cross cultural sensitivity

Birgitt Williams birgitt at mindspring.com
Mon Nov 6 01:55:43 PST 2000


Dear friends and colleagues in Open Space,
I have been thinking about the implications of this list and Open Space on
Open Space as vehicles through which there is communication across cultures.
Cross cultural communication and cross cultural conflict resolution have
been among my work passions for a few decades. In both contexts we have
chosen to use English as our common language. Did we choose it? Or did some
people comply with the norm somehow? Anyway, we have English and we find
ourselves in difficult spots sometimes and I think some of this is because
we are not sensitive enough to each other's interpretations of similar words
in English. I think there are many different interpretations of Spirit.
Based on country of origin. Yet we handle it as though there is a similar
interpretation. Likewise, I think there are many different interpretations
of other words. I think this was a culprit at OSONOS and we did our best
with it (and thank you to our hosts for having the conference in English).
Do any of you have any thoughts on this? Any suggestions for how we can do
well with our international conversations?

Birgitt
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