What Culture Is

Imagine a project meeting with an engineer from Egypt, a planner from Kazakhstan, a buyer from the Netherlands and a site manager from Brazil. Everyone speaks English. Everyone wants the project to succeed. Yet after one hour, two people think a decision was made and two people think it was not. Nobody lied. They simply read the same meeting in different ways.

This is the everyday problem of cross-cultural communication. People bring habits from the places where they grew up and worked. These habits feel normal, so we rarely notice them — until they meet a different set of habits.

This course is for anyone who works with colleagues, customers or suppliers from other countries: office staff, engineers, supervisors, sales people and managers. It gives you words to describe cultural differences and practical habits to work across them.

A working definition

There are hundreds of definitions of culture. A simple and useful one is: culture is the shared values, beliefs and habits of a group, which its members learn and pass on, and which shape how they behave and how they read the behaviour of others.

Three points follow from this definition:

• Culture is learned, not born. A child adopted into another country grows up with the culture of that country.
• Culture is shared. One person’s habit is personality. A habit shared by a group is culture.
• Culture is mostly invisible to its members. We notice our own culture only when we meet a different one.