“If you go into every interaction assuming that culture doesn’t matter, your default mechanism will be to view others through your own cultural lens and to judge or misjudge them accordingly.” (Meyer 2014, 12)
The Culture Map is a model developed by Erin Meyer to bring practical insight into how cultural values impact cross-cultural encounters. Meyer’s model is powerful because of its practical application and ability to shift the view of cultural differences based on the relativity to ones own culture.
Relative and relevant
Meyers model uses eight scales, upon which each culture is mapped. The power of this visualized structure is the ability for a user to first identify his or her own culture and then locate the other culture(s) of interest. It is by examining the gap between the two cultures that the user is able to gain powerful and highly relevant insights to help explain, understand or adjust behavior in a given inter-cultural situation.
It is this relativity that brings the model to life. It is not enough to understand a culture in isolation; rather, we must first understand how our own cultural biases influence our understanding of that culture.
The eight scales used in The Culture Map include:
- Communicating - Low-context (simple and clear) to high-context (deep and complex) approach
- Evaluating - Direct (forward) to indirect (passive and discrete) delivery of feedback
- Persuading - A preference for principles (a holistic view) to applications (specific examples)
- Leading - Egalitarian (equality of team members) to hierarchical (a clear hierarchy)
- Deciding - Consensual (group-based decisions) to top-down (decisions made by the leader)
- Trusting - Task-based (how well you work together) to relationship-based (how well you know one another)
- Disagreeing - Confrontational (forward) to avoiding confrontation (passive)
- Scheduling - Linear (rigid) to flexible time (relaxed)
(Meyer 2014, 15)
To see an example of the model in action, visit https://hbr.org/resources/html/infographics/2014/05/R1405K-Meyer/May_MY_Meyer_v2.html.
The Development of a Model
To develop the model, Meyer used what service designers would consider an iterative approach.
Early on, Meyer used experience and observations gained through more than a decade of professional work. As development became more concrete, she conducted interviews. The data was qualitative and provided insights into cultural dynamics such as the importance of being flexible in scheduling and project management (17). It was through this analysis she began early prototypes of the maps.
Using these prototypes, Meyer gathered feedback from international executives and made adjustments. She also conducted, what appear to be, informal surveys as well as studied the academic work of others such as Hofstede and The Globe Study (121).
To this day, the model is evolving to further improve its relevancy. As a professor at an international business school in France for global executives, she uses her classroom as a lab to continue to test, validate and adjust her model.
Experience-based, field-tested
In our course lecture, Professor Tarja Chydenius introduced the model as experience-based and field-tested. This is a contrast to many of the academic-/science-based models; however, it is precisely this difference that makes the model interesting from a service design perspective. The model was developed in a way similar to how we develop effective services. For me, this is clear in the applicability and usability of the model in real life circumstances.
The Culture Map in Real-Life
I recently interviewed an American manager working in Finland. He shared that after reading Meyer’s book, he developed a culture “cheat sheet” to hang on his office wall. On it, he placed American culture on the eight scales along with those of his international colleagues from France, Finland, and the UK. He references it regularly, typically before meetings or projects, to build a context and frame of mind for the upcoming interaction. He also shared that it’s helpful after the fact to bring context to a specific, sometimes confusing interaction.
A service designer working in an international company or designing for other cultures could similarly use this model. Just last month a friend and fellow service designer was faced with the challenge of interviewing people from Asian cultures. She was looking for a way to prepare for the interview and build context for her analysis of the feedback she would receive. Remembering this model, I shared excerpts with her to help build an interview scenario that would be more comfortable and provide a deeper context for both the interviewer and interviewee.
Sources
Harvard Business Review 2014. Accessed 11.10.2015.
https://hbr.org/resources/html/infographics/2014/05/R1405K-Meyer/May_MY_Meyer_v2.html.
Meyer, E. 2014. The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. New York, United States: PublicAffairs.
Shah, Rawn 2014. 'The Culture Map' Shows Us The Differences In How We Work WorldWide. Accessed 11.10.15.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rawnshah/2014/10/06/the-culture-map-shows-us-how-we-work-worldwide/.