A guide to (mis)communication - FT.com

A guide to (mis)communication - FT.com: "And the miscommunications worsen in mixed teams, with, writes Meyer, “Americans who recap incessantly and nail everything down in writing, Japanese who read the air, the French who speak at the second degree [with secondary meanings], the British who love to use deadpan irony as a form of humour and the Chinese who learn as young children to beat around the bush”.
Is there any solution? Meyer suggests managers at multinational companies should use matrix planners that plot the position of different cultures on the “context” spectrum, to help them interpret each other. She also argues that everyone needs to keep international communication ultra “low context” – ie to spell everything out, as clearly as you can.
But personally, as a British person who has been trained in a mid-context culture to use humour as a social weapon (and mask), I prefer a less direct route. Instead of rewriting HR policies, why not just stick that “Anglo-Dutch guide” on to the walls of all company offices? Better still, replicate it with others cultural pairs? (Anyone want to write the Brazilian-Saudi translation guide? Japanese-Israeli?) Maybe that would cause offence. But the best way to avoid communication pitfalls is to keep remembering they exist – and then laugh together about the fact that nothing sounds quite as peculiar as when the English speak English."



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