Talaria Intercultural Interaction Skills Workshop

Thank you for visiting my humble website*. My name is Patrick Burns. Talaria Intercultural is an entity I use to name and identify products and readings related to facilitated Intercultural Competence Development (ICD) and the industry which supports it. I have developed these resources over a combined 20 years as a practitioner in the ICD field and a manager in multicultural organizations. This somewhat unconventional and provocative website is a place to give my take on the current state of facilitated ICD, and describe an original approach to facilitated Intercultural Competence Development, the Talaria Intercultural Interaction Skills (TIIS)Workshop. When participants develop  TIIS skills, they are better able to manage cultural differences, the core intercultural task. I created the workshop four years ago and have been continually improving it since then.

THE TALARIA INTERCULTURAL APPROACH

TALARIA:  tuhlair-ee-uh   In Greek mythology, the winged sandals worn by Hermes (known as Mercury by the Romans), enabling him to assist others in crossing borders.

TALARIA’S SERVICES

I provide job performance-based training (PBT) workshops and consulting assistance to global and multicultural organizations to improve individual and group workplace performance in support of one particular organizational need; the need to adapt cultural behavior according to particular intercultural situations and organizational goals. I use PBT practices in Talaria workshops and programs. PBT is one component of Human Performance Improvement (HPI) methodology — an integrated systems approach to improving human and organizational performance.. For more on HPI, also known as Performance Improvement (PI), see http://www.ispi.org

Global and Multicultural Organizational Needs

Global and multicultural organizations share most of the same needs as domestic and monocultural organizations. Typical organizational needs can include increasing customer satisfaction, reducing costs, acquiring more talented employees, increasing sales revenue, and successfully making organizational transitions such as mergers and acquisitions, matrix organization structure and geographic mobility and expansion.

The added complexity for global and multicultural organizations is that the human interaction processes necessary for addressing the above organizational needs are impacted by cultural differences among colleagues, customers, partners and suppliers. Leadership practices, knowledge transfer, decision-making, conflict management, teamwork, performance management, meeting styles and most other human work processes are influenced by members’ differing cultural backgrounds and behaviors. Navigating through cultural differences and adaptation dynamics is complicated. In order to navigate successfully, there is a need for organizational members to effectively perform the task of Managing Cultural Differences. If individuals and groups can effectively manage cultural differences, it increases effectiveness in addressing global and multicultural organizational needs, such as the ones listed in the paragraph above.

Multicultural organization members need the same skill sets as employees in monocultural organizations – and then some, including skills for managing cultural differences!

Managing cultural differences toward cultural adaptation is a core ability for anyone whose organizational work depends upon reaching results together with intercultural counterparts. Whether a senior global leader, a member of a multicultural team, an expat on assignment, a consultant on an international development project, or an individual contributor managing one’s own cultural adaptation; the ability to manage cultural differences is critical to maximizing organizational effectiveness in multicultural contexts.

Cultural Differences Defined

Surface vs. Deep Culture Context

 The Talaria approach deals primarily with deep culture differences. Talaria workshops make the invisible visible. Surface culture is visible to everyone; differences in food, clothing, prayer rituals, and language are surface culture differences. While they may not be completely understood by other cultures, they can at least be seen. They present less of a challenge than deep culture differences.

Cultural values drive cultural behavior. Deep culture values such as the use of power (more hierarchical or more egalitarian), change (more risk avoiding or more risk taking), communication (more direct or more indirect), and task accomplishment (more task oriented or more relationship oriented) are generally invisible to most people. Any culture’s values teach the group what behaviors are right/wrong and good/bad. For simplicity’s sake, we can identify most of the world’s cultures to generally fall within one of two broad categories – “individualist” cultures or “collectivist” cultures. Generally speaking, individualist cultures place a relatively high value on independence, egalitarianism, direct communication, risk taking, and task orientation, while collectivist cultures generally value interdependence, hierarchy, indirect communication, risk avoiding, and relationship orientation. While these respective value orientations and their resultant behaviors work out in their respective cultures, it is at the point of intercultural interaction where we see it can’t be both ways, and so it becomes a challenge that requires new consciousness and skill development.

The values and their corresponding behaviors are acted out in virtually every human interaction process. Among many other organizational processes, decision-making, performance management, meeting participation and facilitation, conflict management, problem solving, teamwork, project management and the training/learning process are all impacted by cultural differences.

Open and proactive intercultural difference communication is rarely heard in today’s world – even in global and multicultural organizations.  Typically, most people in every culture generally tend more toward downplaying cultural differences rather than openly and proactively recognizing them toward reconciliation in order to better achieve goals and establish relationships. When cultural differences are dealt with at all, it is often in the context of talking about other culture(s) rather than with them. The Talaria approach remedies this ineffective situation by assisting workshop participants in identifying the root causes underlying this problem and by presenting a set of interaction skills which narrow this gap.

Please understand that my finger is not pointing to anyone here. There is no lack of good intentions. As my colleague, Reinart, is fond of saying, “The road to diversity and inclusion confusion is paved with good intentions.”

The problem is that most people in the world don’t understand what intercultural interaction skills are and that they can indeed be developed. Many people think of intercultural effectiveness as being a matter of open-mindedness, cultural sensitivity, accepting all ideas, and being respectful. You will notice that these all reflect a state of being and echo the exhortations of many diversity and inclusion efforts. However, when people are asked to give a behavioral example of these well intended states of being, most are at a loss. ­­­­

Talaria works on the interaction skills aspect of managing cultural differences. Application of the Talaria skills enables participants to turn the above states of being into action – specific job-based behavior change. The foundation of the TIIS Workshop is a universal workplace intercultural interaction skills model. The skills enable intercultural counterparts to proactively and openly work together toward spontaneously managing cultural differences – in the moment when they come up.

TIIS-based workshops include the following: Multicultural Team Skills, Global Leadership Skills, Cultural Inclusion Skills, Skills for Working with Specific Cultures, Skills for Global Assignees, Skills for Black and White Americans Working Together, and Intercultural Performance Management Workshops (for managers and their intercultural counterpart employees). Virtual TIIS-based individual coaching is  available.

Please don’t read any more of this website!  Wait…what?

That’s right. Like almost anything else, particularly with something innovative and unusual like the TIIS Workshop,  the best way to understand the Talaria approach is to experience it first — and then discuss and read about it. Showing and then telling is much more effective than telling only (or showing only for that matter). So, if you want to stop now and contact me to discuss doing a no cost 90-120 minute virtual experiential demonstration, please do so.

You can connect with me on the Contact page or by emailing me at: patrick_burns@talariaintercultural.com.

Experiencing the workshop snapshot is, as they say, no risk. No risk….that’s my one marketing ploy, except for my back-door marketing through the Marian/Suzanne dialogue you will see farther down this page! Well, the risk is 90 to 120 minutes of time, but that’s it. What can I show you in the snapshot experience? I use the website documents as a reference, sometimes for learning during the experience, and then also for the debrief afterward. You will understand the main content and process elements of the workshop. You will see how the TIIS skill set is the foundational ability for any global/multicultural interaction context; including Leadership, Teams, Working with Specific Cultures, Diversity and Inclusion, and individual coaching. You will experience a systematic structured approach to experiential and performance-based training resulting in significant behavior change in a relatively short amount of time. You will be able to concretely answer the questions below:

  • What do effective interaction skills look like during interactions between intercultural counterparts in the workplace? What kinds of concrete and specific things do people say and do leading to the effective management of cultural differences? Are effective interaction skills universal?
  • What are the organizational results of effective interactions? What are the immediate results of effective interactions for intercultural counterparts?
  • If all members of a multicultural work group had a high level of intercultural interaction skill, how would their interactions differ from a group that didn’t?
  • What are the organizational risks for multicultural organizations with relatively limited interaction skills?  How can these risks be managed?
  • Do I need to change my cultural behavior when interacting with intercultural counterparts? If so, how? Should my counterparts adapt their behavior?  How do I make decisions about adaptation?
  • Can intercultural interaction skills be developed, or do some people just have them and some people don’t?

As you can see, the answers to these questions form a vision of what intercultural competence looks like. That vision forms a backdrop to the TIIS Workshop.

However, it you would prefer to read first…..please continue.

 Acronyms

  • TIIS – Talaria Intercultural Interaction Skills, as in TIIS workshop or TIIS model
  • TFM – Talaria Facilitation Method
  • ICD – Intercultural Competence Development, as in facilitated ICD, also known as Intercultural Training
  • L & P – Learning and Performance process (replaces the term “Training”), consists of necessary workplace performance behaviors, learning content, and corresponding instructional methods.

 Is this website for you?

If you are a consumer of facilitated Intercultural Competence Development products and services, or simply an individual who wants to learn more about the nature of intercultural competence development, this website is written with you in mind. I am also possibly interested in collaborating with other facilitated ICD providers.

One FAQ: This website is dense with substance and solutions to current gaps in facilitated ICD work.  Also, the format is quite different than most other websites and writings related to intercultural competence. What’s it all about?

The site provides a fresh way to present and describe facilitated ICD. Much of this approach is my use of fiction. There are numerous characters throughout the site. There are many non-fictional characters. Some are famous people living today and some are dead famous people.   The fictional characters who appear were born in my imagination. They are the ones through whom I express my voice. At times, I also express my perspective and voice through the more traditional narrative style found in organizational literature.

Why I Use Fiction

While it is not the case with all writers, I find much of the traditional narrative form of writing to be relatively voiceless and bland, and sometimes too academic for the average consumer of ICD products.  My fiction writing is rudimentary – that’s an understatement! However, any fiction creates possibilities for greater understanding than the usual objective narrative style found in most organizational literature.

Most people in multicultural organizations today can’t see the cultural differences surrounding them. Therefore, they often don’t benefit much from reading the available great work of intercultural researchers, academics and practitioners. My use of fiction is an attempt to reach audiences of all intercultural competence levels. Imagination needs to be cultivated. Fiction can open minds and activate imagination by exposing readers to different points of view expressed by the characters. It is also conducive to expressing emotion, humor, empathy, and creating clear voices. It can be more interesting and stimulating to read dialogues than to be “written at” in the typical, narrative form of writing.

Cultural differences are invisible to most people. I will leave it up to the late novelist, E.L. Doctorow, to comment on this and a few other things having to do with the fiction form. The following excerpt is from his speech entitled “The American Myth of Success.” You can find it on YouTube.

….I can bear anything but indifference. I feel that the writing of fiction is the most important, most all-encompassing of disciplines. I think of fiction as the ultimate discourse because it includes all others; includes all the vocabularies of the special disciplines of the sciences. It includes theological diction and the diction of ordinary life. There is nothing it doesn’t accept. It will exclude nothing. It even accepts data from dreams, illusions, visions, hallucination. So, fiction in my mind is something that connects the invisible to the visible and distributes the suffering of one to the many so that it can be borne by all.  So that’s how important I think fiction is and that means that the writer has responsibility to bear witness. The writer bears witness. His final loyalty is to truth; not to institutional truths, not to institutional truths or lies of governments. Not even to institutions like family when they falter and are destructive. So you see that’s the kind of trouble writers get into and that trouble is the real measure of our success. It’s a matter of staying alert and seeing what’s invisible….

Hopefully, the content on this site can help to see even a little bit more of the cultural world that is invisible to most people; as Edward Hall, the great cultural anthropologist put it, “The Hidden Dimension.”

Foundational Gaps in Many Facilitated ICD Efforts Today

Managing cultural differences toward adaptation is a core competency for anyone whose organizational work depends upon reaching results together with intercultural counterparts. Whether a senior global leader, a member of a multicultural team, an expat on assignment, or an individual contributor managing one’s own cultural adaptation; the ability to manage cultural differences is critical to maximizing organizational effectiveness in multicultural contexts.

The most critical Ends gap is that we don’t have a universal vision and corresponding strategic behavioral model of effective interaction which enables spontaneous management of cultural differences. This skill model needs to be accessible enough to learn in a workshop context. This gap is a yawning chasm. However, even if specific workplace interaction skills were effectively identified, many currently used Means – the L & P process – wouldn’t result in the transfer of learning needed to effectively apply the skills in the workplace anyway.

Put simply, first we need an End that describes universally effective interaction skills in the workplace. Then the L& P process needs to align with the workplace performance objectives and corresponding workshop content. In addition, effective execution of the L & P process type depends upon any individual facilitator’s skill level.

The TIIS Workshop, with its intercultural interaction skills model and its experiential problem solving and performance-based L & P process, narrows the current gaps. The TIIS Workshop’s L & P process is multi-layered and wrapped up inside the Talaria Facilitation Method (TFM)℠.

.Marian Comments on Apollo Productions’ Experience with Talaria Performance Consulting

The following is an excerpt from the Talaria world. It is contained in the Glimpse of the Future article on the website. The year is 2021. One of the Talaria characters, Marian, is speaking with Suzanne, editor of an Intercultural Training trade publication.  Marian is the Global Learning and Development Director of her organization, Apollo Productions. The interview is about Apollo’s 5-year relationship with Talaria Intercultural. They are discussing the gaps identified in the box above. This will give you a comparison of the narrative form vs. the fiction form. See if their rendition of the year 2015 looks anything like your organization’s current state.

Marian: The very first thing Talaria helped us to see was how relatively ineffective many of our efforts were five years ago. Before our work with Talaria, we were spending a fair amount of resources on training in the form of global leadership, mobility, teams, working with specific countries, and global diversity and inclusion. Looking back, we had low expectations of program outcomes. Also, we didn’t really have a lot to compare it with. Add to all of this that none of us internally had a high level of intercultural competence. This prevented us from even knowing how to judge success.  After observing programs, I remember speaking to our providers’ trainers with banalities like, “I thought that went very well – they were very interactive!”or “I think they must have gained a lot of awareness today,” or “These materials are great – your slides look very professional.” Occasionally, we would talk of the possible impact on our employee- participants’ workplace performance. That usually ended in non-behavioral or surface-level ruminations like, “I think they will be able to be more indirect now with their Asian colleagues.” Because we ourselves couldn’t really identify what workplace performance was, other than some protocol and etiquette behaviors and some light style-switching behaviors, our thought process didn’t really reach out any deeper into what interaction should look like in the workplace.

That should actually be the first service a provider supplies their client – a vision of what effective intercultural workplace performance is, and then a concrete workplace skill model to operationalize that vision. So, in terms of the ends, Talaria helped us to see that in the programs in those days, we usually didn’t have clear, concrete workplace performance models. We were boarding a train (the training program) with no clearly identified destination.

In terms of the means, we began to see that even if we would have had clear workplace behavioral ends in mind, we generally weren’t employing the means – the effective Learning and Performance process – training and development in those days – to achieve workplace performance improvement.  So, we could see that many of our expended resources were wasted on efforts not resulting in workplace performance change and building our own capacity. Granted, I am simplifying a bit. Different providers were doing a better job than others and some companies were doing better at managing their intercultural competence development approach. However, I think the picture I am painting here would be recognized by most providers and consumers of intercultural competence development in those days.

Suzanne: Can you speak a bit more about the means?

Marian: Talaria’s work with us addressed both the ends, the what, and the means, the how of intercultural competence development interventions.  Up until that point, we didn’t really see the “how” as something to consider.  There was just this kind of assumption that providers conveyed the “whats” – the content – by means of a Power Point Parade and exercises and  small group discussions with the large group reporting out. We didn’t see actual workplace performance behaviors being practiced during the training programs. Of course that was because the providers themselves weren’t providing workplace performance models as the basis for the training. We had never heard of “job aids” that people would take back to the workplace and use as tools to continue the skill practice that they had started in the training program.

There was, at some point, a proliferation of cultural self-assessment instruments. These were sometimes online. I think these were good for the early stages of intercultural competence in which we were working. They provided a way into the intercultural language and process that needed to be developed. However, we found that often the provider’s facilitators didn’t use that tool within a performance-based, experiential problem posing process which results in clearly identifiable workplace performance, beyond light style-switching. Again, some providers were better than others at this.  Also, it was a little bit difficult to transfer our learning into workplace performance when we needed to be agile in managing cultural differences. A Chinese supplier in Australia couldn’t do an impromptu online assessment with their Australian customer in the moment when a cultural difference issue emerged!

The primary purposes of assessments were to clarify cultural values, uncover work style preferences, and learn to use the cultural value language with intercultural counterparts. We found, and continue to find, that the Talaria Facilitation Method (TFM)accomplishes these purposes of online self-assessments more in-depth, directly, efficiently, and with less time, not to mention how much more cost effective TFM is!

We now fully understand that an effective Learning and Performance workshop moves people in their skill development so that they can continue to work toward fluency back in the workplace. With Talaria, the workshop materials are the same materials that we use as job aids to help us perform the new skills back in the workplace. So, we came to learn that all the “whats” were of little use without effective “hows” that transfer learning to workplace performance. Of course the Talaria Facilitation Method was the primary “how” which helped us to understand this, and to act on that understanding.

Suzanne: It almost seems as if you were all more interested in what happened in the training program than what happened in the workplace.

 Marian: Basically, in those days the majority of the focus was on the training program itself rather than workplace performance. There was little, if any, attention paid to workplace performance.  The one exception to this was light style-switching. We would learn how to do light style-switching to the other culture’s behaviors. This would sometimes be procedures like protocol and etiquette, like how to present your business card in Malaysia or use chopsticks in Japan. Sometimes it would be style-switching to another culture’s organizational interaction processes. For example, we would learn about the predominant style of problem solving in Timbuctoo (smiling) and the values underlying it. But because we didn’t practice it in the training program, see it modeled, or see it done in different contexts, we would often be at a loss as to how to start style-switching once we were in the real situation. Now that we use a performance-based learning & performance process along with its systematic experiential problem solving learning methodology, we have, as you can see, accelerated our intercultural competence development.

The TIIS Workshop, with its intercultural interaction skills model and its experiential problem solving and performance-based L & P process, narrows the current gaps. The TIIS Workshop’s  L & P process is multi-layered and wrapped up inside the Talaria Facilitation Method (TFM).

Hey, who has time to read all of this website’s content?!

Many, if not most of you, will look at the content and think that you don’t have time to read it. I can understand that, for sure.  I certainly had that in mind when I wrote the website.

While the individual content pieces can be read as stand-alones, you will get more out of it if you read it in its entirety, though not in one sitting!  The site has some of the characteristics of a book.  All of the documents are interrelated. Some of the fictional characters from the Talaria world make appearances in different readings. Different readings provide additional perspective and takes on the primary Talaria themes; a vision and universal intercultural interaction skills model to operationalize the vision, dialogues revealing cultural models of effective interaction behavior, and a multi-layered and universal Learning and Performance process which is facilitated using the Talaria Facilitation Method (TFM).

Effectiveness Gap Commonalities Between Intercultural Training and the Broader Training Industry

Many facilitated ICD efforts today are not cost effective. Ineffective programs lack clearly defined workplace performance skills for managing cultural differences. In addition, performance-based instructional methods are often not used. This problem exists in the wider organizational training industry as well. However, much of the wider industry has been addressing this for a few decades now. We in the facilitated ICD industry are a bit behind.

Ruth Colvin Clark, a past president of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI.org) comments on the cost of training waste in her book, Developing Technical Training, 3rd edition, pp. 6-10:

It is a common and costly myth that if there are ten to fifty people in a room with an “instructor” at the front showing slides and talking, learning is taking place. In other words, a training “event” is assumed to result in learning. It is further assumed that learning translates into improved job performance…….often training events fail to realize their potential! Participants are unable to do anything new or different after training when they return to the job.

Clark defines Technical Training as “a structured learning environment engineered to improve workplace performance in ways that are aligned with bottom-line business goals…technical training includes both hard and soft skills.” The term “Technical Training” can conjure up the image of IT-related training for some people. Therefore, within the Talaria website, I refer to this structured approach for improving workplace performance as “performance-based training.”

Further, she comments on many of the people who have become facilitators of training:

As job performance becomes increasingly knowledge-based, there is a growing and appropriate trend toward using technical experts as trainers. But this brings us to another costly training myth: the misconception that all it takes for effective training is technical expertise, combined with the years most of us spent in formal educational programs. This assumption puts an unfair burden on the experts, who are not given adequate support in the preparation and delivery of their training. It is also unfair to the employees who are supposedly “trained” and later feel demoralized because they can’t apply the skills needed on their jobs. Finally, poor training cheats the organization by failing to generate a return on investment.

While it is certainly not always the case, many of the people who are conducting ICD training have been chosen to do so mostly as a result of their experience living and working in other cultures (their technical expertise) and/or their experience working in a multicultural organization. For sure, these are helpful and necessary qualifications. However, just as in the wider Training industry, many intercultural trainers lack skill in designing and facilitating performance-based training. This gap reduces the odds that transfer of learning will result in workplace performance improvement.

Effective facilitators of intercultural training are a highly specialized group of professionals in a complex industry. We need to possess the same performance-based training skills as facilitators in the wider Training industry. In addition, we also need a high level of intercultural competence. The problem in the current state is that there is a wide variety of skill levels and many consumers of facilitated ICD are generally unable to distinguish between those skill levels.

Simple Site Directions

Intervention Descriptions Page

The content of this site supports statements I’ve made in the paragraphs above. The core content is contained on the Intervention Descriptions Page, where you will find four documents:

  1. Introduction to Talaria Interventions
  2. TIIS Workshop Description
  3. TFM Description
  4. A Glimpse Into the Future

Readings Page

Documents on the Readings Page support understanding of the TIIS Workshop and TFM.

Currently, this website is not a blog. Reinart, my Talaria colleague, has commandeered the post area for his intercultural advice column. Even though the site is not set up to make public comments, I am very interested in your reactions and feedback. Please contact me via the Contact page or at   Patrick_Burns@talariaintercultural.com

An Apology – Yes, Already!

To those of you who do not speak American English as your first language, you may not understand some of the language. I apologize for that. Bringing ICD to life is one of my goals here, so I use the language that best helps me do that. As I continue writing on this website, I plan to make footnote explanations of language which may not be understood by all readers. In the meantime, please contact me anytime for explanations.

The Echo of Voices

There are book and song references on the website, and numerous voices echo throughout. If you choose to explore further, you are likely to run into the following people:

Paul Theroux
Tristan and Hesi
James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards
Elvis
Edward Hall
Jackson Browne
Leonard Cohen
Ruth Colvin Clark
Marian
The Green Team in the Philippines
Marshall McLuhan
ISPI.org
Joerg Schmitz
Captain Kirk
Sogyal Rinpoche
Tolstoy
Cass Pierre
Pierre Casse
Scottie
IDI, LLC
Quentin Tarantino
Paul
Rosalyn


Marlon Brando
Ivan Illich
Ivan Iliych
Hoopes & Pusch
Paolo Freire
Plato
T.S. Eliot
Hermes
Vulcan
Dr. Doug (Stuart)
Brethower and Smalley
John Dewey
Charlene
Hofstede
E.L. Doctorow
Janet
Mitch Hammer
Krishnamurti
Hu Shi
Mark Twain
Milton Bennett
Sun Tzu
Hephaestus
Flora T. Taic
Reinart
Kurt Vonnegut
William Jennings Bryan
Andre Laurent
DJ Brazier
Mao
Cher
The Dalai Lama
Mr. Spock
Trege
Hal Edwards
Harrison & Hopkins
Carl Jung
Robert Johnson (the Jungian therapist and writer - not the legendary Bluesman)
Father Guido Sarducci
Clifford Geertz
Thomas Kochman
Rumi
Corporate Relo Refugees
Yuji
Min Chen
Prince
Suzanne

Thanks very much for reading.

Patrick Burns, Ed.D.