Agusto, Brazilian male, mid-30s, business, is the local leader of a multicultural team of Ravi, Indian male, mid-50s engineer, and Hajan, Korean female, mid-30s, product manager, of a Korean paper company with an office in the Amazon. They forest the trees for specialty paper. Agusto has been asked to drive costs down in response to a global slow down. On a call they discuss options as to how to achieve this goal. Agusto offers that he could terminate some employees, but the consequence is that it will reduce morale of the team. Hajan agrees with this potential action. Ravi interjects and tries to be thoughtful about nature by having ideas about efficient deforesting and replacing trees with saplings to ensure the longevity of the forest. Hajan laments that it will cost money to plant saplings. Then Agusto does get excited and mentions there will be pride in the team, and that the team may take a pay cut in order to stay on the job as they will see themselves as saving the forest, rather than harming the forest. That would allow future generations to have work in the forest, and maintain local people's lifestyles. >> Thank you for paying attention during this situation. What did you catch going on, in this story? If you answered that all four were correct, you're right. In this case we had Agusto, who had a very collectivist background as opposed to an individualistic background. In a collectivist cultural norm, one worry is about the group. And Augusto was very centrally concerned about how the generations of workers that were working in the forest would be treated. Hajan was very interested in results, and her focus and conflict with Agusto had to do with her focus on cost savings and her belief in a hierarchical system. She certainly saw herself as the boss and was very willing to insert herself, ignoring Agusto's cultural norm towards collectivism. And she focused on the firing of the staff, and not planting saplings in the forest, purely based on cost. Now Ravi, who's from a culture that normally is not used to staff inserting themselves, he was quite aggressive in this example. So it's quite unusual, you will not see that often. But in this case, he shared that he cared about nature so much he had to bring up the idea about replanting the trees. So in this case, he put himself at risk of being in conflict with Hajan, because she wanted to save money. Finally, Agusto was very concerned about the workers, and in his concern, there was not only a question of the place that they lived and the nature that they were responsible for foresting, he was also responsible for the people who worked there and felt a deep connection to them that Hajan could never understand. So what often happens in conflict is that people come from their own perspective. In this course, we're trying identify how we can have better communication and fruitful dialog. It really begins with understanding ourselves. So how did Agusto, Hajan, and Ravi understand themselves enough before they entered this conversation? What their own beliefs were? What their own tendencies, what their own cultural norms where? But a second step would be, and a better step, is then to get into the minds of those you're interacting with. So how could have Agusto understood Hajan's focus on hierarchy and following her own orders in her organization as he brought up his ideas? How could Ravi have posed his communication? Possibly sharing his idea in a more soft way, or doing it privately with Hajan. What were ways to produce a better outcome with less conflict? What often happens when we approach a situation is as individuals we lead with fear. We're worried about how we're perceived, and those perceptions are important as it comes to coming to cultural agreement, and a business agreement ultimately. When we lead with fear, the real antidote to fear is understanding. So we should work on understanding ourselves and working on understanding those we're interacting with, the participants in our conversation. What we're doing when we get educated is we're avoiding uncertainty. And in this conversation we not only had the context of the business agreement that we were trying to reach, we also had the context of the people and their relationship. The thing is, these three folks all worked in the same organization but worked in different places and had different bosses. So there's also the relational context that is up and above the substance of the situation. And then finally, we have cultural norms in play. How our cultural norms speak to our tendencies. So I am at risk of generalizing, which is something we cover in the course, but a generalization could be that Agusto has a very collectivist attitude, being from South America. Hajan has a very large sensitivity to hierarchy, being from a Korean culture. And Ravi has a particular distinct love of nature, which could come from a respectful culture in India. Those generalizations, when taken to a point of over-generalization and negativity, turn into prejudice. And prejudice blocks us from growth by blocking us from working together. When we focus on prejudice, and when we have prejudice, we're not able to get the best ideas from each other because we're not able to work together. We come into a situation with a very blocked view of how the other person's gonna react, or how the other person is. And when we do that, we're starting with a blocked mind. So we're not open to all opportunities for success. And when we're working in an intra-cultural environment that is not so bad, because in an intra-cultural environment we're all very similar. In an intercultural environment, we not only have to deal with all the issues that intra-cultural relationships deal with, we also have to deal with differences in cultural norms. So it's further complicated and therefore we have to understand ourselves better, we have to understand the other party better, and the context of their culture and their background. A topic that arises when we talk about prejudice is the concept of in versus out-groups. Simply stated, an in-group is a group that we feel connected to and we feel very similar to and safe with, back to the concept of fear and safety. An out-group, from our perspective, is a group that is not like us and that we then could fear. When we have in-group and out-groups, in our own mind and in others' minds, we already begin acting in reaction to who these other people are or who we think they are. And therefore limit the possibility of options we consider when we're trying to solve a business problem. So we should try to do is find ways that we're similar with others, therefore making them safer to us and making them in our in-group. Now the definition of that in-group could grow, but it's still the concept of trying to make them in to our group, therefore making them safe to us, therefore leaving us far more opportunities for success. So thank you for reviewing this situation, let's move on to the next lesson. [SOUND]
