[Applause]
in the 19th century communication was
award primarily associated with the
transmission of goods and before the
development of the railways rivers were
the main ways that materials and
information were transported or
communicated as you can see logs were
one item that were easily transported
down rivers every now and then however
those logs might get blocked forming
what we call a log jam and a log jam is
something that makes communication
impossible the idea that communication
involves the flow of something that this
flow can be blocked and may require
facilitation to be unblocked is the same
today and one area where this is most
obvious is the domain of intercultural
communication according to the Journal
of international project management
intercultural communication is the
greatest challenge facing international
managers now this should not surprise us
because we face the same challenge at a
more mundane level the majority of us
are Europeans and yet if we were honest
we would say that we have difficulty
communicating with our European
neighbors I’ve been living in France for
the last 25 years and I still have
difficulty communicating with the French
you only have to ask my wife wife for
and if like me we sometimes have
difficulty defining ourselves because
I’ve been living in France for the last
25 years and I’ve lived more of my life
in France than I have in Ireland yet I
still define myself as Irish and if we
may have difficulty defining who we are
we have very little difficulty defining
who we are not we are not like the
others
people from other cultures and this is
because we generally view people from
other cultures in a negative light
as an example let me ask the question
who in Europe do we consider to be cold
pretentious arrogant snobs the answer of
course is the English and apart from the
English not many of us want to be
English I mean who amongst us would like
to be considered as a cold arrogant
pretentious stub no strangely enough
this propensity to view people from
other cultures in a negative and
reductionist light is actually quite
normal
psychologists tell us that we have a
natural tendency to want to put people
into boxes and to keep them there Carl
Jung says that this is part of what he
calls our shadow or our dark side and
even if we have difficulty admitting it
we all have a dark side now we don’t
have time this evening to go into how we
develop boxes for people from different
cultures and so on but one track I would
encourage you to explore is how the
media portrays what is going on in other
countries you will notice that the media
tends to focus on the negative news
the media have learned from the German
word sad schadenfreude ah that the
pleasure we get from the misfortune of
others is something that sells almost as
good as sex now how this impacts
intercultural communication is that the
normal convention for improving the
situation is to analyze the culture of
the people we want to communicate with
so if I want to do business in China
I will first of all analyze the Chinese
culture but this is not always the good
way to go about it because of our dark
side the power of prejudice means that
the majority of us are poor
intercultural communicators what I
suggest is to turn the normal convention
upside down and my inspiration doesn’t
come from the psychologists it comes
from the philosophers ghannouchi say
Alton is an expression we associate with
Socrates though he is not the author and
know yourself means that the first
person our culture we should analyze is
our own this is important because in the
communication process the encoding and
decoding of messages is very much
influenced by our dark side I call these
influences our dysfunctional drivers now
if we were in Ireland I would probably
use as an example the Irish the
deep-seated inferiority complex of the
Irish as an example of a dysfunctional
driver but because we’re in France I
want to take an example from French
culture and to look for clues so as to
improve the intercultural communication
process from a French perspective now
the example I want to talk about is our
angst-ridden
education system now I’m not saying that
French educational institutions provoke
anxiety not at all
anxiety pervades French culture for many
complex and historical reasons the
education system only serves to
highlight this it is not a direct cause
the education system in France is
designed a little like a pyramid and at
the top of the pyramid are the grande
Cal and from an anxiety perspective the
Grande call signify guaranteed
employment and guaranteed status many
French parents want their children to
get into a grande college they love
their children and they want our
children to have a secure future so they
keep reminding them to work hard at
school because the process to get into a
grande Ecole is very difficult and very
stressful
unfortunately what the parents also
communicates is their anxiety and
anxious parents make for anxious
children even if this anxiety remains at
a subconscious level we can see this in
the results of a Pisa study from 2012
which shows that French school pupils
are amongst the most stressed in the
world with nearly 50% of them saying
that they don’t feel well at school
another indicator is the number of young
people in France who aspire to a job in
the public sector over 70% of high
school graduates in France think that
the best option for their future is a
low-paying job with poor career
prospects so there is a subconscious
anxiety in French culture and
concomitant with this anxiety comes a
need to control that anxiety know what
this has to do with intercultural
communication is obvious when we
encounter people from other cultures we
very quickly perceive that there are
differences there are differences in the
way we speak in the words we use and how
we use them there are differences in our
appearance in our dress code
in our values in our beliefs these
differences inject a certain uncertainty
into the communication process they can
be a little destabilizing it’s a little
like riding a log down a river during a
log drive our response to these
differences will depend on we’ll
determine whether the log goes to form a
logjam or whether we keep the flow of
communication going and reach our mutual
objective an unfortunate way is to allow
the communication process to be driven
by our anxiety instead of focusing with
on the anxiety when anxiety drives the
process we tend to either ignore the
person we’re speaking with pretend to
like them we avoid communicating with
them or we act in a hostile way towards
them one way or the other this leads to
a jamming of the communication process
the way out is to apply the
intercultural communication principle
that the psychologist philosopher and
religious leader Jesus Christ speaks
about when he says first remove the log
from your own eye we have to work on
this log we have to recognize and take
responsibility for our anxiety and
anxiety that comes from our values our
beliefs our culture the differences we
experience and meets when we encounter
people from other cultures
may cause us to have feelings of anxiety
and there is nothing fundamentally wrong
with feeling anxious what is wrong is
when we see the differences of others as
the cause of that anxiety this is the
log we have to remove and when we focus
on the deep sources of the dysfunctional
drivers dysfunctional drivers such as
anxiety in France
poor self-image in Ireland both others
dysfunctional drivers such as honor and
shame in about half of the world drivers
such as guilt drivers such as saving
face
and when we focus on trying to attenuate
or reduce the impact of these
dysfunctional drivers will be well on
the way to developing the skills to keep
the flow going in the river of
intercultural communication thank you [Applause]
in the 19th century communication was
award primarily associated with the
transmission of goods and before the
development of the railways rivers were
the main ways that materials and
information were transported or
communicated as you can see logs were
one item that were easily transported
down rivers every now and then however
those logs might get blocked forming
what we call a log jam and a log jam is
something that makes communication
impossible the idea that communication
involves the flow of something that this
flow can be blocked and may require
facilitation to be unblocked is the same
today and one area where this is most
obvious is the domain of intercultural
communication according to the Journal
of international project management
intercultural communication is the
greatest challenge facing international
managers now this should not surprise us
because we face the same challenge at a
more mundane level the majority of us
are Europeans and yet if we were honest
we would say that we have difficulty
communicating with our European
neighbors I’ve been living in France for
the last 25 years and I still have
difficulty communicating with the French
you only have to ask my wife wife for
and if like me we sometimes have
difficulty defining ourselves because
I’ve been living in France for the last
25 years and I’ve lived more of my life
in France than I have in Ireland yet I
still define myself as Irish and if we
may have difficulty defining who we are
we have very little difficulty defining
who we are not we are not like the
others
people from other cultures and this is
because we generally view people from
other cultures in a negative light
as an example let me ask the question
who in Europe do we consider to be cold
pretentious arrogant snobs the answer of
course is the English and apart from the
English not many of us want to be
English I mean who amongst us would like
to be considered as a cold arrogant
pretentious stub no strangely enough
this propensity to view people from
other cultures in a negative and
reductionist light is actually quite
normal
psychologists tell us that we have a
natural tendency to want to put people
into boxes and to keep them there Carl
Jung says that this is part of what he
calls our shadow or our dark side and
even if we have difficulty admitting it
we all have a dark side now we don’t
have time this evening to go into how we
develop boxes for people from different
cultures and so on but one track I would
encourage you to explore is how the
media portrays what is going on in other
countries you will notice that the media
tends to focus on the negative news
the media have learned from the German
word sad schadenfreude ah that the
pleasure we get from the misfortune of
others is something that sells almost as
good as sex now how this impacts
intercultural communication is that the
normal convention for improving the
situation is to analyze the culture of
the people we want to communicate with
so if I want to do business in China
I will first of all analyze the Chinese
culture but this is not always the good
way to go about it because of our dark
side the power of prejudice means that
the majority of us are poor
intercultural communicators what I
suggest is to turn the normal convention
upside down and my inspiration doesn’t
come from the psychologists it comes
from the philosophers ghannouchi say
Alton is an expression we associate with
Socrates though he is not the author and
know yourself means that the first
person our culture we should analyze is
our own this is important because in the
communication process the encoding and
decoding of messages is very much
influenced by our dark side I call these
influences our dysfunctional drivers now
if we were in Ireland I would probably
use as an example the Irish the
deep-seated inferiority complex of the
Irish as an example of a dysfunctional
driver but because we’re in France I
want to take an example from French
culture and to look for clues so as to
improve the intercultural communication
process from a French perspective now
the example I want to talk about is our
angst-ridden
education system now I’m not saying that
French educational institutions provoke
anxiety not at all
anxiety pervades French culture for many
complex and historical reasons the
education system only serves to
highlight this it is not a direct cause
the education system in France is
designed a little like a pyramid and at
the top of the pyramid are the grande
Cal and from an anxiety perspective the
Grande call signify guaranteed
employment and guaranteed status many
French parents want their children to
get into a grande college they love
their children and they want our
children to have a secure future so they
keep reminding them to work hard at
school because the process to get into a
grande Ecole is very difficult and very
stressful
unfortunately what the parents also
communicates is their anxiety and
anxious parents make for anxious
children even if this anxiety remains at
a subconscious level we can see this in
the results of a Pisa study from 2012
which shows that French school pupils
are amongst the most stressed in the
world with nearly 50% of them saying
that they don’t feel well at school
another indicator is the number of young
people in France who aspire to a job in
the public sector over 70% of high
school graduates in France think that
the best option for their future is a
low-paying job with poor career
prospects so there is a subconscious
anxiety in French culture and
concomitant with this anxiety comes a
need to control that anxiety know what
this has to do with intercultural
communication is obvious when we
encounter people from other cultures we
very quickly perceive that there are
differences there are differences in the
way we speak in the words we use and how
we use them there are differences in our
appearance in our dress code
in our values in our beliefs these
differences inject a certain uncertainty
into the communication process they can
be a little destabilizing it’s a little
like riding a log down a river during a
log drive our response to these
differences will depend on we’ll
determine whether the log goes to form a
logjam or whether we keep the flow of
communication going and reach our mutual
objective an unfortunate way is to allow
the communication process to be driven
by our anxiety instead of focusing with
on the anxiety when anxiety drives the
process we tend to either ignore the
person we’re speaking with pretend to
like them we avoid communicating with
them or we act in a hostile way towards
them one way or the other this leads to
a jamming of the communication process
the way out is to apply the
intercultural communication principle
that the psychologist philosopher and
religious leader Jesus Christ speaks
about when he says first remove the log
from your own eye we have to work on
this log we have to recognize and take
responsibility for our anxiety and
anxiety that comes from our values our
beliefs our culture the differences we
experience and meets when we encounter
people from other cultures
may cause us to have feelings of anxiety
and there is nothing fundamentally wrong
with feeling anxious what is wrong is
when we see the differences of others as
the cause of that anxiety this is the
log we have to remove and when we focus
on the deep sources of the dysfunctional
drivers dysfunctional drivers such as
anxiety in France
poor self-image in Ireland both others
dysfunctional drivers such as honor and
shame in about half of the world drivers
such as guilt drivers such as saving
face
and when we focus on trying to attenuate
or reduce the impact of these
dysfunctional drivers will be well on
the way to developing the skills to keep
the flow going in the river of
intercultural communication thank you [Applause]
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