Searching for understanding on the road to innovation

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Don’t believe what the leaders tell us. Nor what the economists or media reports say. We are in a recession. Maybe even a depression. It’s dire out there, and with little end in sight.  But I’m not talking about the economy. I’m talking about understanding.

Understanding ourselves, our families and neighbors, our state, country and globe already seems like an unsurmountable peak, especially when trying to bridge the gap between gender, geography and generation. Perhaps time, technology, tin ears and tender sensibilities are to thank for our difficulty in connecting with each other from a place of thoughtfulness.

In an age where shared benefits grow scarcer, the benefit of the doubt for those not like us, and who do not necessarily like us, may be on the verge of disappearing completely if we don’t fight for it to remain the last piece of the commons amongst the lords’ estates.

I’m a delusional optimist, though. Maybe we are at the nadir of understanding’s downward trajectory. Maybe, like any other muscle, understanding is at the point of breakdown that leads to growth.

Leviticus 19:18 instructs and Matthew 22:37-39 reminds to “love your neighbor as yourself.” As Eula Bliss, author and former professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., points out in her book On Immunity,  the Danish theologian and philosopher Kierkegaard responded to that commandment with the question, “Who, then, is one’s neighbor?” He goes on to teach that “neighbor is what philosophers call the other, that by which selfishness in self-love is to be tested.”

Understanding the need to love and listen to the parts within ourselves and the people in our families, neighborhoods, states and countries who we consider the “other,” is an act imbued with holiness. Understanding acknowledges that while the languages by which we express ourselves may be different, the message behind the words are the same: See me.

In our professional lives, understanding across the multiple cultures that click together like Legos to make up an organization’s culture, is a power skill called intercultural fluency. In simple terms, intercultural fluency is the ability to comprehend and adapt to different cultural situations and perspectives. It’s the ability to make Excel jokes when hanging out with the finance team or dishing with the marketing team about an awesome commercial you just saw. It’s knowing how to effectively communicate your solution’s return on investment to the executive leadership. Your relative skill at intercultural fluency often determines the success of your goal, which is why it is a power skill worthy of strengthening.

What is intercultural fluency?

Unless you are a business of one, your daily work activities will involve interacting with people who have different lived experiences. Even in a family business, you and your family members may approach the world from different perspectives. It is important that you are able to understand and adapt to the different cultural signifiers that your colleagues will bring to their interactions with you.

The first tool you need in your intercultural fluency toolbox is strong communication skills.  Be an active listener, which means focusing on what the other person is saying, not solely thinking about what you are going to say next. Pay attention to the nonverbal messages the person is sending you. When active listening and speaking in response, do both with a sense of empathy, understanding and an effort to share the feelings of the person you are communicating with. Finally, whenever possible work toward conflict resolution in conversations. This doesn’t mean to simply agree with whatever someone else is saying, but to seek a way forward in the conversation that allows everyone to feel heard and for their insights to be built into the final consensus at the end of the conversation. (Unless the other person is telling you that ketchup is an appropriate condiment for a hot dog.)

The next tool or skill for intercultural fluency is independence. You may receive instructions or your team may work in manners that you aren’t used to, methods that are informed by other people’s cultural experiences. Independence in these situations looks moving forward with confidence, seizing the initiative and self-directing any need for additional knowledge to inform your decision-making process.

Working in an environment where multiple cultures interact requires effective problem-solving skills. Aligned with independence, people’s different cultural underpinnings will often impact how they arrived to a problem’s potential solution. Being able to communicate your own approach to analysis and troubleshooting will help walk your colleagues through how your own solution-making process, and remaining creative and resourceful helps open you up to multiple possible approaches to achieve success.

Adaptability is a very important skill to exercise when working out your intercultural fluency muscles. Different cultures introduce us to unique expectations, processes and ideas. How flexible are you in reacting to changes those differences present to you in your daily activities? Do you approach cooperation as a default or the last resort? What level of patience do you embrace, and nonverbally communicate, to your colleagues when working toward a solution?  

Curiosity is key to intercultural fluency because exhibiting this skill ensures that you approach instances where cultures are interacting as a learner. There’s a huge difference between, “Why are you doing it that way?” and, “WHY ARE YOU DOING IT THAT WAY?!” Seeing these interactions as an opportunity for growth rather than conflict illustrates to your team members that you seek a solution with compassion in your heart, rather than a proscribed answer in mind.

Language skills are a huge support to intercultural fluency. Whether it is learning to speak in your team member’s mother tongue or gaining an understanding of some of your colleagues’ cultural language, these activities support greater sociability and will help inform your critical thinking when seeking to strengthen your team’s solution to a problem.  

The final tool in the intercultural toolbox you need is collaboration. The most lasting way to effectively solve a problem or work toward a common goal is to engage with others from a place of positivity, using effective diplomacy and leadership skills. It is easy for one person to stick their finger in the crack of a dam. It is impossible for one person alone to fix it.

The role of intercultural fluency in innovation

The miniature world inside a watch is a wonder of mechanical engineering. Springs.  Wheels. Pinions. Plates. Each component of the watch is singular in its purpose, but all the components unify to keep the watch hands moving in a steady pace forward through “evenings, mornings, afternoons, lives measured with coffee spoons.”

The miniature world inside any innovation is a wonder of social engineering. Designers. Salespeople. Manufacturers. Managers. Each component of the organization singular in its purpose. All components unified in the goal of solving a problem for a customer, offering new gains and relieving old pains “with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”

Watches and innovations mark the day with novelty as components collectively march from the lived-in present to the unknown future. A missing balance spring brings a watch’s movements to a halt, just as a missing project manager brings an innovation to a halt. For all the pieces in either environment to fully serve their purpose, it has to appreciate the different strengths its colleagues bring to the shared goal.

Organizations that generate a steady state of innovation do so only if the foundation of exploration, experimentation and optimization is integrated into the company’s culture.  And for that culture to flourish, team members and the teams themselves must have a strong level of trust in each other to deliver their own unique value to the end-product, whether it is a healthy patient, a new chiller design or a breakthrough treatment for a disease. 

Culture at Work: The Value of Intercultural Skills in the Workplace, a 2013 whitepaper developed by the British Council, Ipsos Public Affairs and Booz Allen Hamilton, discusses findings from a survey they conducted on the role of culture in the workplace with large private, public and nongovernmental organization(NGO)/charity sector employers in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Jordan, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the U.S. Participants included 198 private sector, 86 public sector and 83 NGO/charity sector employers.

The results highlight the value that employers find in employees with strong intercultural skills and the value those employees bring to the organization. The employers “value [intercultural] skills above many technical abilities and formal qualifications. The value of intercultural skills manifests itself in teams running efficiently, bringing in new clients, building trust and improving brand reputation. Employers also see significant risks in their employees lacking in intercultural skills. Without these skills, they fear conflict within teams, loss of clients/sales, damage to reputation and brand, and cultural insensitivity.”

In a 2020 World Economic Forum article, “How Higher Education Can Adapt to the Future of Work,” Farnam Jahanian, president of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa., explores the impact of innovations in automation and artificial intelligence and their influence on the current and future workforce. Jahanian makes it clear that “21st-century students must learn how to approach problems from many perspectives, cultivate and exploit creativity, engage in complex communication, and leverage critical thinking. With a future of work that is constantly evolving, these non-automatable ‘human’ skills are foundational, and will only increase in value as automation becomes more mainstream.”

Lasting innovations, and organizations that desire to achieve them, also need to consider the underpinnings of different cultures and their impact on even creating a shared definition for innovation within their teams.

In May 2019’s Frontiers in Psychology, the research article “How Does Culture Shape Creativity? A Mini-Review” highlights that the “cultural difference in preferred creativity processing patterns or creative processes is rooted in belief system differences between the East and the West.” It goes on to explain how in Eastern cultures creativity is characterized as an ongoing process involving “a circular movement in the sense of successive reconfiguration of an initial totality”; in contrast, in the West, creativity is considered “a linear movement towards a new point” and “an insightful production achieved by individuals engaged in a working process with a finite beginning and end.” It’s a lot to think about when considering how the geography of your research and development team could potentially impact the topology of the innovation coming out of their work.

How to improve your intercultural fluency

Underneath all cultures is the shared agreement of multiple people in a specific set of interests and ideals. Any one person can have an immense impact on the culture of an organization, its approach to innovation, and its ability to weld together the multiple cultures inhabited by its members toward a shared goal. In other words, intercultural fluency starts with each of us and the choices we make on how to interact with our colleagues, clients and constituents.

Indeed.com offers three simple (but maybe not easy) tips that you can take to improve your intercultural fluency. They recommend to:

• Connect with your coworkers. Start meaningful conversations and listen attentively when colleagues share their cultural backgrounds.
• Be accepting. Often, there are many ways to complete a task or communicate an idea, so stay open to other people's viewpoints.
• Learn about your colleagues' or clients' cultures. Culture influences the way we communicate and can involve a specific etiquette. Taking the time to learn about your clients' or coworkers' culture can help you communicate with respect and mutual awareness.

As we’ve discussed many times this year, innovation at its core is about finding new solutions to persistent and emerging problems. Major innovations often create gains or reduce pains for many different types of people. The more the lived experiences of those people are mirrored in the teams developing these innovations, the more likely it is that the cultural relevance of the innovation will be considered when developing the solution.  t is of paramount importance that there is intercultural fluency across the teams and organizations developing these innovations to be successful in their pursuit of new frontiers.

So, spend on empathy. Invest in understanding. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Become fluent in intercultural fluency.