How To Resonate With a Multi-Cultural Audience

Have you ever experienced a situation where you presented an idea or proposal to a person or group of people and you thought your presentation was clear and concise, easy to understand and persuasive, only to have your audience completely disengaged, totally confused or completely opposed to what you were presenting?

I think we have all experienced presentations like this at various times in our careers. This can be quite a common experience if the culture of your audience is different than yours or if the audience is a mix of cultures. In today’s global business world, this can describe almost every meeting or presentation we do!

The subtle and sometimes not so subtle differences between our cultures can cause tremendous misunderstanding and misalignment in all aspects of our communication. If we want to be successful in today’s world of business, it is critical that we spend time to understand our audience and adjust our presentation and communication style to match those we are presenting to. Tony Jeary talks about this in his book Life is a Series of Presentations. In this book he lists eight Presentation Essentials. Number one on his list is “Know Your Audience”, number five is “Build Bridges” and number eight is “Flex for Success”. Essentially he is saying that you go into a presentation after researching your audience, use that knowledge to bridge culture and communication gaps and read the audience all the way through the presentation so that you can flex your presentation to what is resonating most with them.

How Can We Make Projects Anti-Fragile?

Nassim Taleb has written a book entitled Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder  in which he basically defines fragile, robust and anti-fragile as;

  • Fragile – things that are harmed by volatility (e.g., glass bowl, economy, etc.)
  • Robust – things that are not harmed or helped by volatility (e.g., a rock)
  • Anti-fragile – things that thrive and improve with volatility (e.g., athletes with exercise gain strength and skill, entrepreneurs gain experience and resilience, etc.)

You can find a good summary of the concepts in his book in this video interview at http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ .

According to Taleb, the more we interfere with systems to prop them up and eliminate unpredictability and try to smooth things out (i.e., take out the booms and busts of an economy) the more fragile and unstable that system gets. He uses the US economy extensively as an example and illustrates how bailing it out with programs like Quantitive Easing has really only made it that much more volatile and unstable. He states that “man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.” Essentially, as the systems that man creates grow larger, they become so complex we cannot control them. In fact, our attempts to control them only make them more volatile and likely to self destruct through a runaway chain of reactions.

What Kinds of Questions is Your Organization Asking?

Organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask” (David Cooperrider)

Cooperrider is basically saying that your organization takes on the culture of the questions being asked by the leaders.

In his book “A More Beautiful Question“, Warren Berger explained it this way: if your leaders ask questions like; “why are we falling behind our competitors and who is to blame?”, then the business will end up with a culture of turf guarding and finger pointing. However, if the questions are more expansive and optimistic then this will be reflected in the company culture. Berger goes on to say that “we all live in the world our questions create.”