Different Shades of Red

The first chapter of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color contains the following passage:

“If one says ‘Red’ (the name of a color) and there are 5o people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.

“Even when a certain color is specified which all listeners have seen innumerable times—such as the red of the Coca-Cola signs which is the same red all over the country—they will still think of many different reds.

“Even if all the listeners have hundreds of reds in front of them from which to choose the Coca-Cola red, they will again select quite different colors. And no one can be sure that he has found the precise red shade.

“And even if that round red Coca-Cola sign with the white name in the middle is actually shown so that everyone focuses on the same red, each will receive the same projection on his retina, but no one can be sure whether each has the same perception.”

I thought that was a good analogy for how we interact with others within and across organizations. Basically, even if we think we’re looking at or talking about the same thing, we may have different perceptions based on the different lenses because of our different personalities, experiences, and upbringing.

Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner is about how this plays out across country cultures. Their main point, as one of my business school professors put it, is: “Different countries are different.” (That then became a running joke in my class.) 

That part is obvious. What’s not obvious in practice is knowing whether our “objective” beliefs about the “right” way to do things are, in fact, objective or right.  

Part of the challenge, as Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner articulate, is that the business landscape is dominated by American and Western European companies, the business literature is dominated by English-speaking professors and gurus, and the top consulting firms—though global today—were born and developed their versions of “best practice” in the U.S. and Western European contexts. 

So even business concepts that have robust research grounding may cause issues if we overinterpret their relevance across context. The authors write: “Rather than there being ‘one best way of organizing,’ there are several ways, some much more culturally appropriate and effective than others, but all of them giving international managers additional strings to their bow if they are willing and able to clarify the reactions of foreign cultures.” 

The other problem is that it’s hard to see our own cultural beliefs. Much like a fish doesn't see water, we often fail to see core assumptions about, say, the best way to frame an argument or the proper relationships between people in hierarchies.  

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner write: “The best way to test if something is a basic assumption is to note if the question provokes confusion or irritation. [...] When you question basic assumptions, you are asking questions that have never been asked before. It might lead to deeper insights, but it also might provoke annoyance. Try in the US or the Netherlands to raise the question of why people are equal and you will see what we mean.”

In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer explains that even if we have the language to describe our culture, we still hold our own experience as the norm. She writes: “The point here is that, when examining how people from different cultures relate to one another, what matters is not the absolute position of either culture on the scale but rather the relative position of the two cultures. It is this relative positioning that determines how people view one another.”

A simple way to think about this: The person who shows up two minutes late to a meeting often believes they are on time, and they believe that the person who shows up two minutes after them is incredibly rude.

So what can we do?

Because these cross-cultural differences are often subconscious, the solution set is not obvious or easy. 

Some ideas:

Make an effort to try to understand our own cultural assumptions.  

Meyer writes: “The way we are conditioned to see the world in our own culture seems so completely obvious and commonplace that it is difficult to imagine that another culture might do things differently. It is only when you start to identify what is typical in your culture, but different from others, that you can begin to open a dialogue of sharing, learning, and ultimately understanding.” 

Both The Culture Map and Riding the Waves of Culture have frameworks that can help put language to our cultures. 

Take a listen-first approach. 

Meyer writes: “When interacting with someone from another culture, try to watch more, listen more, and speak less. Listen before you speak and learn before you act.”

And while learning about the average experience in different cultures can be helpful, we shouldn’t assume that specific individuals we’re working with are necessarily representative of that average. Meyer writes: “If your business success relies on your ability to work successfully with people from around the world, you need to have an appreciation for cultural differences as well as respect for individual differences. Both are essential.”

Craft routines that are unique to this group. 

Teams have conflict when they’re operating with unseen or unstated assumptions, and the basic advice from both The Culture Map and Riding the Waves of Culture is to create an operating agreement for this team—that is, to make clear how the team will interact, so that it doesn’t have to rely on assumptions. That’s probably good advice for teams even from the same culture!