How can we overcome prejudice? By "mapping" our differences.
A review of Erin Meyer’s "The Culture Map"
Not long ago I found myself talking with a friend about her struggles at work. She loved how diverse her organization was — her colleagues were from all over the world: Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America. The problem was, the organization was dominated by a small group of German men and, like everyone else, they naturally assumed their way of doing things was the right way of doing things. In meetings, they were direct and forceful; if they had negative feedback to give, they’d give it. And they expected this of everyone.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this way of working. It’s just that it’s not natural to everyone, and my friend’s colleagues from other cultures felt like they were being steamrolled over. They experienced their German colleagues as overbearing.
So there were major cultural differences undermining the organization, but they were unspoken. Which makes sense, because: How does one even begin to speak about such differences? And what’s the point — what can be done about them? It just seems like a potential minefield of misunderstanding.
In the conversation with my friend, I kept wishing her organization would do a deep dive into the book I’ve been reading lately — Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map. It’s by no means a perfect way to understand culture, but it’s a great place to start. With it as a foundation, one can begin to build up an objective sense for cultural differences, especially how to work with them.
Such an understanding clearly has immediate practical implications for multicultural organizations (which is Meyer’s focus), but its importance is actually much more far-reaching: It’s necessary for overcoming prejudice in general. Ignoring cultural differences — claiming that “deep down everyone’s basically the same” — won’t get us anywhere. To overcome prejudice, it’s necessary to become interested in who people truly are, to see them in their specificity.
And its importance is even more far-reaching. Understanding cultural differences will be the basis for solving global issues in the future — the abstract term “humanity” will only become concrete when the nations of the world learn to consciously see each other in this way. Then peace and cooperation won’t be such fleeting, fragile things — barely maintained by a thin web of custom and treaty — but will become strong.
I know these are big claims for such a small book, but it’s not really about this book. It’s about the book’s approach. I’ll try to make this approach plain in what follows.
What makes The Culture Map so helpful is that it compares cultures to one another — a scary thing to do in this day and age. When we think about comparing cultures, we often think about our cranky old uncle saying something like “We Americans are blunt: we say what we mean and we mean what we say. But the Japanese are different. They’re sneaky. You never know what they’re thinking.”
This sort of thing naturally makes a lot of us cringe — it makes us want to retreat and not talk about culture at all: “Why,” you might ask, “should we even bother with culture? Shouldn’t we just treat people as individuals?”
But we don’t transform our judgements when we ignore culture, we just transfer them to the individual. We make them personal. To transform our judgements, we must try to move beyond our own sympathy and antipathy and instead try to see things for what they actually are.
One thing to mention from the start is that The Culture Map is a business book, so it looks at culture in terms of how it affects the workplace.1 On the one hand, this gives the book a narrower focus, which is great because the topic is so broad. But even better is the fact that it makes the book immediately practical. It’s not just theory for theory’s sake — the ideas need to be effective in the workplace so they’ve been drawn from decades of experience, and tested and honed through constant application.
The map itself is pretty simple. It’s actually eight maps, each one placing the various national cultures along a scale that lies between two extremes. Each scale looks at some basic social task, such as how we make decisions, or build trust, or give feedback.
For instance, the first scale looks at communication and classifies cultures according to what they consider good communication — is it better to be more explicit and direct, or more implicit and indirect?
Coming from America, the second option sounds bizarre. Americans are raised to communicate as simply and clearly as possible, and even to repeat important points: “Tell them what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you said.”
But in many Asian countries, good communicators strive for sophistication and nuance. In such countries, your conversation partner is expected to “read the air” — they should understand not only what’s being said, but also what’s not being said. So messages are layered, and the best communicators are the subtlest — those who can say something without actually saying it.
One way to understand these two extremes is to think about the difference between a dewy-eyed young couple and one that’s been married for the last 50 years. When you first start dating, you have very little shared context — no shared history, stories, or jokes — so you have to explain everything. But if you’ve been married for a long time, then you probably know (or at least think you know) exactly what your spouse is thinking, so there’s no need to explain anything.
And this is how the book assesses communication. If you’re from a culture with a low level of shared context (the young couple in our example), then you value being explicit. But being explicit doesn’t make sense, and would be strange, if you have a high level of shared context (the older couple). These are the two poles on the communicating scale, which the book refers to simply as “low context” and “high context.”
America, for instance, is low context — we’re a young country and also a “nation of immigrants,” meaning we often need to communicate with people from radically different cultural backgrounds. Japan, on the other hand, is high context — they’re a much older country, and also historically much more homogenous (they were completely isolated from the world for 220 years, so at this point they know each other pretty well :)
So it makes sense that Americans, being low context, would value clarity in communication, and the Japanese, being high context, would value subtlety. When it comes to the communication scale, these two countries are exact opposites.
This also explains why we often think that the way other cultures do things is strange or even dishonest: Because that’s how it appears from our perspective on the scale. So, in a sense, our cranky old uncle was right: He recognizes that Americans are straightforward (low-context), while the Japanese are subtle (high-context), which he experiences as evasive or “sneaky.” Here’s how Meyer describes these perspectives in the book:
If you’re from a low-context culture, you may perceive a high-context communicator as secretive, lacking transparency, or unable to communicate effectively. [One company executive] put it starkly: “I have always believed that people say what they mean and mean what they say — and if they don’t, well, then they are lying.”
On the other hand, if you’re from a high-context culture, you might perceive a low-context communicator as inappropriately stating the obvious (“You didn't have to say it. We all understood!”), or even as condescending and patronizing (“You talk to us like we are children!”).2
So we can see how prejudice naturally arises: We’re raised with certain ways of doing things, a certain perspective, and we’re naturally critical of other ways. It’s ingrained in us: Other ways just feel wrong. But in reading The Culture Map, we come to realize that it’s all relative — there’s no one right way of doing things.
I should mention from the start that I detest the phrase “it’s all relative,” but I’ll come back to that in a moment. What’s important to realize at this point is that how we understand ourselves is always relational, it’s always in relationship to other people.
Meyer gives a great example of this early in the book. She describes a project where British and French consultants are working together. From the perspective of the British, the French were “disorganized, chaotic, and lacked punctuality. ‘They take so many tangents and side routes during the meeting, it’s impossible to follow their line of thinking!’ one British team member said.”
But another team, composed of Indians and French, yielded the opposite results. The Indians complained that the French were “rigid, inflexible, and obsessed with deadlines.”
And when she told this story to a team of Germans and British, one of the Germans laughed and said, “‘That’s very funny, because we Germans always complain that the British are disorganized, chaotic and always late — exactly the complaint the British in your example lodged against the French.’”3
So who’s right? Are the French always late, or are they obsessed with deadlines? And what about the British? Well, it matters where you stand on the scale in relation to time.4
And we can see such relativism even in our own lives. If we work with someone who’s perpetually late, then we imagine ourselves to be quite punctual, even though we might be a couple minutes late from time to time. But if we work with someone who’s even more punctual than we are, then all of a sudden we’re the one who appears tardy.
As I’ve written before, how we understand ourselves — our very sense of identity — depends on who surrounds us. And this isn’t just a social phenomenon, it’s the same with other things in life, even color. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Everything is context-dependent. Everything is relative.
Now that I’ve thoroughly championed relativism, let me return to my difficulty with it. I don’t have a problem with relativism per se, but how it’s often wielded, especially in conversation: “Ah, it doesn’t really matter; it’s all relative anyways.” That phrase, it’s all relative, is used to end debate, to dismiss the search for truth as fruitless. “It’s all relative” signifies “it’s all arbitrary”: There is no truth — everything depends on a person’s viewpoint, and we know there are as many viewpoints as stars in the sky…
But a person’s viewpoint isn’t arbitrary or random. Like a star in the sky, it’s specific. We can map it. And when we do, we find certain regular patterns and constellations.
As an example, here’s a picture of the whole culture map, depicting where four different national cultures — the U.S., Germany, Japan, and China — fall on the various scales.
If you work with people from other cultures, difficulties will arise; it’s inevitable. So how can we work with them?
Meyer offers different strategies for the different scales. For instance when it comes to communication — where, as we’ve seen, some cultures are more explicit (low-context) and others are more subtle (high context) — it makes sense to foster a shared communication style that’s low-context. That might seem unfair to the high-context folks, but remember: Low-context communication exists in order to manage miscommunication between people who don’t share the same culture. That’s exactly when you want to be as explicit and transparent as possible.
Also, people often won’t mind working in a way that’s culturally “unnatural” to them if they understand the need for it. In discussing the different strategies, Meyer regularly refers back to this point: Don’t try to find a perfect solution; just help your team understand the constellation of cultural differences creating some difficulty and let them find a solution that works for them. It turns out that simply understanding cultural differences can alleviate a lot of the problems. In this respect, Meyer quotes the French saying, “When you know your sickness, you are halfway cured.”
In reading the book, I also experienced this, but in retrospect. Like many people, I’ve been burned by some of my cultural encounters in the past, and realizing they were largely cultural and not personal helped to heal them.
For instance, I once had a German boss who chewed me out for something I didn’t do — “This is totally unacceptable!” But when they finally realized I wasn’t responsible, they simply laughed, clapped me on the shoulder, and strolled out of my office. It was clear that giving strong negative feedback was no big deal for them, whereas I felt personally attacked.
I also once co-organized a conference in the Philippines, a country with an extremely flexible relationship to time. I knew this going into it, but I didn’t really know it. When our sessions ran an hour or two late from the very start, I couldn’t cope. I had a frustrated and somewhat heated conversation with some of my fellow organizers (it turns out I can give negative feedback!), which didn’t end well. Here I was — an American in a country previously colonized by America — telling them how to do things. It was not a recipe for success.
And there are other stories. Plenty of them. Some funny. Most somewhat painful.
Hopefully by this point it’s clear why I think it’s so important to recognize cultural differences. Yes, there is a danger in it. Such differences can be weaponized. People might judge another culture’s actions as “less than” or even immoral. But the answer is not to hide our differences in the dark — doing things in the dark usually just means running into walls and getting hurt (as I can attest from my own experience in the Philippines and elsewhere). The answer is not more darkness, but more light. And not only because we need functioning workplaces, but because we need a functioning humanity.
Think how weak international relations really are. Yes, they have custom and treaties to shore them up, but custom and treaties can change. Public officials come and go. They have their own agendas. Public sentiment is fickle and follows its leaders. There’s very little real understanding, real connection, between countries themselves.
This is why the 20th century philosopher Rudolf Steiner thought the League of Nations — the precursor to the United Nations — was basically useless. It was an intergovernmental organization meant to maintain the peace, but there was nothing new about it. It would operate on the same principle that leads to war, that of power politics. What was needed, Steiner felt, was real connection between the nations forged from an actual interest in one another. Here’s how he described it:
Impulses must prevail in every country in the world that will lead to a true interest in every other country… We will never gain sincere international social relations by merely corrective regulations [such as those found in the League of Nations]. The only way is to find the source of a common understanding among the various peoples.5
Such interest has to be cultivated, and this can only be done by developing an objective sense for cultural differences. I don’t just mean the kind of differences found in The Culture Map — different ways of communicating, making decisions, building trust, and relating to time — national cultures are not so fragmented as all that. They are bigger, fuller, more integrated, more whole. National cultures are radically different ways of being in the world. Radically different soul configurations. Radically different soul capacities. The capacity for devotion, for courage, for abstract thought. These are all capacities we might think we know, but do we really?
The truth is, every culture has developed certain characteristics — certain gifts — that are part of what it means to be human. We must learn to recognize and even assimilate these gifts if we wish to become fully human ourselves. Here’s Steiner again:
The ‘human’ is not expressed in its entirety through any individual person, nor through the members of any one race, but only through the whole of humanity. If a person would understand what they are in their whole being, let them study the characteristics of the different peoples of the earth. Let them assimilate the qualities which they themselves cannot possess by nature, for only then will they become fully human… If they discover what is great and characteristic in the other peoples, and allow this to penetrate deeply into their own being, they will realize that the purpose of their existence cannot be fulfilled without those qualities which they are able to receive from others, because these other qualities are also part of their own inner striving.6
It’s not that we’re meant to escape our own culture — it’s our home, and we were born into it as a vessel that can help us bring our own gifts to fruition. We’ve all been born on some part of the earth, into a specific time and place and people. That utterly unique climate will draw certain potentials out of us, and there is incredible wisdom in that.
But we can also develop other potentials — other gifts — if we’re able to expand our home, if we’re able to make other people, our people. Then we will become more well-rounded, more whole, within ourselves. Then, hopefully, we will become capable of helping humanity find a path out of the darkness.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
It’s worth noting that, in such a factious time — a time when the culture wars are red hot — a book that attempts to describe the objective reality of culture has had to appear as a business book. For years, I’ve scoured the anthropology section of bookstores looking for books that compare contemporary national cultures, and have found pretty much nothing. I think this is because the very act of comparison is so frightening, is felt to be so fraught with danger (— Won’t such research just encourage xenophobia and racism? And what would be the basis for such comparisons to begin with?). But the business world requires international (i.e. inter-cultural) cooperation, and so also requires a more profound development and application of cultural psychology.
Meyer, Erin. The Culture Map, p. 42.
Meyer, Erin. The Culture Map, pp. 22-23.
And just a reminder: one side of the scale isn’t “better” than the other. There is certainly a virtue in being exact in one’s actions, but there’s also a virtue in rolling with the punches, in working flexibly with what the day brings. In countries where circumstances are constantly changing — for example, where public transportation isn’t always on time, that is if it even exists at all — such flexibility is simply a necessary part of life.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Social Future, p. 141.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Peoples of the Earth in the Light of Anthroposophy, March 10th, 1920.
Hey Seth,
This article was so interesting and thoughtful. It's a tricky subject and I liked your way of approaching it by pointing to the reality that in ignoring culture we aren't able to transform our judgements, but make them personal instead. Thanks for your research and shared insights.