in analysis and communication that help one function effectively in multicultural environments. Stress is placed on experiencing cultural differences in the classroom and in the society rather that simply studying about them. " Here again, Hoopes and Pusch could be talking about NLP.
I had breakfast with David Hoopes a couple of years ago. I said,"David, I've been around this discipline for a while, and when push comes to shove, where intercultural communication breaks down, it's where people say something like, 'Oh the French, they are so arrogant!' This is an emotional response, right?"
He sipped his coffee and said, "Yes, go on."
"Well, then shouldn't our job as professionals be giving people something you might call 'emotional choice'?"
"How would we do that?"
"It seems to me, there have been disciplines teaching that for at least 3,000 recorded years."
"I don't know," David looked concerned. "Sounds like you are talking about therapy. I can understand doing a little counselling."
"David, where I come from, if you are still confused, it's called counselling. If it feels good, it's therapy."
"I see your point," said David with a rueful smile.
My point is that the borderline whereat the disciplines of ICC and NLP meet is the frontier of human change.
In NLP, we tend to think that every individual represents his own culture. Thanks to the brilliance of our founders, we have been oriented toward creating human change. Thanks to the brilliance of the founders of ICC, they have discovered many distinctions that can be invaluable to NLPers working with different cultures, in overseas assignments, and in aiding the evolution of humankind.
I think the two fields seek common outcomes: How can people be happy together? How can we improve as a species? How can we learn compassion, understanding, and to love our differences?
This is the first in a series of columns I am writing to share what I've learned about ICC with my colleagues. Therefore, I plan to provide an introduction to the field, its major themes and tools, how it compares to NLP, and suggestions and directions for further study and practice.
Future articles will include tips on how to start NLP trainings overseas, a review some of the notable personalities and works in ICC, and as I progress further in my personal research, I will present the early results of a modeling project on multicultural competence.
Many people already move from country to country, working effectively and enjoying many different cultures. They are happy to do so, and these "foreigners" are joyfully welcomed in many strange lands. Three years ago I began a research project to find out who these people are, and what makes them so successful.
I call these gifted individuals the multicultural. They are "at home," effective, productive and happy in places quite different from their native lands. I call their constellation of qualities, "multicultural competence."
In ICC, they too call these people multi-cultural, bi-cultural, intercultural, cross-cultural, multi-national, or internationable. These people are not necessarily polyglots. The existance of the ICC field is predicated on the observation that a multi-lingual person with just one culture does not do as well overseas as a multi-cultural person speaking just one language.
I have identified a group of people that have been flexible and successful in at least three countries, based on their professional achievement, length of sejour, and ability to work with other cultures, and survive culture-shock and re-entry trauma. I have created an interviewing instrument that detects significant meta-programs, learning and coping strategies, and further NLP distinctions that are permitting me to formulate a model of what it takes to become a multi-culturally competent individual.
Thus far in my study, it has become possible to say that a profile exists for multicultural competence, and that it will be easier in the future to identify who will succeed in different cultures. But much more than that, this work indicates that many of the cognitive patterns and emotional responses that constitute MCC may be learnable and teachable.
So that's the plan. Write to me care of Anchor Point if you have any commentaries or specific questions about inter-cultural or multicultural issues. In the mean time, the attached bibliography has been prepared for those who want to get up to speed right away in learning about this fascinating mirror universe of NLP.
SUGGESTED READINGS FOR MULTICULTURAL TRAINING Selected by Brian Van der Horst
Hall, Edward T. The Silent Language, New York: Doubleday, 1959 The Hidden Dimension, New York: Doubleday,1966 The Dance of Life, New York: Doubleday, 19?? Beyond Culture, New York: Doubleday, 1976
Pusch, Margaret D. (Editor) Multicultural Education, A Cross-Cultural Training Approach. PO Box 700, Yarmouth, ME 04096: Intercultural Press, 1979
Hofstede, Geert Culture's Consequences, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1980
Casse, Pierre Training for the Cross-Cultural Mind, SIETAR, Washington, DC, 1977
Condon and Youself An Introduction to Intercultural Communication, New York, Macmillan, 1988
Samovar and Porter Intercultural Communication : A Reader, Belmont, CA : Wadsworth Publishing, 1988
Useful addresses:
SIETAR International (The International Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) Georgetown University, 733 15th St. NW, Ste. 900, Washington, DC 20005
Intercultural Communication Institute 8835 SW Canyon Lane, Suite 238 Portland, Oregon 97225
American Graduate School of International Management Thunderbird Campus, Glendale, Arizona 85306
The Business Council for International Understanding, The American University, Suite 244 3301 New Mexico Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20016
David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602
School for International Training Kipling Road, Brattleboro, VT 05301
Cutural Diversity at Work (Newsletter) The GilDeane Group, 13751 Lake City Way, NE Suite 106, Seattle, WA 98125-3615