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Stephanie West Allen recently posted an informative article at Brains on Purpose on neuroscience research about the ways in which brains of people in different cultures function in distinctive ways. References to her own earlier posts, especially What’s Universal in Mediation, as well as the work of Geert Hofstede on cultural difference are well worth exploring.

Her post has set me thinking about a general problem I’ve often run into. Stephanie is well aware of this issue, and I want to say immediately that I’m not talking about her post. She is one of the pioneers in educating lawyers and mediators about cross-cultural issues and knows better than most of us how complicated the issues are.

It’s a given that cultural differences must be understood and respected to achieve effective communication. Those differences concern basic values and beliefs that shape worldviews and guide choices for action in all walks of life. When values at this level differ in fundamental ways, misunderstanding of motives and interests is common, and clashes between groups become more likely and resolution more difficult.

But it is possible to exaggerate the effect of those differences on the process of reaching agreement itself. When culturally distinct groups see themselves in conflict, that perception often has a history of adversarial relationships behind it, tensions about interests that are considered incompatible by both sides, or even overt political domination of one group by another. Any conflict interweaves a complex set of influences.

When it comes to conflict resolution, I think of cultural differences as the most significant barrier to communication and hence to initiating any effective effort of the groups to come together for the purpose of resolving problems. Isolating the influence of culture on conflict as negotiation as a whole may be necessary to help one group learn about the unfamiliar values and ways of thinking of another. That process of study, however, can create an impression that cultural characteristics are more fixed and resistant to change that they actually are.

For educational purposes, separate dimensions and categories are useful to explain the nature of cultural differences – dimensions like a sense of time, the degree of individuality, expectations about authority, forms of social interaction, and the like. Unfortunately, this sort of study has led to overemphasis on composite and artificial concepts such as the Arab mind, the Native American worldview or any number of simplifications that sweep together numerous localized cultures and traditions into a single, “typical” cultural character.

In reality, no culture has survived over centuries without extensive change born of the necessity to adapt to new circumstances – such as new political realities, natural environmental changes, migration, influences of other cultures or the availability of new technologies.

A willingness to get together with representatives of a different culture to resolve conflict is also a willingness to consider adaptation to change. Rigid cultures resist change and are unlikely to show that degree of openness.

One example in the public policy arena comes to mind that illustrates the interaction of culture with other influences such as politics and historical relationships.

During a dialogue between a western state government and a group of deeply traditional Native American governments, it became obvious that the basic values of the two cultures led to sharply different characterizations of the problem under discussion.

The conflict concerned water, and the state interpreted the problem in the context of legal and jurisdictional systems. Against a background of regional demand, the state saw the issues as jurisdiction over the water source and its use for economic purposes. They spoke in the language of law, economics and hydrology. Future growth of the region was at stake.

Leaders of the native governments, on the other hand, interpreted the issue in terms of their community’s responsibility to sustain a source of water that played a central role in religious practices. They spoke in a language of story, ancient tradition and historical events of a spiritual nature (what western culture calls “myth”). Their concern was to continue traditional culture and protect the places of deepest importance to its practice. Time was not readily divided into past, present, future in this context. They had a sacred responsibility for the survival of traditions that defined a way of life.

But the representatives of these dramatically differing cultures shared goals and ways of thinking in this setting. For one, they both perceived their differences about this issue as a conflict that might be resolved through dialogue and negotiation. Both had the same fundamental goal – however they defined the nature and value of the resource – of having authority to control the water source and the waters flowing from it. Both had issues relating to internal decision-making and power dynamics among competing factions within their own groups. Further, they shared the desire for a productive relationship over the long-term.

Achieving success in the process required each side to be open to the other’s specific cultural style of interaction. The state negotiators could not assume that the burden was on the tribal leaders to fit into the non-Indian cultural style. Nor could they attempt to adapt their behavior entirely to the Native American style. Both extremes would be false, coercive in the first case, condescending in the second. Each group needed to speak from the integrity of its own values and cultural frameworks in order to have a productive conversation.

The two groups needed to help educate one another about their values and approaches to the water issue. In effect, they had to establish a common language to achieve the dialogue that could lead to agreement. Understanding cultural differences, especially differences in the way things are valued, was essential for communication, but once that step was achieved the dynamics of the negotiation process were conditioned far less by cultural issues.

Collaborative negotiation based on meeting needs and interests, as opposed to positional or adversarial negotiation, can be quite flexible in adapting to cross-cultural settings – provided the participants are open to understanding and respecting values and styles of behavior very different from their own.

In a 2008 post, Stephanie provided a list of some of the elements of a conflict resolution process that could vary in important ways in different cultures.

As we learn more about culture, we will continue to be surprised at what we thought was universal and in fact is not. . . .
For example, in many other cultures:

• Confidentiality would not make sense;

• Ownership of the dispute (and the responsibility to resolve it) would not belong to the individual;

• Insight about how the problem came about would not be valued (this is especially surprising for those mediators with a therapeutic bent to their model of mediation);

• Self-disclosure or discussing feelings would be inappropriate (particularly surprising for that same group of mediators).

The more we learn to question our assumptions about what is universal, the more culturally sensitive we can become.

Such sensitivity is essential on the part of all participants in order to create a process that they can trust as respectful and fair. Getting to that point can be extremely complicated and require preliminary dialogue sessions – perhaps a series of them – before negotiations to resolve conflict can be attempted.

A collaborative approach to designing the process ensures that the different groups are dealing with each other as partners and avoids the implication that one culture is superior to another. It challenges and hopefully removes unconscious cultural assumptions about how the process should work that could undermine any attempt to make substantive progress.

Openness to cultural differences, the desire to form mutually beneficial relationships, a willingness to engage in effective dialogue to resolve conflict and the ability and commitment to use an agreement as the basis for future action – elements such as these are prerequisites to negotiating agreements to meet important interests. But I would argue that these are not culturally unique. Culture determines the language, behavior and constraints as well as the content of values and needs that guide the participation of each side. Without the shared learning of how to communicate across cultural boundaries, reaching agreement about critical needs would hardly be possible, but that is one element among many.

Any discussion of culture and conflict resolution is controversial, and I’d welcome your ideas and experience to stimulate dialogue about this critical area.

Related posts:

1. Who Are You? Identity Across Cultures

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In response to the Open Government Directive, federal agencies have been meeting its many deadlines, though the quality of the results at this early stage has been uneven. Next is the April 7 deadline for publishing the Open Government Plans that will guide long-term implementation for each agency.

A February workshop, sponsored jointly by federal agencies and private sector groups, took a look at dozens of ideas for these plans. Using collaborative methods, the 55 participants, about equally divided between public and private sector groups, reviewed the proposals in a series of intensive sessions and came up with a priority list. (The workshop report can be downloaded here.)

The report presents a set of strong ideas that could do a lot to keep the Open Government process on track toward meaningful change. Nevertheless, in reading them and looking through the Directive, I keep asking myself, What is Open Government really about? How will its grand principles of transparency, participation and collaboration turn into meaningful action that makes a difference in people’s lives?

I’m reminded how different the public expectations can be from those of government employees. What looks like big change from the inside may not register at all with the public. Most people, of course, will never know or care about the Open Government Directive or Open Government Plans, and most don’t have time to spend downloading data sets or finding each agency’s website in order to contribute ideas about policy.

The starting point that tends to get lost in the attention to the details of the Open Government Directive is clear enough. The public doesn’t trust government. A lot of people experience it as closed-minded, ineffective at solving problems, and inefficient and wasteful in the way it spends the taxpayers’ money.

That’s what Obama was responding to in the original Memorandum on Openness in Government. He went right to that problem and made a promise to the American people that the federal government will earn the public’s trust by:

• giving people a greater voice in the decisions that directly affect their lives

• solving the big social and economic problems effectively

• spending money efficiently

• delivering results that matter to people.

At the end of last year, the Progress Report to the American People kept that basic concept in the forefront by using examples of everyday benefits: information for travel plans, nutritional meals, response to local disasters, opportunities for small business. A seldom-mentioned document that is offered as part of the Open Government policy is A Strategy for American Innovation: Driving Towards Sustainable Growth and Quality Jobs. Open Government in that context is a chief contributor to cultivating public sector innovation as a source of sustainable growth and job creation.

That’s the sort of thing Open Government is all about. Transparency, participation and collaboration are only means to that end of unlocking innovation not just for effective and efficient government but also to spur growth. The sharing of ideas and experience should become the norm to create economic benefit, end waste and restore confidence in government.

But it doesn’t sound quite the same when translated into a directive from the Office of Management and Budget. The emphasis shifts from on-the-ground results that benefit people to the more formal steps agencies must take to satisfy a new standard of performance for openness. Granted these are some of the necessary changes inside government that make possible what the public will see outside agency walls. The Directive as a whole, though, tends to reframe the action-oriented language of the White House into terms that better fit existing agency cultures.

That worries me because the whole initiative can start to drift toward compliance with directives and business as usual. As I’ve discussed before that’s an atmosphere in which innovation carries risk, and safety lies in following detailed definitions of what each agency and manager are empowered to do. Going beyond those boundaries can get into the zone of “no good deed goes unpunished.”

That reality is captured in a key recommendation to come out of the workshops: find a way to guarantee anonymity and safety to employees who are bold enough to offer new ideas. Such protection is necessary because innovative ideas are quite likely to be taken as unwanted criticism by leadership. Good call by the workshop group, but it doesn’t sound like setting free the creative torrent of innovation that the White House expects from inside government as well as from the public as a result of the new openness.

This danger is exactly what workshop members are worried about, and their proposals try to steer implementation of the Open Government Directive toward fundamental change rather than passive compliance. Some of the strongest ideas address the need to integrate openness into long-term agency operation and decision-making. In particular, changing performance standards for staff and agencies alike would add a more lasting level of accountability than launching a website or publicizing an exemplary project.

Ongoing training for federal managers and staff is also critical, as is spending the time to ensure that program and agency leadership are really committed to action. The hope, of course, is that the various agencies will act on such ideas and not simply tuck them away in an Open Government Plan that may or may not survive the current Administration’s push for results.

The workshops are performing a great service by getting such proposals into circulation. They have much more influence than individual contributions precisely because they come from a collaborative public-private effort. It’s one that includes leading agencies like the General Services Administration and the Department of Transportation as well as influential activists, consultants and private companies. The workshop series helps build a core of agency supporters who can act as internal advocates of change while the private sector and non-governmental organizations can monitor from the outside.

The first sign of their success will be the release of the Open Government Plans for each agency in early April. The collaborative group is working hard and will reconvene shortly after the plans are out. We’ll keep watching to see what happens.

Related posts:

1. Will Open Government Policies Build Trust for Effective Collaboration?
2. The Open Government Directive & Changing Federal Culture – 2

Susan Collin Marks is the Senior Vice President of Search for Common Ground (SFCG). In this interview with the European Journalism Centre, she describes some of the goals of SFCG and specific projects involving popular media to reach millions of people in war-torn countries.

The mission of Search for Common Ground, founded in 1982, is nothing less than shifting the world away from conflict to cooperative solutions. It now operates a series of global forums and media projects as well as seventeen field programs, mostly in African countries but also in Macedonia, Ukraine, Jerusalem, Nepal and Indonesia. These are all countries dealing with the effects of violent conflict as well as deep ethnic and political divisions.

SFCG emphasizes long term commitments in its projects and partners with local peace activists to achieve its goals. As noted in the video, one of the organization’s most distinctive strategies is to use popular media and culture to encourage cooperation and reconciliation. In the group’s own words:

Our methodology is rooted in a simple idea: Understand the differences and act on the commonalities. Within that framework, there are numerous delivery systems. We have developed these into a diverse toolbox that includes such traditional conflict resolution techniques as mediation, training, facilitation, and back channel negotiations and unconventional ones involving radio and TV production, music, sports, and community organizing. Because violent conflict depends on stereotyping, demonizing, and dehumanizing, we make extensive use of popular culture to help reverse this process. Thus, among other things, we produce soap operas that communicate win-win messages of mutual respect, tolerance, nonviolence, and problem-solving. We make music videos that have turned into theme songs for entire peace processes. In a dozen countries, we produce soap opera and reality TV – with good values. In addition, our toolbox includes street theater, sport, art, community organizing, and film festivals.

For further information, consult the Search for Common Ground website at www.sfcg.org.

The video is a production of the European Journalism Centre, is a nonprofit organization that provides news, resources and programs for mid-career training of journalists and media professionals. Its online magazine reviews journalistic standards and practice throughout Europe and internationally.

Public involvement sometimes presents a stark contrast between community and technical knowledge. Often public agency representatives, with the best intentions of gathering information about local concerns, may arrive at a community meeting, make a presentation, but find itself facing a lot of frustrated and angry people. The meeting might end with members of the community feeling they haven’t been listened to. The agency team may feel it hasn’t learned anything useful but instead has had to sit through a gripe session.

I once observed a community meeting of this type where one woman in the audience took exception to a statement of the official who was presenting to the group. While he was doing well in translating technical terms into lay language, he responded to this concern, as he did to several others, by saying that the research findings showed that she was mistaken. He then quickly moved on to his next point. But the woman sat down and muttered under her breath:

Everything they say is right. Everything we say is wrong.

That got to the heart of it. The community perspective, based on years of dealing with the issue under discussion, seemed to have no relevance to the presenter. He assumed that technical research provided the only real knowledge, especially for use in decision-making, and filtered out most public comments as anecdotal, impressionistic or emotional. Similarly the research findings seemed to the residents completely at odds with what they had learned from their first hand experience over a period of decades. Neither side found the other to be credible, and both felt they were treated with contempt.

Each had a point. Both had useful knowledge to bring to bear on the problem. What was missing was a means of interpreting between the two and finding a way to allow both types of information to be reflected in new policies.

Knowledge can’t be communicated effectively if there is no respect for the possibility of seeing the world through different frameworks and evaluating information and perceptions according to different value systems. In this example, the community members had a shared culture and a way of talking to each other and gathering information they could trust. They did not feel comfortable or understood by state agency staff, who were strangers and knew nothing about the local community. There were unspoken rules for becoming a part of the community and for building trust with the residents.

The technical staff also comprised its own community with rules for membership. Technical training and accomplishment commanded respect, and participation in decisions was limited to those who could demonstrate the necessary skill and mastery of the discipline. They could trust each other because they could talk the same language.

What can be done to change situations like this? How can these two groups integrate what they know instead of seeing only conflict between their two different forms of knowledge? I was once part of an effort to bridge the knowledge gap between agency staff and a local community. It illustrates one way to attempt this difficult task.

The starting assumption by the sponsoring agency was that both groups had to learn from each other. That recognition in itself was critical, and it came from years of conflict that had frustrated both agency and community and produced nothing of benefit to either.

To facilitate that learning, the first step was to convene community groups and agency staff separately to clarify what their assumptions were about each other and what each side thought the other needed to learn about them. Those conversations, which were captured by facilitators, brought out a combination of accurate insight and faulty assumptions based on limited impressions. Summaries of both sets of meetings went to all participants in a format that compared the assumptions of each group about the other.

After the groups had a chance to discuss the summaries among themselves, a joint dialogue brought them together to explore misconceptions and also to respond to fundamental problems in the relationship. This process required more than one meeting. The groups hashed out many issues and came up with specific proposals for improving communication and mutual understanding. For example, the agency created community internships that would enable residents to get a sense of the technical issues staff had to deal with as well as the complex process of planning and decision-making that had given rise to many misunderstandings. Community participants worked out a way to have staff gain an orientation to local values through regular meetings with nieghborhood leaders. The effort had to be reciprocal to help gain trust through much longer and more indepth experience than had ever occurred before.

There are many other possible structures for dialogue that could achieve similar results, I’d like to publish here other stories about different methods. Have you encountered this problem, and. if so, how have you tried to deal with it?

Related posts:

1. Who’s the Public & How Should They Participate?
2. Who’s the Public? Two Views
3. Who’s the Public in Public Involvement?