Cultural relativism is the death of your company…

When I moved to Uganda six months ago, I quickly noticed that people say sorry a lot. If I dropped something, or if I was fumigating at my computer’s permissions scheme, or if something else just went slightly wrong, people around me would respond with “I’m sorry!” At first, I quickly responded with, “well, that’s okay”. After a while I would say, “well, it isn’t your fault, is it?” And then I said, “why do you say you’re sorry, I was the one who dropped it!” Because in the Netherlands, when you say you are sorry, you imply guilt. And then I learned that the sayer doesn’t really mean they are sorry as a way to excuse themselves, they use the phrase in the literal sense. They are literally sorry for me that it happened to me! I am Reinier, from Tunga and this is my story!

Working at Tunga, I’ve had these situations a lot. Tunga was founded in the Netherlands and works with more than 300 software developers across Africa. Roughly 130 from Nigeria, another 130 from Uganda, 20 from Egypt, others from Ghana, Cameroon, Kenia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and the list goes on. We have running projects with clients from the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, Egypt, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. And many of our clients are multi-national organizations in themselves. So dealing with different cultures is ingrained in the way Tunga works. And here are three things that we have found to work over the years.

Dealing with different cultures is ingrained in the way Tunga works

Cultural relativism is the death of your company…

First of all, while there is of course value in every culture, not every custom works for your business. A couple of weeks ago, I had a performance review with one of our project managers. When I asked him, what he found most difficult in his job, he said: “It was really hard to learn to say ‘no’ to our clients. The way I grew up and did my first jobs, whatever the client said should be done. So if a client asks me something, I feel an enormous pressure to just say yes, even though I would know it would be disastrous for the project. At Tunga, I was immediately taught to say no if I knew it was a bad idea.’

Some things just do not work for your business. Doing whatever the client says, in a software project, that is a recipe for disaster. So create maxims, about how someone in your company should act, and try to prevent any behaviour that is contradictory. Even if it comes from someone’s culture.

…but you cannot disregard it!

Yet that does not mean you can negate the fact that different customs lead to different experiences of reality. Once, I was talking with a prospective Ugandan client, who was interested to hire a dedicated developer. We decided he had to share a profile of what he was looking for, and once I received it, I did what I was very much used to do as a (blunt) Dutchman: I provided critical feedback.

Now, as you can imagine, since otherwise, I wouldn’t have shared this story, this did not end up well with our prospective client. He looked upon my critical feedback as though I was making a joke out of him, that I was even humiliating him. While my version of reality was that we were conjointly working to a profile as best suited as possible. My mistake was not that I gave feedback. My mistake was that I did not stop to think that in our cultural gap, there may be a different way for my client to perceive that feedback.

Language is everything
When I was studying philosophy, one of my subjects was linguistics. And the basics of linguistics is the relationship between reality, thinking and language. This is called linguistic relativity, or the idea that language shapes its’ speakers view of the world. This sounds very difficult, but most examples are quite well known: the idea that the Inuit have much more words for ‘snow’ than other cultures. Although it is difficult to prove a strong connection, we can take it for granted that different words can have very different meanings in different cultures.

I, for instance, have learned a lot about the idea of clock time, as I had to coordinate meetings across different timezones and cultures. Now, to get a meeting timing wrong every so often is not a big deal, but if you want to work internationally, you have to develop your own companies vocabulary. In our Tunga Slack, you’ll see many different references to ETA’s (Estimated Time of Arrival, or when you can expect something). We use COB CET, which is Close Of Business or 5pm Central European Time, or COB EAT, which is 5pm Eastern African Time, or EOD, which is End of Day or would translate as ‘I better have it ready when I start working tomorrow!’.

‘I better have it ready when I start working tomorrow!’

Keep on learning!
But most of all, you and your organization have to realize you can never really stop learning about dabbling with different cultures. Because nothing is so fluid, perhaps even volatile, and ethereal, as culture is. When you think you can grasp it, something happens which surprises you, and you learn all over again. And if you want to learn more, check this one out: When Cultures Collide.