Intercultural Learning Needs an Upgrade

After I graduated with an advanced degree in cultural anthropology, I found a job as an “intercultural trainer”. They were willing to sponsor me for a Green Card (in the United States), and I was delighted by the opportunity to put what I learned into practice. The match of cultural anthropology and intercultural training seemed obvious and sensible. Except, as I was to discover, it isn’t.

In this new job, I was tasked with developing and implementing training and coaching programs: comparing German to US culture for pharmaceutical companies and Korean to US culture for Korean electronics manufacturers, or contrasting US, UK, French, Japanese, and Australian cultures for US-based telecoms. I found this aspiration and approach profoundly puzzling:

• Why do we use a political construct - the “nation”/country - as the boundary for “culture”? Are we not playing into the hands of “nationalists” when we implicitly support a sense of “cultural homogeneity”?
• Why are we satisfied with broad-stroking characterisations of “others” when we claim nuanced and differentiated descriptions of ourselves?
• What makes us think that we can improve relationships with specific individuals through crude and monolithic generalizations about a country-level culture?
• Why do we focus on the culturally “other” when the insights generated are most often actually about ourselves?

Of course, when the structure of business spans a number of countries, the concept of “national culture” seems intuitive and reasonable. Yet somehow perpetuating the idea of “national culture” felt unsatisfying, even irresponsible - at least given my anthropological training that insisted on culture being a much more local and nuanced phenomenon of social construction.

My sense of discomfort was compounded by the use of value orientations to categorise these “national cultures”. Value orientations - proposed by Hofstede, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, and others - seek to understand cultural differences by identifying core, stable value dimensions, such as individualism vs. collectivism, high vs. low power distance, or high vs. low uncertainty avoidance.

While these seemed meaningful at first glance, it was their use for comparing and contrasting national cultures that felt problematic - mainly for the following reasons:

1. Overgeneralization and essentialism: These models tend to freeze cultures into broadly generalized, monolithic entities with consistent, measurable traits. This essentialized national culture by suggesting that members of a group share fixed traits, values, or behaviors based on their nationality. This perspective overlooks individual variation and the dynamic, contextual nature of identity and culture.

2. Static and ahistorical assumptions: Values orientation theories often portray culture as timeless and unchanging, despite the fact that cultures are in constant flux due to globalization, migration, technological change, and political shifts. They tend to disregard the dynamic and historically situated nature of cultural practices.

3. Context-blindness: Values-based approaches frequently isolate values from the situational contexts in which they are enacted. For example, while collectivism may seem to be a predominant orientation within a group, individuals can behave individualistically in specific situations such as job interviews or academic settings.

4. Simplistic and reductionist use: In practice, values orientation models are often used in overly simplistic ways — turning them into checklists or typologies that can reinforce stereotypes and biases and significantly hinder, rather than promote, genuine intercultural understanding and effective collaboration.

Towards a More Effective Approach

The last point, in particular, became a growing concern for me. In the early days of my career, when conducting training in the contexts of joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, or partnerships, I felt like I was handing out weapons in the middle of a civil war. Rather than promoting the development of openness, mutual adaptation and healthy, constructive relationships, I seemed to validate stereotypes that supported the polarization that was the result of shifting power dynamics in an organizational context. Promoting intercultural understanding on the basis of value orientations by national culture seemed utterly naive and counterproductive.

Ignoring the power dynamics of the use context for intercultural work was no longer an option. Nor was ignoring an individual and a group’s predominant mindset and attitude towards “others” or “otherness”. This made Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model for Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) critically relevant in the qualification of clients and the design of intercultural development solutions. The DMIS outlines a developmental progression from ethnocentric to ethnorelative worldviews.

Intercultural effectiveness and synergy require an ethnorelative mindset. My work, therefore, fell into two fundamentally different types - Type 1: moving participants out of an ethnocentric understanding of cultural diversity into an ethnorelative one, or Type 2: building upon the ethnorelative mindset of participants to guide the process of collaborative co-creation of an inclusive culture together.

In both types of work, the notion of “national culture” was generally unhelpful and unnecessary. At best it can be a useful reference and starting point for Type 1 work.

Value orientations can play an important role when contextually framed and not used as an either/or classification system, but rather both/and. This means that we don’t classify a group of people as individualists, but rather explore when, why and how individualism shows up within a given group, and when, why and how collectivism is exhibited by and within that same group.

These questions ask training participants to become astute observers, learners, and experimenters of culture as a dynamic and nuanced group phenomenon. For me, this also meant that personal reflection needed to be engaged and enabled. It is useful to examine personal preferences/biases and behavioral choices in distinct contexts/situations.

Through these considerations, I began to see my job differently. I embraced the insight that intercultural training was an oxymoron. At best, I could claim to facilitate intercultural development. Rather than delivering training, my job became the design of developmental experiences and stimuli. To me, exchanging 'training' with 'facilitating' is much more than a semantic shift.

Where Intercultural and Diversity Work Meet

I had the great fortune to also engage in diversity work. While you might assume general similarity, it became apparent that these were actually quite different paradigms - at least in their respective beginnings. There were (and are) important parallels. But most importantly both fields offered an opportunity for synergy.

The most obvious and superficial one was the possibility for a more nuanced focus of diversity to shatter the implicit homogeneity of the “national culture” construct. A diversity focus requires a more differentiated description of the social landscape within countries and the respective social power structures and dynamics. This enabled the acknowledgement of different ethnicities, generations, racialised identities, sexual and gender identities, norms and taboos, or socio-economic-, religious-, migration- and linguistic backgrounds. A nuanced understanding of the plurality of social identities within and between national boundaries is a welcome and important upgrade of intercultural learning.

From my perspective, however, the problem with “national culture” for the intercultural field is analogous to “social identity” in Diversity. Both can suffer from the same problems of essentialism, static a-historicism, context blindness, and simplistic reductionism. In fact, diversity work entails the potential to polarize and fracture communities and groups and set back the development of inclusive and equitable organizations, institutions and social systems.

From my diversity work - later DEI work - I learned about the delicate and sensitive way that addressing power and power dynamics requires (if we seek a constructive outcome). Similar to the ethnocentric/ethnorelative distinction of the DMIS, that readiness to address and shift power dynamics requires an analogous developmental shift from an egocentric to sociocentric orientation. An egocentric orientation describes a view of identity based on personal traits, choices, and achievements. Sociocentric orientation describes a view of identity that is shaped by relationships, roles, and responsibilities within and of a given group.

As a result, I developed for myself a simple model to orient myself to the cognitive-emotional landscape of participants and / or groups I work with:

From today's vantage point, this model can easily apply to the political and cultural stances that compete in our current social and political environments.

The right, ethnorelative side of this model describes the tension between personalism and equitable inter-group relations that responsible and responsive DEI work needs to reconcile. I have come to believe that this reconciliation is what Inclusive Leadership is all about. Concretely this means the collective and collaborative stewardship of culture where all stakeholders thrive.

Increasingly, my notion of stakeholder has expanded to include the non-human world - other living organisms that are part of the interdependence ecosystem of life as well as the non-human agents of our own creation. But, I digress.

Back to the deeper concept of culture that can be developed out of a critical reflection at the intersection of intercultural and diversity work.

Culture as a "Dynamic Situational Code"

An alternative to the static, simplistic and reductionist models is to define, describe, and operationalize culture as a "dynamic situational code"—a flexible, context-sensitive system of meaning-making and behavior regulation. This view aligns more closely with constructivist and interpretive paradigms in anthropology and sociology, and also the insights of 'social neuroscience'.

From my perspective, this is more compelling because it recognizes:

• Culture as a process of co-creation and co-construction, not a ‘state’ or ‘trait’. Viewing culture dynamically emphasizes that culture is not something one "has" but something one "does" and develops within groups. People navigate culture as a set of communicative practices that are co-created, negotiated, and reinterpreted in real time. Intercultural learning requires us to become aware of culture as a process, our roles as active participants and co-creators, and the deliberate and conscious exercise of our cultural agency.
• Situational sensitivity: Cultural behavior is not determined by fixed values, but by how people interpret and adapt to specific situations. The same individual might draw on different cultural codes depending on the context—family dinner, workplace, online forum, or public protest. This requires us to focus on the subjective and inter-subjective aspects of cultural conditioning and cognitive-emotional patterning and formatting of our nervous system that underpin choices and behavioral manifestations.
• Multi-dimensional, hybrid identities and code- or style-switching. Individuals possess multiple “cultural repertoires”. They switch between codes and styles fluidly, depending on audience, setting, and intent. In a globalized world these repertoires are expanded and broadened. A dynamic view of culture accounts for hybridity, intersectionality, and the complex identities of individuals who defy rigid cultural boxes.
• Power, agency, and change Culture as a dynamic code is deeply connected to questions of power—who gets to define what is "normal" or "appropriate" and who has a disproportionate influence on the circumstances of others. A perspective that recognizes power dynamics and inequities can explain and navigate the process of cultural co-creation, change and innovation, and inclusive resistance. It sees culture as contested and evolving rather than static and predetermined.

Such an approach - let’s call it “intercultural intelligence” - encourages curiosity, reflexivity, and humility as the foundation for active and practical cultural development.

While value orientation frameworks can provide helpful starting points for cultural comparison, they risk oversimplification and cultural stereotyping. A more nuanced and useful perspective is to understand culture as a dynamic situational code - a system that is contingent, fluid, and shaped through interaction. This approach reflects the lived reality of intercultural encounters and prepares us to navigate the complexity and diversity of contemporary global life with greater agility, insight, and foresight.

Anything but esoteric, theoretical or complicated, it can be translated into five specific skills and practices as the core focus of development:

1. Context Awareness
The ability to perceive and interpret the dynamic cultural elements of a given situation or environment. It involves attuning to the culturally determined meaning of physical, social, and relational cues that influence behavior, decision-making, and communication.

2. Perspective-Taking
The ability to understand and consider another person’s or group’s prevalent thoughts, feelings, experiences, or point of view without judgment and independent of whether or not you agree with it. This means humbly stepping into the experience of others and appreciating their perspective on a given situation. This requires an authentic desire to understand what it is like to be them.

3. Style-Switching 
The ability to intentionally adjust one’s communication or behavior based on the norms of a different cultural context to communicate their intended message or create the desired impact. Style-switching is not assimilation and requires drawing from a broad and flexible cognitive and behavioral repertoire to achieve a particular purpose.

4. Cultural Dialogue 
The ability to initiate and facilitate an open, respectful exchange between individuals or groups from different cultural backgrounds, aimed at increasing mutual understanding, addressing differences, and co-creating shared meaning and/or inclusive norms. Cultural dialogue goes beyond discussion by fostering curiosity, empathy, and a willingness to question assumptions, biases, traditions, and norms — often bridging different perspectives, worldviews, and communication styles in the process.

5. Cultural Mentoring
The ability to leverage one’s intercultural insights, experience, and expertise for the benefit of others and the overall organisation. Cultural mentoring focuses on expanding others’ cultural agility and ability to operate effectively across diverse settings/contexts.

I strongly believe that when culture is understood as a dynamic and situational code, the development of intercultural intelligence is based on a sound foundation. When put into practice, this perspective:

• Avoids essentialising differences
• Allows for important nuance
• Situates cultural practices in a historical context
• Is immanently practical and effective
• Is simple enough, but not simplistic

Parting Thoughts

I wrote this edition in response to the renewed interest in intercultural learning that is currently a reaction to the development and challenges in global organizations, the entrance of new decision makers and solution providers into this space, and also a reaction to the attacks on and scrutiny of DEI. I hope that these reflections can help prevent the spread of overly simplistic and stereotypical categorizations and classification of “otherness”. Educators, researchers, subject matter experts, consultants and “trainers” in this space hold a particular responsibility for encouraging a nuanced, realistic, and inclusive approach to understanding one another and building bridges. And I hope that the above can serve buyers of intercultural services as food for thought and encouragement to critically reflect on the criteria they use to approach intercultural development.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn in April 2025.

About the Author

Joerg Schmitz is a business anthropologist passionate about exploring human behavior through the lens of anthropology and organizational culture. He is the founder and Managing Director of The Inclusive Leadership Institute (@TheInclusiveLeadershipInstitute). After 35 years living in the US and working with organizations and institutions globally, he currently resides in Bremen, Germany. Connect with him at [email protected] to continue the conversation.