Dream time

Early morning.

I’ve been repairing working relations between the Brazilians and the Argentinians in my team. There have always been tensions. Although they live so close to each other, they are continuously at each other’s’ throats, finding fault, failing to clarify and resolve misunderstandings, undermining mutual projects and so on.

What’s to be done?

I’ve tried all sorts of things up to now. For example, I got them into a room together to try to understand the other’s point of view by role-reversing, so that the Argentinians became Brazilian and vice-versa. I taught them how to paraphrase what the other was saying in order to create clarity of meaning. I had them try out English as a mutual language instead of Spanish, which always puts the Brazilians on the back foot.

Nothing seems to work.

But the real problem is: none of this is real. I don’t have any Argentinians or Brazilians in my ‘team’.

It’s all in my dreams.

 

Immigrants drive exports

A Danish friend has sent me a fascinating article from yesterday’s Politiken.DK.

What it reveals is that Danish exports to emerging markets have been hindered substantially by language and cultural barriers ‒ and that a major solution has been found in using second and third generation immigrants to Denmark as intermediaries.

Apparently the policy has been so successful that exports from Denmark to Asian, Middle Eastern and South American countries have lifted rather dramatically.

Now a database has been created so that appropriate people can be matched with relevant markets. Says Jonas Ghiyati, “For example, Morocco is difficult to penetrate with only English. A person with Moroccan roots can reverse the language, will have contacts at all levels, knows the culture and system – and how to dodge corruption.”

Wonder how many other countries with multicultural populations (and negative politics/media around immigrants) have tried this approach?

Best language for brainstorming?

I have found over the years that brainstorming is best done in local language.

Quite simply, the freshest ideas seem to come into our heads most readily in whatever vernacular we learn in childhood. And they are most easily expressed verbally in that language too.

This is not so easy when, as is usually the case in workshops with multinational companies, the common tongue is second-language English.

My Lintas colleague, Eleanor Modesto, discovered this vividly when she went from Manila to be managing director of the agency in Indonesia. She quickly discovered that the language of business in Jakarta is Bahasa Indonesia, so she got down to learning it, becoming expert enough in the language to pass as a local.

Yet it remained clear to her that being able to speak a language is one thing, whereas thinking in it, having ideas in it, is another thing altogether.

“Sometimes, it’s better to think conceptually in Tagalog [the major Filipino language],” Eleanor has said. “I would ask them ‘Do you have an idiom like this?’” And instead of generating ideas from “Man of Steel,” she would throw Filipino idioms like “tibay ng loob” [loosely translated as strength of character] into the mix, enriching the whole process.

Of course, I’ve discovered over the years that the facilitation of workshops in local language(s) brings greater complexity and requires special skills…

To explore this and much more, come to my Brand Renovation Masterclass in Manila, 8 November:

http://www.yeheydigitalgroup.com/repo/adobomasterclass/masterclass_edm.html