Covid gave us the opportunity to experience a new way of working and interacting by taking more advantage of technology.
We have been able to do virtual workshops, develop creative processes, and leverage potential and expertise from different parts of the world.
Yet, something is not working. The full time home office and restrictions have led people to live more and more in their own local reality losing the habit of using English and often also the willing to understand different opinions and different cultural approaches.
Acceptance of what is different happens through personal knowledge and experience. If people live and interact in their everyday lives, they are more likely to understand each other.
The virtual world, on the other hand, allows us to surround ourselves with everything is similar to us and confirms our beliefs. We do not need to make an effort towards the other because we live and are concentrated on ourselves and our context. This complicate relationships reducing the ability to collaborate and generating sometime conflicts based on misunderstandings.
I’ve been working on this for years and actually creating international teams and make them work well together is one of the biggest challenges for a manager. Yet I continue to believe that it is only by bringing different perspectives together that successful projects and concepts can be generated.
The duty and the challenge for us as managers will be to help and facilitate this interaction more and more with greater and very innovative efforts.
Interculturality is also a topic of in my new book “Moving the Moutain“.