Cultural Awareness | Shannon Wellwood | TEDxDaresSalaamIntlAcademy

Have you ever found yourself with your foot stuck in your mouth and you think, I should have known. How did this happen? How does it make me look? I was standing on stage in front of about 200 people and feeling quite comfortable like today when my translator came up to me and said, Shannon, take your hands out of your pockets. Why? I thought. I'm comfortable. This is me. Little did I know that the country that I was in, that the culture that I was in, this was an aggressive stance and I was making an authoritative pose. Every culture that we are in, be it our community, our country, our family, or our school has visible aspects and invisible aspects of culture that define how we interact with one another. Our food, our flags, our language, and our clothing are the visible aspects. But underneath the ocean, there is a plethora of defining aspects which are unseen. This is called cultural awareness or cultural sensitivity or social awareness. And how about this one? This one I didn't know. Zeitgeist. The general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era. So an era or time also has culture. My favorite definition of culture is the unwritten rules of how to be a good member of a group. Because that's what we are. We're members of a group and we're all playing the same game. But is this enough? Is tolerance, is awareness enough? If you're living in a multinational, multicultural city like Dar, is awareness enough? If you go to school, university overseas, is awareness enough? I say no. I say you have to flip that iceberg upside down and figure out what really defines us as individuals and as a group. Now we know that the iceberg is more than two thirds submerged. And it must, there must be so much more information for us to figure out about what makes us tick either as an individual or a group. Edward Hall first used the iceberg as an analogy to culture in the 1990s. And since then, it's been synonymous in understanding. But there are other models. There is Hofstede's model, which takes symbols, heroes, rituals, and values, and defines them through the practice of an individual or a group, similar to the layers of an onion. Then there is Johnson's model with myths and stories, organization, power, control, symbols, and routines, all interconnected in a paradigm, kind of like a spider's web. And the most common is Edward Schein's model, the triangle of artifacts, espoused values and beliefs, and basic assumptions. But my problem with these models is that they don't really tell us how difficult it is to know one another. How do we treat the elderly? Do we live with them in multi-generational homes, or do they live on their own? And what about our personal pleasure? Do we put it before our work? Or is our work more important? Geert Hofstede did his seminal research, and we call it seminal because it's very old. He did it in 1970. But it's very important for this time. He interviewed 116,000 IBM employees across 72 countries, and he defined six critical factors which identify a country's culture. He calls them the six cultural dimensions, the first of which is power distance. And power distance tells us how a country's people look at or expect hierarchy in the relationships they share. Do you speak more casually or more formally with your boss? Individualism is about how a country's people look at I before we, or is it we before I? Motivation for achievement and success tells us how a country, how country's people move towards winning. Is there work-life balance, or are most of the students moving towards university? Uncertainty avoidance is an interesting one for me, because it tells about how a country's people approach public outbursts. Do they shun it, or do they accept it? Long-term orientation tells us if a country uses its history to drive it forward. And the last one is indulgence, and it tells us if a country's people work towards desire and passion. When we look at Canada, where I come from, you can see that power distance scores very low. Out of 100, it's only 39. And this is because Canadians do not expect a high difference in power. It's a flat hierarchy, and so there are very casual conversations between an employer and an employee, or a teacher and students. But in individualism, we score very high at 72, because Canadians are individuals first, and they might only look after themselves and their immediate family, but probably not their grandparents. However, if you compare this to Tanzania, where we all work and live, you see power distance has a great disparity, because in Tanzania, there is a higher expectation of differences in power. But in individualism, it's such a lower score, because Tanzanians tend to play more importance on their religions and their neighbourhood community groups. So I come back to my original question, is awareness enough? Actually, what is in our mind, that is what we call cultural awareness, what we know, our facts. Once we know the facts about flags, fun, festivals, languages, clothing, and even age, then we need to find the motivational intelligence to move us forward, to be able to function in situations that are culturally different. We need to be able to value diversity, and to want to understand, to respect the person and the culture enough to motivate myself forward. And then I need to act on this knowledge and motivation. Applying information that I have into action, to how I behave, embodying the understandings and integrating cultural characteristics into my experiences, allowing me to make better relationships and better friendships without compromising my own principles. But why are these important? And why should you be aware about culture? Well, I can tell you from personal experience, that if you don't know the deep dark secrets about the ocean of culture, and you live overseas, you will have a lot of problems. Just a few weeks ago, I was standing outside, high fiving and fist bumping my students as they came to school. And some of them became uncomfortable. Some of those students are here today. They were young Muslim men who shouldn't have been touching a woman who was not in their immediate family. And what about the conversations that might be overheard that I have with students that might be a little bit less formal, and more familiar than people are used to. So I go back to my original scenario of me standing on stage with my hands in my pocket, thinking, I should have known. But how should I have known? We don't know that our culture is any different from anyone around us. How should I know when to high five, or when to shake hands, or when to bow, or when to just put my hand on my chest? We don't know until we experience it, until someone teaches us the culture behind the action. And that, my friends, is the difference between cultural awareness and cultural intelligence. So I say, turn that iceberg upside down, and visit all of those aspects, those unseen aspects of diversity. And when you learn a culture, don't just understand it, but own it, and celebrate it for the wonder that it is. Thank you.