Today we offer our culture clue — how people might differ in displaying emotion in public in Germany (compared to other cultures) with the benefit of our Cultural Dashboard tool.
1.
Can you guess the likely outcome? Do you know why you might guess that way? Is it based on direct experience? Old movies? A one-time encounter? Our expectations about a different culture can come from all kinds of sources, many of them pretty unreliable! Before you visit a place that you expect to be different, ask yourself, “What preconcieved notions do I bring to this place where I am visiting?”
Below our cultural dashboard…you can often find the reasoning behind why a culture behaves differently than you might expect in one of these “dials”? Each dial offers some ways that cultures vary in how they decide the way things should be done inside their society. Those guidelines have often been in place for centuries. No one tells them to you; people learn these guidelines by example, passed down from generation to generation. While members most certainly know what the “normal” way to do it where they grew up, they often don’t know it consciously. If you ask them why something is done a certain way, they’re likely to be puzzled by the question. They may not be able to tell you why; the answer is likley to be a quizzical smile, a shrug of the shoulders and “That’s just the way we do things around here”.
2.
Below is our best guess as to how this scenario might come out…..but we know it’s only a guess…and we always bring our “beginner’s mind” (eager to learn, happy to be corrected) to every cultural situation. The cultural dashboard helps you navigate, but it never takes the place of person-to-person interaction, an open mind and a warm heart. .
3.
