OUTsight/ Leading Across Cultures

Photo credit Pixabay.

Manila, 27 January 2021 — Engage what feels strange and you’re on track.

Story

It happened in 2018 in Toronto. Vincent Shen (Shen Qingsong 沈清松) died while making preparations to return to his home country Taiwan, where he wanted to become a tour guide at the National Palace Museum. Professor Shen was completing a distinguished international career in philosophy that started in Taipei and took him to work overseas in Leuven, Leiden, and Vienna. From 2000, he served as the Lee Chair Professor in Chinese Thought and Culture at the Department of East Asian Studies of the University of Toronto. 

His death outside his home country came unexpectedly to his family and his students and colleagues. In a strange way, however, it also testified to the passion he had been working on all his life: to learn across borders and bring understanding between cultures, in the service of building a more sustainable and meaningful world. 

To Professor Shen, that work was both important and urgent and it had driven him to focus on the comparison of Western and Eastern philosophical traditions through dialogues. Philosophy, he thought, had an obligation to contribute solutions to contemporary social and global problems. He saw the problems facing the world as dominos, with their interdependence going back to philosophy at the root. “If the first domino — philosophy — collapses, so will the others,” he remarked.  

Challenge

So how to prevent the dominos from falling? The challenge, Shen asserted, was for the Western-dominated philosophical discourse to make way for a new vision and practice of intercultural philosophy that would help the world solve its problems of science, technology, and multiculturalism in the 21st-century.

To this end, he recommended an intercultural philosophy of contrast, strangification, and dialogue. While the understanding of ‘contrast’ and ‘dialogue’ is fairly straightforward, Shen’s strategy of strangification is both unusual and remarkable, and I assume that you see this word for the first time, just as I did a few weeks ago. So what does it mean? Drawing on Confucian philosophy, Shen described strangification (wàituī 外推) as “the act of going outside oneself and going to the other, from one’s familiarity to one’s strangers, from one’s cultural context to other cultural contexts.” Shen explained that this practice needs to be done at three levels: linguistic, pragmatic, and ontological.

Extending from oneself to others is, of course, also a foundational requirement for leaders. In the context of leading across cultures, I take Shen’s three levels of strangification to mean that, first, you should always speak about yourself and your message in the language of your audience (the other party) in order to build trust. Second, that you can link to the intentions, plans, and goals of the other party to make collaboration possible. And third, that you can use the values of the other party to forge a deeper connection in which you can learn together with them.

Question

In leading across cultures, taking up Professor Shen’s challenge involves extending from yourself to others in order to develop cross-cultural understanding. When you do that, you also grow your ability to influence change in ever-larger circles. In an earlier post I referred to that as deciding to play a bigger game. Does your vision for 2021 include this? What Shen shared is more than a concept, it is an act and a process, of doing and non-doing, like most of the philosophies of ancient China. Taking on his challenge starts with you experiencing a transformation in your own being, behaviors, and actions. 

Where to apply this strategy of contrast, strangification, and dialogue? That’s easy. For many, other cultures can nowadays be found as close as next door from you in your community, or in your team, or in people voting for another political party (!), and certainly when you take up a role in your company where you will work colleagues and clients in other countries.

The process of leading across cultures starts with you answering the question: are you willing to engage in strangifying (extending) from yourself to other people at work in other cultures, either close by or further away? Once you affirm this and start engaging in what feels strange, you’re on track. Do let me know your response, and if you want to dive in. There is so much to learn on this topic and there are a good number of resources available to help you with leading across cultures. And, in accepting the challenge, you will be honoring the example set by Professor Shen.