In all there were nine groups. The first challenge listed by six of them? Food.

I knew how they must be feeling, and my heart went out to them. In the course of our everyday adult lives, we may be challenged with food in many ways — What to cook for dinner? Where to eat out? Will I decline that second cookie? — but rarely do we fear that we might actually not get to eat food that we enjoy eating. That’s culture shock at its most bodily.

One of my favorite conceptual tools for thinking about culture shock is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. While it’s been rightfully critiqued as oversimplified and to some extent culturally specific, the basic insight is brilliant, and applies beautifully to culture shock. The most common way of representing the hierarchy is as a pyramid:

As adults, as we navigate our various work and life circles, we mostly bounce around in Levels 3 and 4, and may even have glimpses of Level 5. That’s only, though, because we slogged through childhood and adolescence. It is one of the great privileges of adulthood, one which we take for granted.

Being thrown into an unfamiliar culture is like pulling the floor out from Level 3: suddenly we are again worried about survival — if not literal survival, then at least the question of exactly how we will meet our most basic bodily needs, and whether we will be able to do so in familiar ways. No matter how brilliant or accomplished a person is, brain activity shifts from the “higher” areas such as the pre-frontal cortex to the “lower” areas such as the amygdala. We become frightened and disoriented in ways we might not have felt since childhood. Looking around for the cause of our pain, we land on the only reasonable target: those people and their unsavory habits.

Intercultural training can lighten the load by identifying the issue and helping people realize it’s completely natural to respond this way, but in the end we all have to push through it.

The engineers I met the other day have just begun a journey. It is so moving when a group of human beings in need, like this group, open up their hearts and minds to other ways of thinking and doing. This softening, when treated with care and compassion, opens up vast territory for understanding and growth. For the engineers, when they have lifted themselves back up the pyramid, haltingly and falteringly, but steadily, they will have a vast new set of skills and tools which they can then pass on to others. This is our best hope as a species.

And the good news for humanity doesn’t stop there: the nuclear plants they run will be safer, and their companies will make more money for running safe plants. Kudos to the client company for seeing the big picture and making the training happen.

I can’t offer any such stories, and I be surprised if many of these stories exist. At the same time, I think what’s missing from the piece is the flipside: what can Western organizations gain from a deeper understanding of Chinese culture? In other words, why stop at not being an asshole? Once we’ve achieved non-asshole status, how can learning more about Chinese mindsets help Western organizations reach their highest aspirations?

The case that I’m continually building in this blog is that if Western leaders are mindful of culture, and of what people bring to the table as a result of culture, the upper limit on their success is much higher than without such mindfulness.

“Don’t be an asshole” is great advice the world over, and will save your business time and money. What more can we do to help our organizations thrive in China?

The most common theme I witnessed was suspicion, on the part of some of the Americans, of the motives of the Chinese partners. I kept being reminded of the bugaboo of attributing intentions (usually erroneously) based solely on behavior. There was a particular kind of behavior observed by the Americans which made them uncomfortable, and it didn’t take long, as the Americans talked among themselves later, to create agreement about the (ill) intentions behind the behaviors. This is a savvy group of executives, though, and they were receptive to other interpretations of the behavior.

One thought that recurred frequently during the week was this: what about all the other organizations working in China, which either aren’t aware of intercultural issues, or which are aware but don’t want to invest in intercultural consulting? I thought of how intercultural misunderstanding grows over time, often without our noticing, until it’s too late. A former colleague once put forth the “fish poop” model of human relations: over time, a fish tank accumulates fish poop. From one day to the next, you won’t necessarily notice a difference. But over time you end up with a stinky, fetid mess of a place to try to live, let alone thrive. Human relations, like fish tanks, require constant attention to accumulating fish poop — especially in intercultural environments, where the poop is likely to come fast and furious.

My experience with this company left me with a profound appreciation for them and companies like them, who can see the importance of the intercultural piece for their future success.

…even under the most favorable circumstances, China isn’t always transparent, and if you’re not careful, disagreements can still occur. Instead of overreacting or leaping to conclusions, the best policy is to take the time to listen and to understand. (p. 179)

Humility, empathy, equanimity.

Next:

90 percent of the mistakes made in China are due to misunderstanding and miscommunication. (p. 177)

It’s a good idea to take figures like this “90 percent” with a grain of salt. At the same time, it’s worth some reflection: What if it’s true? What if we could reduce our mistakes by up to 90 percent by dedicating ourselves to minimizing misunderstanding and miscommunication? What leader wouldn’t want that return on investment?

It’s easy for “intercultural communication” to sound like an abstraction, or some sort of fancy extra, or window dressing, to what organizations “normally” do. Yet every time I witness the sort of, for lack of a better term, shenanigans that American organizations try to pull in their dealings with China, I go a little nuts, because what could be more important to an organization than money, time, and good will? Yet these most prized of resources are what go down the tubes every time when intercultural savvy is missing.

In the present case I can safely say that there is no ill will on the part of the American organization. There rarely is. In their eyes they are merely “doing their job.” It’s up to interculturalists to make the business case for our services. What gets my hackles up here is that overtures have been made multiple times over the years about the advantages of entertaining other perspectives — overtures which have been rebuffed time and again. And over these years this organization has spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and untold hours of precious human capital, all in service of angering or alienating exactly the people most crucial to the long-term success of their venture.

The way I see it, ultimately we are responsible, individually and collectively, for honoring what we have been given. Among other things, organizations are in possession of limited resources with which to accomplish something in the world. Like any form of organizational consulting, intercultural consulting aims to help organizations make the very most of their resources, so that they can go about their business and get things done. The ongoing challenge we face as interculturalists is to bring our work into the mainstream of business practice. When you have a legal problem, you call a lawyer. No one thinks twice about that. What if, every time you dealt with someone from another culture, you called an interculturalist? We’d get more done with a lot less, and we’d all be happier for it too.