Picasso once said: “By the age of eight I could paint like Raphael, but it has taken me another 60 years to learn to paint like a child.”
What Picasso was getting at here was that in order to innovate you have to know the processes and rules very well. In fact you don’t even want to know them but you want to live them, breathe by them, make them automatic/reflex.
In the software development arena (e.g. the Games industry) do we sometime suffer from not knowing the processes and rules well enough before breaking the rules? I would say so. In my experience, I have been confronted in numerous situations where projects were in danger of failing. When asked about the reasons for being in danger (completed over 50 projects), more often then not I find the following issues (list non-exhaustive):
The process is not applied
The code is not fully tested
The communication points between business and technical team are loose
The architecture is not described
The iterations (assuming agile process) are ill defined
Most of the time, when I am looking for the reasons of these issues, I am finding answers such as: “Nobody really applies the process, why would we? We are better the way we do.”, or “No real time for testing by the book, let’s just apply common sense and save money”, or “We are agile, we don’t need documentation.” Ad infinitum.
Am I missing something here? Because to me this looks a lot like laziness hidden behind the ultimate excuse: creativity!
If you are running a business in UK, especially in London, you are very likely to be working with people from all over the world. Since I am presenting seminars and business chats on cross-cultural communication, I am often asked what the implications are on a business. I have already presented some aspects of it in the perspective of off-shore development. I shall now consider the angle of business in general. So, in short, what if you are working with colleagues, partners, providers who are from another country?
Maybe I will start by answering something I already hear coming in your mind: “that surely won’t apply to me since I’ve been working in UK for XX years.” Well, I am far from convinced it is the case. If you are yourself a foreigner in the workplace you live in, at best you are adapted and work on adaptation mode without knowing, but deep inside there are elements of yourself that probably remain what you were educated as.
Before going further I will quickly recap what culture is about in the context of this article. I am using the definition given by Gert Jan Hofstede: Culture is the unwritten book with rules of the social game that is passed on to newcomers by its members, nesting itself in their minds. In other words, it is the sum of all the rules you have learned when you were a kid without necessary knowing you were learning them. They were just “the way to do things”. There are several depths in what makes culture. If we think of it as an onion with layers, in the outskirt we would have the Symbols made of Words, Gestures, Pictures, and Objects that carry a particular meaning only recognised as such by those who share the same culture. These symbols are easily developed and copied from other cultures. It is the layer that will be the easiest to change. Then we have Heroes. This layer is made of persons, alive or dead, real or imaginary, who possess characteristics that are highly prized in a culture and thus serve as models for behaviour. Even if we start sharing more and more Heroes via television (mainly Anglo-Saxon shall I say), these models are often specific to the culture you come from. As a Frenchman I shall mention Asterix who might be known outside of France but is unlikely to be perceived as an influential character. Descartes is definitely influential as we even made an adjective out of him: Cartesian. Heroes can be recent or ancient. In all cases they are known by everybody and associated with a role. This layer is obviously more difficult to change than the previous one. You do not replace the influence of Darwin on the British people and history in a snap. No more than you replace Buffalo Bill or Martin Luther King (Please, I do *not* compare Buffalo Bill and Luther King intrinsically but only as names attached to acts and values you respect or despise). The next layer is made of Rituals. They are activities technically superfluous to reaching desired ends, but within a culture considered as socially essential. They are carried out for their own sake. This goes from ways to greet and pay respect to others, via social and religious ceremonies to discourse and the way the language is used in text and talk. This is becoming really tricky here because you don’t even think about it really. It is the way you shake hands (if you do), the real expectation in asking “How are you doing?”, the way you serve tea, the formula at the beginning and end of a letter, the level of familiarity you allow yourself with people at first encounter and thereafter, how you give a present, a business card, how you invite people and how you visit those who invited you. The list is endless but you understand that none of these thing are summarised somewhere in a book. You “know” them and that’s it. These rituals are very difficult to change for real in your mind. You might adapt slightly but do you really understand the deep meaning of these actions when you learn them as an adult? The last layer and core of any culture is Values; In other words, the broad tendencies to prefer certain state of affairs over others. These are acquired early in our lives. You still don’t walk that you are already learning them: Evil vs Good; Dirty vs Clean; Dangerous vs Safe; Forbidden vs Permitted; Decent vs Indecent; Moral vs Immoral; Ugly vs Beautiful; Unnatural vs Natural; Abnormal vs Normal; Paradoxical vs Logical; Irrational vs Rational, etc. Believe me: these values are not going to change easily. Once you made up your mind on what is nice and what is ugly, it takes a while to change if ever it does.
Now what, will you ask? Fair enough cultures are making us different and we kind of knew that. Well then: what are the consequences on our business relationships? will I ask in return.
So, I would like to present a situation you could encounter when working with foreigners and the potential consequences of misreading the foreigner’s behaviour. I will aim at illustrating the different layers within the fictional scenario. I will talk about a job interview.
Now what happens during a job interview? First of all we have to convene that this situation is highly charged in rituals. From the chosen room to the chosen desk to the chosen team to run the interview, it is very unlikely that the context of the interview is not carefully thought and managed by the interviewer.
On his/her side, the interviewee will carefully select clothes, time for arrival, general attitude, etc.
In this situation, we have several cultural layers involved: - the Symbols one (clothes, haircut, colours, etc.); - the Rituals one with the way to greet each other, the handshake, who sits down first and when, who speaks first, asking permission for taking notes or not, looks into the eyes or down, etc. ; - Then of course, you have the Values one with judging what is right or wrong, normal or abnormal, etc.
So, you could have an interviewee arriving in suit and tie but with tattoos and face piercings, an interviewer relaxed in casual clothes, an interviewee always looking straight into the eyes when talking, an interviewer asking about a 1 year gap in the CV. What do we have to think about that?
A suit is rather risk free for the interviewee as it is becoming a general sign of respect worldwide in business when you do not know the person you are meeting with. But in some situation, that makes you look like a follower depending on the country you are coming from. As a Frenchman, I have to say that you more and more rarely see any suit and tie in the IT business in France. On the other hand, I would not think twice about it for a job in UK as it is the basic rule to wear a suit.
Regarding piercing and tattoos, once again I could imagine that in UK (up to a certain level of course) but hardly in France for a managing job. I remember working for a huge bank in the city and having my manager (on the customer’s side) being a lady, biker and tattooed. That never bother anybody around that she was in charge of a big department. I can hardly imagine the same thing in France. You’d have to hide your tattoos carefully. This is even truer about piercings.
Is looking straight in the eyes a good thing or not? If you refer to a previous article of mine, you can see that this is the case in USA and most probably in most Anglo-Saxon countries. But I remember talking with a friend of mine from Congo about Congolese students who were perceived as not trustworthy by French teachers because they were never crossing your eyes with theirs. What happens is that it is a sign of disrespect to do so in Congo. Therefore these very teachers should have read that as respectful students rather than dodgy ones.
What about the 1 year gap in the CV? That is definitely a sin in France. Everyone in Voltaire’s country knows how to hide a gap in a CV. There are tricks and formulas you will use to pretend you were working when in fact you were raising your kids or travelling around the world. Do the same in Australia and as I understand you become dodgy as everyone expects you to get out and travel for a while, one day. So if you did not do it yet, the employer might think you will in the future and be less keen to hire you. Same CV, two conclusions.
What is important to understand is that there is absolutely no right or wrong in either side of the interview. In both sides people will do what they have been taught to do when they were kids. This has nothing to do with the language you talk and speaking English, German or French will not tell you the rules we are talking about. This is why I am always smiling when I hear someone saying that they have given responsibility of an office abroad to someone based on the fact that this person knows the language. This is nowhere near enough. Culture is all about these things you don’t “see” unless someone told you to look at them. And the most treacherous part of the problem is that very few people are aware of their own rules. So, unless you genuinely understand where things can go wrong, I’d bet they indeed will go wrong at some point.
As we all know, outsourcing off-shore is a complex decision to make for a company. The reasons for doing so are generally cost saving of course, but also the hope to get the development happen faster due to a bigger and more readily available team.
When you have at last made the decision to do it, comes the difficult question of where to do it. By where I mean of course what company to use but I also mean where geographically. I’ll put myself in the shoes of a UK company as this is where I am working. So, you are based in UK and you want to use the services of people living in a remote cheaper country. Will you go in India as many have done? Will you go in Russia? Will you prefer to get closer with Eastern Europe? What about China? Then come more elements in the equation: language, time difference, reputation, process certification, etc. These are difficult parameters and indeed having 2h difference with the off-shore team surely needs a different logistic than having 8 or 10. Some argue that a big difference allows a team to work when the other is not and some will say that having a small difference allows better communication. All these questions and answers are valid, of course. But I would like to add one that is rarely taken into account: how will we get on with the local culture?
I was recently delivering a Cross-Cultural Communication Workshop for a customer which has decided to outsource in Romania. This workshop was part of a longer seminar designed to get both British and Romanian team acquire the same understanding of the project along a proper team building. This seminar happened about 20km from Dracula’s castle. By the way, for those who would not know, Dracula has indeed existed. He named was Vlad III, prince of Valachy (today Romania), but although he was incredibly violent and probably sadistic, he was not a vampire. I recommend reading his biography as I did if you are curious. Back to my topic, I have to say that it is the first time that I am working on a project that is started with so much care and energy, a real good start, but that is another story. So I had to prepare a specific workshop related to culture. And by culture, here I do not mean sharing the same movies, music or even type of clothes. Even sharing the same language is not relevant. I mean what is making a people a people; what is giving in individuals this feeling of belonging to a specific group of human beings on this planet.
I cannot really present the whole content of the workshop I delivered but I can still present some elements of it.
First of all, I shall introduce the concept of cultural dimension. There are many schools of thought regarding what elements are really describing a culture. Some like Edward T. Hall in his series of books started with Beyond Culture will emphasise on things such as time and space management. For instance, some cultures will have a more linear way to deal with time like the Germans (one task at a time) and some will have more a multi-task approach like South American countries or even France. For space, you will have also big difference like for instance simple but important things such as open and closed space. Americans will feel better in open spaces and open doors when Germans (T. Hall worked extensively on Americans and Germans) will prefer closed doors. Some others like Geert and Gert Hofstede in Cultures and Organizations will describe a culture along 5 dimensions:
1/ Power Distance, or the way the society is dealing with power, equality and inequality.
2/ Individualism/Collectivism, or how the society is dealing with individuality inside the group.
3/ Masculinity/Feminity, or how the society is dealing with gender and their roles within the group.
4/ Uncertainty Avoidance, or: is the unknown and unexpected dangerous?
5/ Long/Short Term orientation, or what do you value best: now or tomorrow?
Each of these dimension deserve a whole article if not a book like the Hofstedes did. But if you take my word for a moment that these are indeed valuable ways of describing a culture, then you might be interested in knowing where you stand on these compared to your offshore selected service provider. That’s what I did for my customer and I can present the result and discuss it in here.
The following diagram presents the relative positioning of UK and Romania on 4 of the 5 dimensions (the studies have not included Romania in the Short/Long term Orientation but it is likely to be comparable with UK and the rest of Europe). This is the result of different studies presented in Cultures and Organisations. I have to insist on an important point: these studies have been conducted on 74 countries and the results are relative to each country included in the study. The maximum scores in each dimension is around the 100 mark; sometimes below, sometimes above. You need to check the next diagram to get the full picture.
The following diagram presents the rank within the study of UK and Romania for each dimension. The number of countries included in the study is 74. Therefore, for each dimension there is a number 1 and a number 74 which represent the min and max. Once again, this position is therefore relative and it is perfectly possible to find a country outside of the study which would score far above or even below in a dimension. But 74 countries is not a bad panel considering that the number of countries in the world is about 195 (open to debate as it seems but out of the scope of this article).
I hope that my explanations about the diagrams and dimensions are clear enough. I am here summarising hundreds of pages of studies and books. If you find it confusing, let me know and I’ll try to clarify. If you have only one thing to check in these diagrams, it is the difference between the red and the blue on each dimension. The bigger the difference the bigger …well the difference in culture.
What do we learn from this diagram? Beyond the details of each dimension, we learn that British and Romanian cultures stand quite far from each other on 4 of the 5 dimensions. We learn that misunderstanding is very likely to happen at different levels. In short, we learn that if Romania is closed geographically to UK both people are not so close. Several types of misunderstanding can happen on the project and we’d rather know beforehand then improvise during the course of the project.
I’ll take one dimension to illustrate what it means in real life terms for a project. If you consider the Power Distance Index (PDI) we see that Great Britain scores 35 in 63rd position, and Romania scores 90 in 7th position. If we understand that Power index, within a company could be related to the level of power the boss has on the subordinates, then you understand that a British manager will expect his staff to speak their mind. On the other side, the Romanian manager is used to get respect and his authority is not something to consider lightly. Then, one day, you have a member of the UK “basic” staff talking to the Romanian manager as he/she does with the British one: openly. And for some reasons the dialogue from that day has not worked very well and became more formal and cold. Nobody knows exactly why. After a while, the UK team starts to think that “these lot other there” are difficult to work with and quite incapable of proper communication. On their side the Romanian team suffers as well from the poor communication and think that the British are a bunch of difficult people, showing no respect for hard work and valuing the Romanian team work far under its real worth. In a word, both sides start to believe the other one is kind of crazy and at the minimum impossible. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? I’m afraid nobody is! You are not right or wrong because you behave like you have been taught to. You are not guilty of respecting the rules. The thing is: the rules are different. But worse: the rules are not written, they are invisible and worst of all, we are not even aware of the rules we are applying. They are the rules and that’s it. We apply them without knowing.
Of course, my scenario is not guaranteed to happen. Of course, individuals do not necessarily comply 100% with the “typical” behaviour of their country. Of course, the British in here could have travelled and be more prepared. Yes the Romanians do not have to be typical either. But whole in whole we all know in our guts that what I have described is possible if not likely. We know that this level of misunderstanding is not a crazy scenario and we also know that the consequences on a project can be dramatic.
How do I answer the initial question I used as a title: Where on earth will we outsource offshore? I’ll suggest the following: integrate in the equation the cultural challenges of the situation! Do not overlook the problem and certainly do not consider that sharing American movies on TV will make us all Americans. This is a doomed approach and also a costly one. Prepare your staff. Prepare the offshore staff. Use the services of someone experienced in such matter. Always always keep an open mind when you are in trouble and start thinking the other side is impossible. What about you? Are you impossible to work with?
I could carry on and I probably will in a future article.
Cross-cultural communication is a challenge for everyone! As Gert Jan Hofstede puts it in Exploring Culture, “Cross-cultural misunderstanding is a much under-estimated cause of trouble.” I am currently working a lot on this question for different reasons and I am very attentive to every cross-cultural trouble I am in front of. Working in London UK is a wonderful playground for the cross-cultural observer.
When you study cultures, the one topic that you need to be aware of is stereotypes. Almost every nation is seen with some specific attributes in the eyes of the other countries. To mention just a few, Germans are very organised, French are wine experts, English drink tea all day long, Italians speak a lot, etc. If you are a disorganised German or a very quiet Italian will not do any good as you are not as expected anyway. I remember a situation like that when I was 25. I was travelling the USA for 2 months. I was lucky enough to know a couple of families over there. These friends did something very good for me: they arranged for me to travel the country almost always from friends to friends; these friends sending me to other friends and so on. That was fantastic! But something I was not expecting happened to me at some point. In new-Orleans, I met a lady who had been informed of my arrival. And guess why she was waiting for me? …Because she wanted me to kiss her hand in order to say hello. Man! I had never ever kissed anybody’s hand before in my life! The only thing I knew was that you are not actually suppose to really “kiss” the hand and that to do it properly; you don’t bring the hand to your mouth but your mouth to the hand. Well, in any case, you should never disappoint a lady! I was lucky enough to have been tipped beforehand and could prepare myself for it. So I did kiss her hand. As far as I know she was delighted.
On another occasion during that trip, I had the opportunity to discover another feature of “frenchism” I was not expecting, but this time i was less lucky. In Delaware, I was invited for dinner by some friends and they took me to the local wine shop before the dinner to choose some good wine. The trouble was, at that time, I knew nothing about wine. I did not like wine and never drunk any (I have fixed that since). I told my friends but they did not believe me. So, I thought that, as I did with the new-Orleans lady, I should not disappoint. Then I picked a bottle of wine from a region I knew my family was fond of. We went home, opened the bottle and they asked me to taste it and give my opinion. I did. My opinion was as vague as I could decently be and I asked for theirs. I’ll never forget that one: they found the wine really average to remain polite. I failed and somehow disappointed. What sort of Frenchman was I? Since then, and especially to avoid that shame again, I have decided to study wine and I consequently created a few wine clubs of my own. But that is another story.
In fact, I did not start that text in order to tell you about my wine misery but to tell you about cultural stereotype. As you see it is important to understand what stereotypes you have in mind for other nations and maybe be ready for the fact that everyone from that country is not necessary complying fully with the stereotype.
Now, I think it would be useful, in order to prevent cross-cultural misunderstanding, to not only be aware of stereotypes we have in mind for others but also stereotypes we have in mind for our own nation. Somehow, when you are travelling or dealing with foreigners, you have in the back of your mind something about what you should be as a whatever-country-you-are-from. This stereotype might change your behaviour in ways you would not think too much of otherwise.
I was watching a series on DVD the other day that gave me a great illustration of how you can caricature yourself when you pretend to be a true member of your country. This series is Mission Impossible. Not that I am particularly proud to be watching it but it reminds me of my younger time when I watched it on TV. The episode I am referring to is about a bad guy from the other side of the iron curtain who is specialising in guess what: American culture. Yes, this evil man is training people at behaving just like real Americans. The training camp is already a piece of choice as it represents the most average image of American city you could think of. Amazing! Our Mission Impossible Forces manage to infiltrate the camp and pretend to be candidates for being trainees in the camp. And they are clever at that, believe me! At some point they get clear lessons of what a “true American” would do and not do. I’ll give you two out of the four or 5 the episode contains.
A true American looks into the eyes when shaking a hand! Check that dialogue between Rollin Hand and Mr Bad guy. And see as well how the other candidates know their lesson better than Rollin Hand. Look at their eyes! That’s very amusing!
A true American woman knows how to behave with a man compared to these comrade girls from central Europe! Cinnamon needs to get the attention of Mr. Bad Guy and almost fails because she was not behaving as decently as a true American woman would do. Have a look at that!
I found that very amusing because in this very case, the caricature is coming directly from the nation itself. It is not how the others see the Americans but how the Americans see themselves compared to the rest of the world. I certainly do not pretend to take any lesson from a Mission Impossible episode regarding cross-cultural communication. I certainly do not even wish to judge in any way the content of that episode which is all about the cold war. I wonder what the TV series could have been on the other side. As exaggerated I suppose! Last but not least: this illustration is about Americans, but I am convinced that we could find similar examples for other cultures by searching other movies. Americans are not better or worse than anybody else at that. Do not take me wrong, this is not about Americans, or Germans or French or whatever, this is about culture perception, nothing else!
I think you can always learn and get opportunities for deeper thoughts when attentive to your environment, including while watching such stuff like Mission Impossible TV series.
In the end, I just wanted to say that we should always be aware of what we believe the others are like but also what we believe we personally are before working in a cross-cultural environment. The awareness of both sides should defuse a good load of troubles!
“Please sign here!” Every time I hear that sentence I am worried about what I am doing. And every time I am in the same situation: I have to sign to move forward but I am leaving part of my freedom away. This is true when you get a mortgage or a credit, when you sign a mobile phone contract, an energy supplier contract or actually, every time you sign a contract with somebody more powerful than you are. Even when I sign a letter I wrote myself I might be worried about what the receiver could do with it, provided the receiver is a powerful administration.
Why on earth am I worried about what I am signing off? After all, in almost all cases I even looked forward to get to that point. I did want to buy that expensive stuff that I will pay over 55 years. I did want to get that mobile connection so that I can be disturbed any time or indeed disturb anyone I want any time I want. I did want that life insurance that will protect me and my family. So what’s wrong? The answer is trust. I actually do not trust a single second that the other party will play a fair game. First of all the contracts I am signing are made of 4 to 10 pages of famous small prints. I am asked to sign when I have not read any of these lines. Should I want to do it, the person in front of me would find that outrageous. Should I decide to indeed read it, I would not even understand what I am signing anyway. And believe me, I am not someone giving up in front of words.
But why, are you asking, is he telling us about these signatures that we all know about anyway? I am because as a consultant in software project optimisation, I have been asked again and again how we can reconcile sign-offs and iterative process. This is most of the time the case in organisations coming from a strong waterfall process culture. Before answering that question, I’d like to analyse what it means in a software project to get these sign-offs.
Recently, we were consulting for a rather big public service which had troubles with their software delivery. Basically, they had reached a point where the business side of the projects almost refused to sign any kind of requirements document. They were saying that they did not understand the content well enough. So they were delaying sign-offs as far as they could and incidentally creating a mess in the IT department’s schedule. The business did not want to sign and the technical team refused to start before sign-off. Why? Because, they say, the business people can’t make their mind and always change their view of what is needed. “You can’t work with people like that.” In fact, I would say that this organisation had reached a kind of honesty point where everyone was recognising almost heart fully that the other side was a bunch of crooks. …But were they? Do not forget that they were all part of the same organisation!
My answer to that is of course connected to that dreadful signature that you need to put on that big fat un-understood document. The very reason why you have a need for a signature on a document is because you do not trust the other part for doing their job in the first place. If you do trust the other party, then this document is seen rather differently as a way to state what we both believe is what needs to be done. If things change in time, as we both trust each other, we will re-read that document and surely amend it as needed. That is what I do with trusted partners. Yes we have paperwork done but we all know that this is not what our deal is based on in reality. In fact, if you really try to describe in writing what a proper, honest, healthy deal is based on, you end-up with or a very light document describing in a few lines what the objectives are, or you end-up writing forever all the things you mean, you meant, you will probably mean and you surely would mean otherwise. It is mission impossible! That is why these law firms are making such a huge amount of money for writing a contract. And guess what? Even with these big fat contracts, the same law firms will make even more money in trial to explain the proper interpretation of that contract. It is hopeless! My view is that there is no need for building relationships on these bases. I would even say, it is the top level management responsibility to make sure that internal departments of the same organisation do not apply these hopeless rules to projects supposed to increase the business profitability. It is almost a crime to do so!
And here comes a better approach with the iterative software development processes. I will not explain in detail what this is about because it is almost common knowledge nowadays and it would take longer than this text to do so. In short, for those who have not boarded the train yet, iterative development is based on the idea that you will not wait for the final version of any specific step to do the next one. You will develop the software in small chunks. But mainly: you will deliver the software regularly from as soon as possible. As a result of these deliveries, you are building guess what? Indeed: trust! Where is the signature then? Oh sure you can maintain them if you wish. What about signing there for the piece of work we will deliver next week? Great, let me sign that and see you next week to make sure that I get what I have in mind. It is much more of a gentlemen handshake than a lawyer contract. If by any chance you do not get what you had in mind, you will make it known and make sure that you get it next week. And believe me; nobody in the IT department will be bothered by a change to do on a one week work.
Everywhere we have implemented such approach we have the business getting addicted to this delivery mode and the level of trust is rising like mad! If you want to have a better idea of the in depth reasons why this is happening and why the business if empowered again in front of IT, you can check on my previous article Iteration size and the tap water glass.
What is culture and what does it mean to be a foreigner? Don’t worry; I will not give a detailed answer to these two questions; that would need 100s of pages to do so. These 2 questions, I had to ask them to myself when I married a foreigner and when I moved to live in London-UK. In fact, it is crucial to be able to answer, at least in part, to these questions to live happily with different cultures.
In short, and I’ll come back to that, living in harmony with a different culture than yours is difficult and there are so many good reasons for that that you should not feel bad about it. At the same time, we have seen in the recent years enthusiasm for off-shore outsourcing. Depending on what country you are based in, the elected off-shore country is always one which is more or less speaking your language. I’ll take two examples: United Kingdom will outsource in India due to their English heritage. France will outsource in North Africa for the same reason. Of course, other parts of the world are heavily used, like Russia, Eastern Europe, China, etc. But anyway, for at least UK and France, I can say that common language is seen as the way to work together.
Now what happens? Every day, we hear more and more about disappointed companies regarding the success of their off-shore outsourcing. And most of the time, the complains are the same and turn about inability to understand each other, deliveries that have not much to do with expectations and in the end, some managers recognise they would be far happier if they could stop dealing with “this lot over there”. In a word: misunderstanding!
The point is: communication is not about using common words and common grammar. Culture is not about TV programmes or football results (another topic for a next article regarding off-shore and call-centres). Until we acknowledge the real complexity of culture, the real meaning of belonging to a people, the serious complexity of human communication we will end-up in misunderstanding. This misunderstanding can be very costly indeed when a company is injecting huge amount of money off-shore with the expectation to get things faster and better.
In “Beyond Culture”, Edward T. Hall, explains that whatever the domain, there is something universal in communication: the message received by a target is always composed of the message, history (previous communications), internal context (pre-programmed reactions from the receiver) and the external context. If the external and internal contexts are supposed to play an important part in the decoding of the information, we are in a “rich context”. If the message contains all the information needed for the decoding, then we say the context is “poor”. Of course we permanently adapt to the situation but there is one element we hardly adapt to: the culture and all the things that we are all supposed to know. The problem is that during a cross-cultural communication both sides of the channel will make the wrong assumptions by considering a common ground for this context. This is precisely how we end-up with reactions such as:
“How could they convert what we said into this?”
“It was quite obvious that we would not want that!”
“We have to tell them everything like children!”
And so on…
In fact, yes, when we are dealing with a different culture, just like children, we have to learn again the basics. So, I hear you say, what do we do?
First of all, we need to recognise that fact that whoever we are dealing with, as soon as they are from a different culture (and you do not have to go far from home to find that) there will be misunderstanding. It is the nature of the relationship we are creating in the first place. It will then become far easier to fail than be successful. Then we need to understand that being ISO or CMMI compliant will not solve that, it will just guarantee that the misunderstanding is following the agreed process! You will get high quality rubbish! Then we need to take action to tackle what the real problem is: a cross-cultural communication challenge.
I will not detail here all the steps you need to take to improve the communication in the context of an off-shore project bur I can mention a few:
Produce less plain English documentation;
Increase the use of modelling languages such as UML which convey the poorest context you can think of and therefore maximises your chances to share the same identical understanding;
Agree on the framework/process you will use and incorporate in this process steps that will identify risks, potential misunderstandings and errors as soon as possible;
Use a risk driven approach to your development;
Use an iterative development cycle with short iterations (I mean short!);
Increase the human to human relationship and do not trust that what you have sent in writing will happen fine. Follow-up, talk, meet and remain calm on both sides as everybody is probably trying his best;
Run workshops on cross-cultural communication so that everyone understands the nature of the problem to come;
Stop thinking you are going to change the other side. That will not happen!
In the end, in these times of globalisation, I believe it is futile to try to avoid these problems. Off-shore or not off-shore, companies are international and very often the off-shoring is in fact using another part of the same company. Belonging to the same company is a plus but not a guarantee to be understood. I strongly believe as I have experienced it myself, that working on the matter with the firm intention to remain intellectually honest and true is going to make a difference and drastically increase the likelihood of success in your projects!
John von Neumann, the “father” of computers as they are now, has said: There’s no point in being exact about something if you don’t even know what you’re talking about. I like that quote and I’ll tell you why.
I have delivered again and again courses about requirements management and requirements gathering. There is no surprise to that, as bad requirements are the main reason for failing projects. The ways to get “bad requirements” are countless. I am not going to detail them today. Today, I am interested in an interesting phenomenon about natural language. It happens that I had to work with the topic of natural language during my PhD and since then I keep an eye on it. As I am also interested in learning languages (I have learnt Hungarian out of curiosity and intellectual challenge) I keep a second eye on it. So, what do my eyes tell me?
I bought the other day “The Story of Writing” by Andrew Robinson at the British Museum (I love the British Museum and its library is killing my wallet every time I go). In the introduction it talks about the different writings over the world. We all know that learning Chinese is far more difficult than learning English. Of course, it is obvious but the explanation why is still interesting. I quote:
All scripts that are full writing – that is, a ’system of graphic symbols that can be used to convey any and all thought’ (to quote John DeFrancis, a distinguished American student of Chinese) – operate on one basic principle, contrary to what most people think, some scholar included. Both alphabets and the Chinese and Japanese scripts use symbols to represent sounds (i.e. phonetic signs); and all writing systems use a mixture of phonetic and semantic signs. What differs – apart from the outward forms of the symbols, of course – is the proportion of phonetic to semantic signs. The higher the proportion the easier it is to guess the pronunciation of a word. In English the proportion is high, in Chinese it is low. Thus English spelling represents English speech sound by sound more accurately than Chinese characters represent mandarin speech; but Finnish spelling represents the Finnish language better than either of them. The Finnish script is highly efficient phonetically, while the Chinese (and Japanese) script is phonetically seriously deficient.
So, in short, you can read accurately Finnish when you know the rules and you cannot do that that easily with English. Here is a diagram (from DeFrancis and Unger) that shows on a theoretical continuum the different writing systems, between pure phonography and pure logography.
What is says is that the closer you are to Pure Phonography, the easier to read and produce the adequate sounds. Interestingly enough, I spent most of my life believing that French was harder to read than English when it is the opposite. And believe me, as a Frenchman adopting English as my working language I have learnt my lot of words that you cannot pronounce unless you know them already. But that is another story.
So, what we discover here is that, every language is made of phonetic and semantic signs, and that the phonetic is far from perfect. Now, what about the semantic? Back to our requirements, what is important to us is the information conveyed from one person to another, the semantic. In fact, it is even worse than the phonetic aspect! What we mean when producing a sentence is different depending on the context. It is different depending on your culture (with the same words). It is different depending on your age, experience, time of the day, etc. Let’s take a couple of examples:
Suppose you are at your doctor’s waiting room with your kid. You have been waiting for a while and your child is getting bored and looking for some fun to kill the time. She is now taking magazines, tearing them apart. Then she is moving chairs making noise and disturbing everybody trying their best to read something. You take your child apart and say: “That’s enough. I am tired of you. I don’t know you anymore!” Every one of you, readers, understands that we don’t mean “I don’t know you!” but “I am ashamed and I wish people would not know we are related.”
Now take the same sentence after being cheated by someone you really counted on. Someone who is disappointing you like never before. You now say: “I don’t know you anymore!” In this case you mean something like: “I do not want to have contact with you anymore. If I ever do, I will behave like if we were strangers.”
The example I often use in my trainings is the expression “I’m going to kill you!” Clearly, this is an expression that rarely means what the words are supposed to say; which is quite fortunate! We can read the meaning in the intonation, the facial expression, the body language, the precise context when it is said, etc.
So where is this leading? It is leading to the fact that most of projects failing due to poor requirements are counting on written natural language only; which means you remove intonation, facial expression, body language and so on. Only remains words. And words are so weak at being precise!… These projects are trying to prevent the unexpected by writing to death all the details of the project when in fact, the more you write, the more inaccuracy you add to the project. This is intrinsic to natural language. There is no way you can define all the details of a software project in writing only and be accurate. So, there must be other ways to do it. And indeed there are multiple solutions. I list without specific order: use of diagramming techniques like UML, increase the communication level between business stakeholders and IT team, implement documentation reviews, produce a project/company dictionary, get workers to know each other and understand each other’s roles, remove silos and ivory towers within the project and so on. I’ll surely pick some for a future topic.
Keep in mind: natural language is treacherous and not created for understanding without adding human context. If it were the case, after all these years trying to write laws with precision, we would not need any more to refer to jurisprudence. We still do; which means we still are unable to write law and mean precisely what we mean. So why would we for software?
When I teach iterative approach in software development, I use to justify it with an analogy that I have borrowed from Kent Beck: managing software is like driving a car; you permanently need to adjust left and right if you don’t want to have an accident. That’s a fine analogy and it always worked for me. Being myself deeply convinced that iterative approach is a completely natural human behaviour I have added my own list of images, examples and stories to reinforce the concept. For instance, I often ask my audience in autumn, how many in the classroom know precisely what they are going to do for Christmas eve. At best I have a couple of people saying they do and all the other ones showing uncertain faces. If I ask how many have a rough idea of what they are going to do, most hands come up. And all in all, we all know that Christmas will come and that we’ll do something special on the 24th and 25th. Interestingly, you will notice that nobody is seriously contemplating the idea to postpone Christmas because we would not be ready. So, we deal with it!
I often use another example and ask my delegates to plan a year long trip around the world to start in 3 months time. To keep a long story short, we always end-up with at best a planned trip for the first weeks and a lot of unknown to adapt to the situation. I never had the case of someone describing week by week what they will be doing, visiting, and where they will be sleeping or what transportation they will use. But they can all assure that they will travel around the world, …and be back at work on a very specific date! So, we can get firm and confident on the objectives without planning like mad all the details of the plan.
Now, I am asking the question: if we, for our own personal interest, can’t figure out what the plan will be for Christmas, 6 weeks in advance, or where we’ll be sleeping in a trip 6 weeks inside the journey, I wonder why on earth we would be naturally interested (I mean genuinely, deeply, honestly) in knowing what the plan will be for our software in 6 or 12 months time. I am not challenging the relevance of the question in terms of business planning, budget management, sales perspectives. I am challenging it in human terms. The scale an individual is comfortable with has nothing to do with the scale some big projects are talking about.
One way to tackle that problem is definitely to manage the project iteratively. This has the immediate benefit to reduce the time scale to something people can naturally cope with. We all can have an objective in mind to achieve in the next 3 weeks. So, in terms of connecting with human’s behaviour, it does the job. Now, does it have other serious implications in terms of business benefits? Here comes my glass of tap water!…
This example is taken from “The Fith Discipline” by Peter M. Senge. The point of the chapter it is taken from is to be able to describe the root cause of problems rather than stick to the surface of the problem. So, here is the example: one is trying to fill a glass of water from the tap. This simple action is in fact rather complex and involves a real time reaction to the situation if one wants to get the glass filled right. We never think about it but that’s what we really do (the arrows mean “influences”):
Now that works fine because of the speed of the influence between each step. You get immediate change in the water flow when you move the faucet and you see immediately any change in the level of water in the glass. Now comes the interesting bit: what if we introduce a delay in the system? What if we had a 5 seconds delay between the move of the faucet and the flow of water? That would look like this:
Concretely, you are very likely to overfill the glass due to the lack of response from the system when you make an input! What I find interesting in that simple fact is that if you think of the system as a Software Development Project, then you get the following:
At that stage, if you are the sponsor of the project, your obsession becomes to remove the delay in the system. The longer the time between, in one hand, the injected money and effort and, in the other hand, the possibility to evaluate the result (perceived gap box), the bigger the error will be. This is what Peter Senge calls a reinforcing loop. Pragmatically, the consequence of this will be:
More money injected due to the lack of response of the system. This is the equivalent of one opening the flow of water bigger because there is no response.
Counterproductive actions due to the feeling of panic that target will not be met in time. Imagine that the delay is now 30 minutes when you are filling your glass, we would probably be hitting the faucet, swearing at the pipe, put the glass aside while we would look into this, even maybe start some unnecessary quick fixes, like opening other taps to fill the glass. We would certainly start thinking of reducing our objective and intend to fill the glass by 30% only. We might even call the plumber for enlarging the pipe to fix this problem once and for all when this is not the problem.
In the end, I think it is important to understand that an iterative development approach is not only beneficial to the development team in terms of respecting the human scale of projects but also very beneficial in terms of financial control. The more often you get a feedback for the effort put in the project, the less you will waste time and energy fixing the wrong problems on the project! So, let’s get the shortest possible iterations in our software development projects!
Who in the software industry has not worked in one of these huge open-spaces readily available in many workplaces? Those who have not can probably consider themselves as the exception. Those who have, probably wonder where on earth this idea of putting dozens and dozens of people in the same room to produce software, come from. I’d love to meet that guy who suggested that first, just to be able to put a face on it. I doubt there is only one source. Anyway… my point is not to find the culprit but to think about the consequences of such choice.
The question came to me first when I was asked to work in such place, then when I read Peopleware (Tom DeMarco) and then when I read about the Zajonc experience. All in all it deserves to think about it.
Let’s start with the Zajonc experiment. Robert B. Zajonc (pronounced Zy-unce – like Science with a Z; born 1923) is a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. In 1969, this fellow and his team have conducted a strange experiment with cockroaches. He found out that cockroaches ran faster down a runway to escape a light source if the runway was lined with an "audience" of onlooking fellow cockroaches (each in its own plexiglass cubicle). This work led to the theory that the mere presence of species mates elevates drive/arousal of the performer. Since then, plenty of other research teams have lead other experiments. In the end, a meta-analytic review has been conducted by Bond and Titus in 1983 of both published and unpublished works involving over 20,000 participants. I give you the overall conclusions:
Yes, the presence of others has an impact;
This impact is positive for simple tasks and negative for complex tasks.
Here comes my question: what is the impact of working in open-spaces for the software industry? Are we, like the cockroaches likely to perform better because of the others watching us or are we, like Bond and Titus found likely to perform less because of this situation? Clearly, we cannot consider software production as the result of a reflex, like running, eating or having sex (yes, studies have shown it works on sex as well!) Although requiring highly collaborative activities, software production requires a high level of concentration, thinking and lonely work. None of these can be done in an open space where:
You can hear 5 colleagues phone conversations at any time;
You can be interrupted by anyone seeing you and wishing to ask a question, share a coffee or simply say hello;
You benefit from the never ending printing noise of the whole floor;
Etc.
And anyway, you’ll notice the high number of workers using headphones to isolate themselves from the crowd. I have even personally put ostentatious headphones on my head, although not listening to anything, just to stop people from interacting with me.
In fact some research have demonstrated why we are doing that. The key fact is that when we are bombarded with attentional demands, our focus of attention shrinks (Geen 1976). Did we need a research to know that? Clearly, some companies (quite a lot in fact) should read a bit more about human interactions and behaviour. They might rethink their workplace strategy!
Let’s think about IT!
Quotes from books I read
National culture is the name we give to that which distinguishes the people of one country from those of another. National culture runs deep. It is taught to children from the day they are born. Does it matter whether a child is female or male? What about social class? Do children accompany their mother all day? Does the family sleep in one room or even in one bed? Do grown-ups teach their children to use different behaviour toward the elderly, the young men, women? To stand up and fight or to sit down and talk? To speak their mind or to save others’ face? To wear shirts, shorts, veils, caps? Or are all these things theirs to decide, and if so from what age? — Gert Jan Hofstede and al, Exploring Culture
If you are running a business in UK, especially in London, you are very likely to be working with people from all over the world. Since I am presenting seminars and business chats on cross-cultural communication, I am often asked what the implications are on a business. I have already presented some aspects of it in the perspective of off-shore development. I shall now consider the angle of business in general. So, in short, what if you are working with colleagues, partners, providers who are from another country?
Before going further I will quickly recap what culture is about in the context of this article. I am using the definition given by Gert Jan Hofstede: Culture is the unwritten book with rules of the social game that is passed on to newcomers by its members, nesting itself in their minds. In other words, it is the sum of all the rules you have learned when you were a kid without necessary knowing you were learning them. They were just “the way to do things”. There are several depths in what makes culture. If we think of it as an onion with layers, in the outskirt we would have the Symbols made of Words, Gestures, Pictures, and Objects that carry a particular meaning only recognised as such by those who share the same culture. These symbols are easily developed and copied from other cultures. It is the layer that will be the easiest to change.
the British people and history in a snap. No more than you replace Buffalo Bill or Martin Luther King (Please, I do *not* compare Buffalo Bill and Luther King intrinsically but only as names attached to acts and values you respect or despise).
asking “How are you doing?”, the way you serve tea, the formula at the beginning and end of a letter, the level of familiarity you allow yourself with people at first encounter and thereafter, how you give a present, a business card, how you invite people and how you visit those who invited you. The list is endless but you understand that none of these thing are summarised somewhere in a book. You “know” them and that’s it. These rituals are very difficult to change for real in your mind. You might adapt slightly but do you really understand the deep meaning of these actions when you learn them as an adult? 
Now what happens during a job interview? First of all we have to convene that this situation is highly charged in rituals. From the chosen room to the chosen desk to the chosen team to run the interview, it is very unlikely that the context of the interview is not carefully thought and managed by the interviewer.
Regarding piercing and tattoos, once again I could imagine that in UK (up to a certain level of course) but hardly in France for a managing job. I remember working for a huge bank in the city and having my manager (on the customer’s side) being a lady, biker and tattooed. That never bother anybody around that she was in charge of a big department. I can hardly imagine the same thing in France. You’d have to hide your tattoos carefully. This is even truer about piercings.
What is important to understand is that there is absolutely no right or wrong in either side of the interview. In both sides people will do what they have been taught to do when they were kids. This has nothing to do with the language you talk and speaking English, German or French will not tell you the rules we are talking about. This is why I am always smiling when I hear someone saying that they have given responsibility of an office abroad to someone based on the fact that this person knows the language. This is nowhere near enough. Culture is all about these things you don’t “see” unless someone told you to look at them. And the most treacherous part of the problem is that very few people are aware of their own rules. So, unless you genuinely understand where things can go wrong, I’d bet they indeed will go wrong at some point.
I was recently delivering a Cross-Cultural Communication Workshop for a customer which has decided to outsource in Romania. This workshop was part of a longer seminar designed to get both British and Romanian team acquire the same understanding of the project along a proper team building. This seminar happened about 20km from Dracula’s castle. By the way, for those who would not know, Dracula has indeed existed. He named was Vlad III, prince of Valachy (today Romania), but although he was incredibly violent and probably sadistic, he was not a vampire. I recommend reading his biography as I did if you are curious. Back to my topic, I have to say that it is the first time that I am working on a project that is started with so much care and energy, a real good start, but that is another story. So I had to prepare a specific workshop related to culture. And by culture, here I do not mean sharing the same movies, music or even type of clothes. Even sharing the same language is not relevant. I mean what is making a people a people; what is giving in individuals this feeling of belonging to a specific group of human beings on this planet.
Why on earth am I worried about what I am signing off? After all, in almost all cases I even looked forward to get to that point. I did want to buy that expensive stuff that I will pay over 55 years. I did want to get that mobile connection so that I can be disturbed any time or indeed disturb anyone I want any time I want. I did want that life insurance that will protect me and my family. So what’s wrong? The answer is trust. I actually do not trust a single second that the other party will play a fair game. First of all the contracts I am signing are made of 4 to 10 pages of famous small prints. I am asked to sign when I have not read any of these lines. Should I want to do it, the person in front of me would find that outrageous. Should I decide to indeed read it, I would not even understand what I am signing anyway. And believe me, I am not someone giving up in front of words.
My answer to that is of course connected to that dreadful signature that you need to put on that big fat un-understood document. The very reason why you have a need for a signature on a document is because you do not trust the other part for doing their job in the first place. If you do trust the other party, then this document is seen rather differently as a way to state what we both believe is what needs to be done. If things change in time, as we both trust each other, we will re-read that document and surely amend it as needed. That is what I do with trusted partners. Yes we have paperwork done but we all know that this is not what our deal is based on in reality. In fact, if you really try to describe in writing what a proper, honest, healthy deal is based on, you end-up with or a very light document describing in a few lines what the objectives are, or you end-up writing forever all the things you mean, you meant, you will probably mean and you surely would mean otherwise. It is mission impossible! That is why these law firms are making such a huge amount of money for writing a contract. And guess what? Even with these big fat contracts, the same law firms will make even more money in trial to explain the proper interpretation of that contract. It is hopeless! My view is that there is no need for building relationships on these bases. I would even say, it is the top level management responsibility to make sure that internal departments of the same organisation do not apply these hopeless rules to projects supposed to increase the business profitability. It is almost a crime to do so!
And here comes a better approach with the iterative software development processes. I will not explain in detail what this is about because it is almost common knowledge nowadays and it would take longer than this text to do so. In short, for those who have not boarded the train yet, iterative development is based on the idea that you will not wait for the final version of any specific step to do the next one. You will develop the software in small chunks. But mainly: you will deliver the software regularly from as soon as possible. As a result of these deliveries, you are building guess what? Indeed: trust! Where is the signature then? Oh sure you can maintain them if you wish. What about signing there for the piece of work we will deliver next week? Great, let me sign that and see you next week to make sure that I get what I have in mind. It is much more of a gentlemen handshake than a lawyer contract. If by any chance you do not get what you had in mind, you will make it known and make sure that you get it next week. And believe me; nobody in the IT department will be bothered by a change to do on a one week work.
In “Beyond Culture”, Edward T. Hall, explains that whatever the domain, there is something universal in communication: the message received by a target is always composed of the message, history (previous communications), internal context (pre-programmed reactions from the receiver) and the external context. If the external and internal contexts are supposed to play an important part in the decoding of the information, we are in a “rich context”. If the message contains all the information needed for the decoding, then we say the context is “poor”. Of course we permanently adapt to the situation but there is one element we hardly adapt to: the culture and all the things that we are all supposed to know. The problem is that during a cross-cultural communication both sides of the channel will make the wrong assumptions by considering a common ground for this context. This is precisely how we end-up with reactions such as:
Now, I am asking the question: if we, for our own personal interest, can’t figure out what the plan will be for Christmas, 6 weeks in advance, or where we’ll be sleeping in a trip 6 weeks inside the journey, I wonder why on earth we would be naturally interested (I mean genuinely, deeply, honestly) in knowing what the plan will be for our software in 6 or 12 months time. I am not challenging the relevance of the question in terms of business planning, budget management, sales perspectives. I am challenging it in human terms. The scale an individual is comfortable with has nothing to do with the scale some big projects are talking about.
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