Understanding and Getting understood

Asking questions can be a challenging issue for some of our Africa colleagues. But then, let's just not forget about ourselves: do WE ask enough questions?

First of all, why should we? Our logic is, after all, clean and limpid. We were taught to express ourselves in a way to get understood, to rationalize, to bring up facts, figures, to convince. All this is based on logical thinking. How come then that we can encounter these communication challenges? It must be the other one who has some logic issues!

As it turns out, people don't communicate in the same way. There are visuals, auditories, kinesthetics, just to enumerate the most common classifications. Then some of us see things globally, some of us focus more on details. All these features are logical in their way. Why should then Africans not think in a logical way?

Besides using different logic, we all communicate differently and most importantly, we don't say all the presuppositions, beliefs and rules underlying our thoughts. It's like an iceberg where our day-to-day communication, even just one sentence, is only the visible part of what we think.

Here's a great representation of the iceberg theory, took from the Language and Culture Worldwide homepage:

Each culture has its own set of values and thus interpretations of the world. Even in Europe there can be huge differences among cultures, let alone any European culture and an African one. And of course, each African nation, even ethnic group, has its own mindset. 

So if the world is such a complicated place, how do we go about understanding and getting understood? There's no quick miracle for that, although I think that someone who is ready to not understand what's going on around and just watch is better placed than someone who wants to find meaning in a seemingly strange new environment. If we want to understand quickly, we'll just interpret everything through our own culture's values and practices, giving birth to "this is good/ this is bad" judgments. The point is, things are different in Africa and it's neither good nor bad. It is just like that.

As for me, living in Africa is a really good lesson of reality perception. I always knew (somewhere deep down) that ways of thinking, reasoning, constructing and imagining are different from one person to the other. But in a cross-cultural environment the number of misunderstandings is even higher, because people work based on different cultural perceptions. It is of utmost importance to clarify even fundamental concepts and mainly, to adopt a more descriptive language, since I cannot really know what the other person understands of my speech.

So how to go about it when I'm at the workplace, figuring out how to make sure that I communicate clearly enough the goals, my views and expectations, and that I understand my other coworkers' views? I usually ask a great deal of questions to make sure that I what I have said has been understood and that I see more the hidden part of the iceberg. The tool is called "the language compass" and has been developed by Françoise Kourilsky, a French coach. 

It consists of asking questions on 4 different aspects:

• Facts, experiences
• descriptive, sensory language (what do you see? what do you hear? what do you feel?)
• who? when? how? what? how much?

• Rules
• Is this possible / impossible / easy / difficult? Why?
• What stops us from doing this/that?
• What should we do?

• Judgments
• Why is this good / bad / difficult / unacceptable?
• How would you take it if this/that happened?

• Presuppositions, interpretations
• What do you expect from me/him/her?
• How do you know that x causes y?
• How do you know that this/that would happen?
• Why we couldn't do this/that?

These kinds of questions explore the hidden parts of someone's thinking and can shed more light on the internal (person-specific) challenges and possibilities when working together. This is also a great tool to keep in mind when communicating my own ideas, since I have already learnt that I cannot reasonably expect people around me (African or not) to know every aspect of my logic.

I tried it and it worked. I learnt a lot about how my coworkers think, what their values are. It also helped me to get myself better understood, because I know now where to focus my attention when expressing myself. Asking questions is a wonderful tool that we don't use enough. 

Any questions?