Intercultural Competence
[Introduction to, Intercultural Competence, ?2023]
What a rich cultural tapestry is this complex, troubled, gorgeous world of ours.
And what sheer joy, and adventure, is a lifetime spent in learning about and engaging with the people and places represented by each brilliant thread.
Intercultural competence. (Is such a thing possible?)
A buzzword today, especially in the business arena, this worldview and its accompanying skill set nevertheless become increasingly necessary as we blithely cross borders, and encounter people rather different from ourselves.
The gates of those borders slammed down in the early days of 2020, as the world began to understand that a pandemic was upon us – and what a shock it was to find that we were suddenly very separate from, and more than a little frightened by, one another. This isn’t the kind of world I want to live in, nor as I imagine do you, dear reader, and now that our borders have begun to open again, we must ask ourselves: how can we better engage with one another?
A complex question.
In this digital age, we can easily learn a wealth of knowledge about any of the world’s cultures. We can access and practice the necessary skills for cross-communication, increase our sensitivity and reduce our stereotypes, become ever more aware of our natural ethnocentrism – and transform it, over time, into ethnorelativism instead. And in this era, as we study and do business increasingly online, we’re even more likely than before to encounter and negotiate or collaborate with people from other countries and customs.
Surely, we don’t want to offend. Even more, we want our encounter, for whatever purpose, to be successful. Perhaps being interculturally aware and competent is a desired part of our personal development, to be able to view ourselves as cosmopolitan, sophisticated, a citizen of the world who can interact easily with its people.
Lovely, isn’t that? And so, this competence is both a necessity and a desire for many.
When we begin to get beneath the surface of ‘culture’ – when we peel away a few of those obvious layers and find we knew and understood far less than we’d thought – it can feel very daunting. After all, the world has more cultures than we could possibly count. Not only does each nation have particular cultural features, but within the borders of each lies its own diversity; we can have multiple cultures within one people, not to mention all those who may have relocated there from elsewhere – and the intermarriages and kids who belong to two or more cultures equally, and a wealth of other complexities.
There are tools by which we can hope to understand, and frameworks that assist us. Skills such as critical thinking and reflection, active listening and a broad perspective that allows for multiple interpretations, can also help.
Above all, we must engage with the world’s people. While travel and meeting in person is very nice indeed, for most it isn’t a viable path; frequent travel may be too costly and time consuming, while for environmental concerns we want to reduce our carbon footprint and fly less. If the recent pandemic experience taught us anything, however, it’s the value of the online environment in real-time video transmission. We can easily meet and interact with people from a broad range of cultural backgrounds, and if we do so consciously and skillfully, we can learn and grow.
True competence, in any category, isn’t achieved quickly, and with such a vast cultural array, certainly this takes time. Initially, however, we can rely on those frameworks to help us better understand across cultural lines, as well as solid communication skills; when combined with a basic understanding of the world’s systems, major historical events, and current issues – see Developing a ‘Global Mind’, also in this series, for that – we can build a foundation.
Becoming truly interculturally savvy is a lifetime endeavor.
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People change, after all. Countries, cultures, outlooks, values, circumstances – these continue to evolve over time. What we thought we knew about a country and a people, even our own, will never remain static – for humanity and its civilizations are dynamic instead.
Not only can what we once knew about a place, or even the world as a whole, be profoundly changed over time, with a continual need for updating of our knowledge base, but one human brain could never hope to hold all the cultural richness that this world has to offer. There’s always more to learn.
What’s more: culture is an enormous concept. That well-known model, the cultural iceberg, comes to mind – with behaviors and artifacts above the surface where we can readily identify them, while hidden beneath are intangible elements such as norms, values, beliefs, and assumptions.
We often don’t even know our own culture well. Or rather, as a product of it, we know it deeply and intimately, yet we don’t know what we know because we’ve never analyzed it. As the saying in anthropology goes, “If you want to know about the water – don’t ask the fish.”
How, then, can we ever hope to feel any measure of mastery?
I’ve spent a few decades in the pursuit of intercultural competence and engagement with the global community. Much of my earlier life was in New York City, one of the world’s most diverse with more than 800 languages; my formal education in psychology was undertaken at every level with one eye toward cross-cultural understanding, while along the way, I also studied traditional Chinese medicine, Japanese shiatsu, and several Asian philosophical systems.
For nearly 20 years now, I’ve lived abroad in a series of countries and traveled to more than 100 for cultural research. Having been a long-time activist for a range of causes in my home country, I now belong to an international advocacy organization and endeavor to contribute to a better world wherever I can. I’ve designed and taught university courses on topics of multicultural societies, global citizenship, and intercultural understanding, one of which was the basis for this book. I’m a ‘student’ at the ‘university of the world’ – now and for the rest of my days.
Perhaps by now I can credibly claim identity as a global citizen, and some measure of intercultural competence. And yet: there is so much more to learn.
It can feel like a Herculean task. Or, it can be a never-ending gift.
Sometimes it is, in fact, rather overwhelming. I maintain a daily practice of mindfulness meditation to keep me focused on the present moment. And weekly, I take a break from the world: in an Internet blackout, I immerse myself in nature, and I am home. Self-care is essential for the global citizen.
One might well ask: why bother? Isn’t it far easier to keep the focus narrowed on one’s home culture and community, with deep engagement to contribute to its improvement? ‘Think globally, act locally’, and all that?
Indeed it is, and if you haven’t a professional need for intercultural competence, you may well choose that path. Most do. For me, in this era of increasingly high interaction across borders and the metaverse in which boundaries hardly exist, I choose to engage with that wider community. And for many of the challenges that we face today, a global effort toward solutions is required. I want to be a part of that.
If you do too – and I assume that someone reading a book such as this is already quite internationally focused – let’s see what more we can do together.
Shall we begin?