Understanding Cultural Diversity

Your discomfort is worth trusting. A list of customs by country teaches you to predict a person from her passport, and that is the opposite of what you need in a session. It also ages badly, because the woman in front of you may have left twenty years ago, or grown up between two places, or disagree with the custom entirely.

The frameworks used across Europe are built the other way round. The Council of Europe model sets out 20 competences grouped as values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge and critical understanding. Only the last group is knowledge, and even there the emphasis is on critical understanding rather than facts about groups. The bulk of it is about how you behave: openness, tolerance of ambiguity, listening, adapting how you communicate.

A practical replacement for the country list: after a session that felt awkward, write down what happened, what you assumed, and what she might have been reading in the same moment. The Council of Europe publishes a structured version of exactly that exercise, the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters, with facilitator notes. It works on your own encounters instead of on generalisations.

That gives me the argument I was missing. One worry though: my colleagues will say the country briefing at least gives them something concrete to hold on to before a first meeting.

Give them something concrete, then, but make it about the situation rather than the culture. Before a first meeting, what actually helps is knowing which language she is most comfortable in, whether she has used video calls before, who else is likely to be in the room, and how long she has been here. All four change how the session should run and none of them require a generalisation.

Background reading has a place, but keep it where it belongs. Read about a country to understand what someone may have lived through, not to predict how she will behave. The moment it becomes a prediction it stops being knowledge and becomes a script.