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 63^rd position, and Romania scores 90 in 7^th 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.

Meanwhile, let’s think about IT!

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!

Let’s think about IT!

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!

Let’s think about IT!