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Designing diversity and inclusion

Practical experience. By Angela Siebold

In view of the challenges that corporations, associations, public institutions, and organizations face as a result of demographic change, the spotlight of employee and organizational development (EOD) is increasingly focusing on the skill of designing diversity and inclusion. Intercultural communication and diversity management have also gained a foothold in the educational sector, becoming an established feature in university syllabuses, further qualifications programs, and specific Master’s programs.

Intercultural competence is seen as a key qualification that is essential for success in all industries and fields. The first research results are now in and show which types of training are best suited to enhancing intercultural competence.

This includes all behavioral training involving the affective, emotional and conative dimensions closely aligned to a specific business practice and are, for example, oriented toward so-called critical incidents.

In the numerous intercultural trainings that I have carried out in various sectors over recent years, learning activities such as CultuRallye and simulations such as StrangeWorld have proved to be highly beneficial and effective teaching tools. I would like to illustrate this through a few examples of how I use CultuRallye and, in particular, the simulation StrangeWorld. The potential that both METALOG learning activities offer is evident in the other areas of use that I will sketch out briefly at the end of this article.

Intercultural training design is oriented toward so-called critical incidents, that is, situations that participants need to successfully deal with in their day-to-day business lives and for which no effective behavioral strategies or patterns have as yet been developed.

The two learning projects CultuRallye and StrangeWorld enable such critical incidents to be experienced in an appreciative and playful form. For this reason, they are particularly suited to exploring interculturality and experiential learning in intercultural contexts. I would like to illustrate this through the example of the simulation “StrangeWorld”:

Practical experience. By Angela Siebold

The learning group is divided into two sub-groups that are each given the task of developing a separate culture with its own history, mythology, symbolism, and so on. To help them do so, the trainer gives them a detailed, creative briefing and a “culture bag” containing numerous colored symbol plates to which each group is to assign culturally specific meanings.

After a period of time, representatives from the two cultures take it in turns to visit each other for a few minutes and then report back to their own culture on what they saw and experienced. They then document their experiences in the form of a “travel guide” about the respective other culture. In the next phase, the two travel guides are presented to the whole group and compared with the cultures the groups developed earlier on.

This simulation provides a range of learning experiences in critical situations on the topics of creating cultural values, symbolism, rules, communication and cooperation, and addressing prejudices and stereotypes. I have had particularly good experience with the simulation in multicultural groups on the topics of prejudices and stereotypes, because the topic remains rooted in all group members’ current situation and avoids focusing on past personal experiences of prejudice, discrimination and stereotypes. Although it integrates emotionality, it stays in the current group experience and hence facilitates cognitive processing and understanding by avoiding the “persecutor/victim perspective” as well as any attributions from this dimension.

In addition to confronting a range of critical incidents and then working on the relevant topics, the simulation StrangeWorld can also be used in other training phases.

For example, in the last intercultural training I conducted I used it in the solution development phase. In the follow-up, the groups were tasked with getting representatives from both cultures to plan a joint project. This can be easily adapted to any professional group, such as engineers planning a bridge project, or teachers organizing a pupil exchange program, or architects developing an international cultural center. The participants then learn how to resolve situations that they previously considered to be critical. In the process, they apply methods that they partly applied in the first phase, namely when they worked together on developing their culture. In this way, it is possible to use the situation to structure an entire two-day training workshop or seminar with StrangeWorld as the common thread. However, this requires the trainer to create a good working climate, because the participants must have already warmed to each other a little bit before they can do the simulation. It is highly important to brief the participants in order for them to easily find their feet. The best idea is to use a co-trainer to make sure both groups get into the process properly. One of the participants could take on this job and, for example, then assume the role of an observer. It is important for the group to really get into the culture they develop. The simulation is ideally suited to groups of twelve or more participants. Experienced players use a great deal of fantasy and creativity, and those who are not fond of role plays find the material gives them a very objective approach to the material. The material adapts to the group, as it were. This is where the countless possibilities for using it come in. Although I have so far preferred to use it in intercultural training, I can immediately think of other training situations in which it can be used. The field of social and communicative skills is, as we all know, about interacting with others, with the outside world, about differing perceptions, diverse structures and descriptions of reality, about different values and traditions, attribution of processes, about potential for conflict from such interactions and about negotiation processes to promote understanding and cooperation.

Practical experience. By Angela Siebold

There is practically no limit to the opportunities for transfer to real-life situations in companies and organizations and, because the simulation can be carried out both distant from, and very close to, reality, it offers the trainer a wealth of opportunities.

The same is true of CultuRallye. Here, the participants are faced with a confrontation provoked by relatively minor differences in rules and symbols; in short: a culture shock that they did not expect and that forces them to change their behavior – a situation that persists, even when they know from the second round on that the rules could change. Because the game of dice, symbols and movement echoes earlier playing habits, it is very easy to understand and is always high-energy and a lot of fun. Anyone who doesn’t want to actively participate can contribute a lot to the subsequent debriefing phase by taking on the role of observer. It offers a great deal of insight, lots of fun and dynamism: an experience they will remember for a long time.

The activity is already a classic in intercultural training workshops and seminars, because it makes culture shock tangible. However, because the actual topic is about how to deal with change, the reaction to strange rules, symbols and values, communication in difficult situations and behavior in various group-dynamics situations, the learning activity can be always used when these topics are involved.

That’s why, for me, CultuRallye is an irreplaceable aspect of team & organizational development. Whenever change processes in companies are involved, this learning activity can be integrated into the process, or even in earlier phases. Different corporate or team cultures become visible very quickly. In consulting processes, for example, it enables me to quickly gain insights into the organizational culture and develop potential working hypotheses.

CultuRallye confronts all participants equally, provides countless aspects to be addressed in the subsequent reflection phase, and opens up a range of topics for transferring learning outcomes to the current situation in the team or company. The targeted use of observers enables this activity to be observed from various perspectives, such as at the communicative level, at the individual behavior level in coping with change, and at the group-dynamic process level. It enables these complex relationships to be clarified and opened up to reflection and cognitive processing in training modules or counselling units that build on one another.

Particularly when the topic of “change” is fraught with anxiety and tension, the learning activity can help the participants to access personal resources, it releases energy and, above all, brings humor into the shared activity. Momentum develops, the system starts to move, and change occurs. I have used the activity both for longer-term processes and short mini-workshops and, in doing so, created impetus for reflection on the topic we were addressing; I consider CultuRallye to be a true “all-rounder.”

 

My conclusion: Both activities and simulations have enormous potential and can be used in a wide range of areas, particularly for all training programs relating to interculturality, diversity management, and inclusion.

Angela Siebold is a supervisor, coach, demography consultant, lecturer at Berlin University of Applied Sciences, and trainer at the Joint Academy for Intercultural Competence in south-west Germany.