O is for Observe
“If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.” Robert Baden-Powell

One very useful tool for increasing our cross-cultural awareness is practising observational skills with intention. We do this by looking at a given cross-cultural interaction, describing the data we observe and then separately describing our feelings attached to what occurs. This helps promotes an open and receptive mindset to engage with people from diverse backgrounds.

I’m also fascinated by how observational skills differ between people. I remember doing the Myer-Briggs personality test and learning about how some people lean towards describing the details of a scenario (“Sensing”) and others the broader concepts (“Intuitive”).

Interestingly, there are also cultural factors influencing our observational skills. For example, in a study by Nisbett and Masuda, they asked participants from the USA and Japan to describe the picture below. The USA participants were likely to describe the fish in the foreground first. The Japanese participants were more likely to describe the background surrounds first.

All of these different viewpoints is one of the reasons I love diversity – they can be harnessed for creativity and innovation! Of course, without cross-cultural awareness they can also cause some confusion in communication too.

A-Z of Cross-Cultural Awareness
This blog post is part of a series of short posts on cross-cultural awareness. Keep an eye out for the rest of the series.