Schuman S. - The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation (2005)(en)

3.Delivery

•Provide opportunities for members of different cultural groups to explore their differing perceptions of both the goals of the workshop and the processes to achieve them.

•Provide participants with learning opportunities to stimulate different learning styles, for example, activist, reflector, theorist, and pragmatist (Honey and Mumford, 1986, 1992).

•Encourage participants to get to know and actively listen to each other.

•Avoid negative or potentially offensive stereotypes or assumptions.

•Encourage participants to use their backgrounds and experiences as learning tools.

•Speak in plain English, explain acronyms, and avoid using colloquialisms and jokes that are culturally specific or difficult to explain.

•Actively discourage language or behavior that is racist, sexist, or homophobic.

•Actively watch and listen for any cross-cultural issues that may be influencing group dynamics, communication, and learning.

4.Evaluation

•Provide participants with opportunities to give you feedback early on in a workshop regarding your pace, volume, use of language, and clarity of explanations.

•Provide participants with a range of anonymous or informal feedback mechanisms.

•Provide participants with the opportunity for one or more group representatives to act as a messenger to give you informal verbal feedback.

Source: Adapted from a handout from the Teaching and Learning Committee (2003).

WARM-UPS AND ENERGIZERS

It is useful to have a range of nonverbal activities as warm-ups and energizers for cross-cultural groups so that participants who are not fully fluent in the language of the meeting are not immediately disadvantaged.

Forming Cross-Cultural Subgroups

It is useful to be able to form cross-cultural groups quickly and easily without causing embarrassment. Ask the participants to line up according to their places of birth. Start on the left side of the room, and tell the participants that the area on the

far right represents the farthest place from the workshop venue. Some chaos will ensue while people try to sort themselves out. Then ask participants to introduce themselves and give a little information about where they were born.

To form subgroups, start at the left end of the continuum (those born closest to the workshop venue) and ask individuals to number off from, say, one to five if you want five subgroups in a room of twenty-five people. Ask all the number ones to raise hands and spot each other, then number twos, and so on. Ask people to form into groups, and you will have a mix of ethnic backgrounds in each group.

Having formed cross-cultural groups, the facilitator needs to help these groups explore and value their differences and similarities and develop ground rules to enable them to work together.

Pass the Blob

A useful icebreaker is “Pass the Blob” in which the facilitator explains that she has a blob that needs to be passed around the group. (A “blob” is an imaginary shape held in one or both hands; it may change size and substance depending on the creativity of the person holding it.) Participants quickly catch on to how they can carefully, playfully, or carelessly pass on the blob (or even drop it and scrape it up together). This exercise causes laughter and can lead to later discussion on how we pass information and new ideas around an organization.

Remember that laughter may indicate embarrassment rather than enjoyment. If individuals in the group appear embarrassed, the facilitator can retrieve the situation by diverting the focus away from them and moving on.

Clapping Exercise

Another quick activity is a clapping exercise. A facilitator claps once and passes it on to another person who must clap at the same time as the facilitator. Once “caught,” she turns and claps to the next person in line. The next person receives the clap by clapping exactly at the same time as the sender. When everyone has the idea, a single clap can be passed across the group. Everyone must pay attention in order to be ready to clap together. Many variations can be developed along these lines.

Check out the culture you are going to work with. For example, this exercise was very popular in Lao PDR with women’s groups and nongovernmental organizations, but members of the Guambian Indian tribe, descendants of the Inca in southern Columbia and northern Ecuador, do not react well to nonverbal activities that

they perceive as “child’s play.“ They consider it to be demeaning (G. Brenson-Lazán, e-mail to the author, Dec. 14, 2003).

Learning Names

It is often quite hard to learn names with which you are unfamiliar, that use different sounds, and are written with characters different from your own language. It helps to have large labels on which participants write their preferred names or nicknames and how they are pronounced (rather than Anglicized names, unless they choose to use them). For more formal settings, large place cards may be drawn up with participants’ names in English facing the front and their names in their own language and characters facing them. If the spelling is incorrect, rewrite the name cards as necessary.

Name Meanings

It is useful if individuals can introduce their names and the names that they prefer to be called (and their pronunciation). Many people from South, East and Central Asia, South America, and Africa have names that have a meaning, so you can help them feel at ease by asking them to tell the group the meaning behind their names. The names of some Westerners have meanings, but for those who do not know their name meanings, you can add an alternative request: explain how their parents chose their names.

Singing Songs

In many Asian and African cultures, singing songs is a pleasant way to start a workshop. Not only is singing an integral part of many of these cultures, but the rise of karaoke in many cultures has increased the popularity of singing in public. (For an in-depth discussion on using music with groups, see Hogan, 2003b.)

CREATING VALUE WITH DIVERSE TEAMS: THE MAPPING, BRIDGING, AND INTEGRATING MODEL

This section focuses on a three-stage model and processes to enable multicultural groups to focus on diversity and maximize the potential of individual members of the group.

Research by Adler (1997) and Distefano and Maznevski (2000) concluded that diverse teams tend to perform either better or worse than homogeneous teams,

with more of them performing worse than better. Distefano and Maznevski divided multicultural teams into three categories:

•Destroyer teams. These teams were dysfunctional because the formal leaders made decisions without genuine discussion among members. As a result, they destroyed the potential value of these multicultural teams.

•Equalizer teams. These team members smoothed, compromised, and suppressed any differences in ideas and perspectives. Distefano and Maznevski’s research led them to believe that most culturally diverse teams that thought of themselves as doing well were equalizers.

•Creator teams. These teams did more than use platitudes like, “We value diversity.” They actively explored their differences and took advantage of their diversity like a jazz ensemble. Brenson-Lazán (e-mail to the author, Dec. 14, 2003) calls this the “humongous paradox of synergy,” that is, the greater the diversity, the greater the potential for synergy and the greater the difficulty in achieving it. The less diversity there is, the lower is the potential for synergy and the greater the ease of achieving it.

Distefano and Maznevski concluded that the key to being successful was the quality of the interaction processes rather than the team membership. As a result, they developed the mapping, bridging, and integrating (MBI) model as shown in Exhibit 16.2. In their research they observed that creator teams actively mapped and tried to understand their differences, bridged their communication and took differences into account, and integrated team-level ideas by carefully monitoring participation patterns, solving disagreements, and creating new perspectives.

The MBI model is a set of principles for helping teams to develop their own best ways to perform well. It may be applied to debriefing a meeting or for analyzing a videotape of a team meeting. A facilitator may take a group through each stage in turn; if there is confusion, it may be necessary to revert to a previous stage:

• Mapping to understand differences. The important aspect of mapping is identifying which differences will affect interactions and decision making, for example, cultural values, thinking styles, and ways of achieving goals. Most multicultural teams do not take the time to map cultural differences openly; they instead rely on broad generalizations (stereotypes) that they have heard (Distefano and Maznevski, 2000).

There are many different methods that use different senses that may be used to map cultural differences. Among them are learning basic words in the languages

Exhibit 16.2

Mapping, Bridging, and Integrating Model

for Creating Value in Diverse Teams

Source: Distefano and Maznevski (2000). Used by permission.

of group members (Reese, 1997), discussing the cultural iceberg (after Brislin, 1991), developing cultural suitcases, and playing the cross-cultural card game (Abdullah and Shepherd, 2000):

•Bridging to communicate across differences. This requires trust building, development of ground rules, and motivation and confidence to discuss differences openly. Team members need to learn decentering, a skill similar to empathy and role reversal, which requires individuals to suspend judgment and value differences using the information from the mapping stage as a “translation key” (Distefano and Maznevski, 2000).

•Integrating and leveling differences. Participants need to recenter and build new ground rules and processes based on what they have learned during the mapping and bridging stages in order to manage participation, resolve disagreements, and build on ideas.

People with different cultural backgrounds often have very different norms for participating and turn taking, so Distefano and Maznevski (2000) provide some suggestions:

•Rotating a process leader or observer, provided this is not a threat and is culturally appropriate. In very hierarchical societies, it may be almost impossible for a participant of low rank to take the role of process leader.

•Varying modes of meeting and sharing information—for example, solicit ideas by e-mail before a meeting, talk to staff in hallways to gather ideas, have pairedgroup discussions during meetings, and have frequent breaks in meetings.

•Map ideas on flip charts as lists, mind maps, or drawings.

If conflict occurs, go back to basics to understand more fully what cultural perceptions and values are underpinning problems. (For further exercises on crosscultural conflict resolution, see Blainey, Davis, and Goodwill, 1995, and BrensonLazán, 2003.)

PROCESSES AND STRATEGIES TO MAP DIFFERENCES

This section describes a variety of processes that facilitators may use at the various stages in the MBI model.

Learning Basic Words in the Other Languages of Group Members

This exercise is based on the work by Reese (1997) to encourage face-to-face active engagement between participants in multicultural groups by encouraging everyone to make the effort to learn basic greetings of their coparticipants—for example:

Hello.

How are you?

What is your name?

Can I help you?

Can you help me?

Thank you.

Please.

Excuse me.

Goodbye.

In addition, it is useful to learn the meanings and differences in usage or nonusage of a term (for example, in some cultures, “thank you” is used only for a major gift, not for a basic service in a shop) and other aspects of communication, such as tone of voice, body language, types of eye contact, and interpersonal space. It is useful for facilitators to develop a basic vocabulary of these key phrases in the languages of people they work with. Participants are usually very appreciative of these efforts.

The interactions that result give an advantage to the bilingual participants who become teachers. It does not matter whether participants develop perfect pronunciation; it is the attempt that counts. Indeed, it is the mistakes that generate laughter and are the hooks that encourage further dialogue. During the learning process shown in Exhibit 16.3, participants start to engage with one another: one person is teaching and another is being taught, and everyone is engaged in the dialogue of learning (Reese, 1997; Burson, 2002). Laughter and humor develop, which is productive provided that participants are laughing with and not at each other, and participants can learn, with guidance, to give one another positive as well as constructive feedback.

Exhibit 16.3

Two-Way Conversation During Paired Teaching

Discuss the Cultural Iceberg

The cultural iceberg model is a useful tool to stimulate discussions and map similarities and differences. The iceberg as a metaphor is useful since only a small percentage of an iceberg is seen above the surface. This is similar to cultures, in that we can observe some food, ceremonies, and dress codes, but there may be many attitudes and beliefs that underpin these customs that are not obvious at first (and that we may not learn for many years, if ever). As depicted in Exhibit 16.4, the level of the water line varies from culture to culture, and what aspects of culture appear above and below the waterline will vary between cultures and individuals.

Exhibit 16.4

The Cultural Iceberg

behavior

Source: Based on Brislin (2000). Used by permission.

Develop Cultural Suitcases

Another cultural mapping exercise is to ask participants to join groups of similar cultural background and discuss what participants from other countries should pack in their “cultural suitcases” to enable them to live and work in their respective cultures. The suitcase can be packed with basic do’s and don’ts, as well as songs, sayings, and proverbs. Issues and contradictions that arise may then be used as starting points for developing bridges and integrating the views of participants from different cultures who are present.

Learn About Your Own and Other Cultural Dimensions

Scholars in the area of intercultural communication have advanced many different classifications or dimensions in order to help us make sense of other cultures and our own (Hall, 1990; Hofstede, 1980, 1991; Trompenaars, 1993; Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 2000; Abdullah, 2001). Different cultural dimensions or patterns may affect the values, attitudes, learning, and thinking styles of participants and facilitators. We should be careful not to stereotype one another, as within each culture there are subcultures and individual variations that vary widely. The dimensions, however, do help us to be more aware of the assumptions that underlie both our own and conditioning and that of others, and provide us some vocabulary with which to analyze diversity.

One exercise is to invite participants to show where they fit on the continuum shown in Exhibit 16.5. Quickly you will find that there is great diversity and also that people often say, “It depends on the circumstances,” that is, styles of behavior are “situational.”

Exhibit 16.5

Eight Cultural Dimensions and Explanations