Foundations of Integrative Thinking: When Models Breakdown

In foundations of integrative thinking last week, we were discussing building models of human behaviour in negotiating. It was a case about two companies from two different countries (we were told they were constructed from "archtypes", but most people could guess which they were) who were going to be negotiating.

The point of the exercise was to demonstrate the interactions and perceptions (modeling) of ourselves and other people and how that is affected by available information. For instance, the Beta team was considered very passive, formal and unified whereas the Alphas were considered aggressive, disorganized and informal. Although this is a gross over simplification, I wanted to extend this idea to what happens when models of behavour are incongruent with behaviours that we are familiar with. This is very much related to the case we did in our Managing People in Organizations case with the Canadian bank acquiring the Mexican bank.

I would propose that in homogeneous groups, where people have very similar cultural backgrounds, it is very easy to develop models because they are similar to how we model ourselves. Slight differences can be accounted for with small exception rules.

However, if cultures are more polar, there seems to be large disconnects between our model of the other person and their model of themselves (and vice versa). Behaviours which might be presented as respectful in one culture might be received as extremely rude in another. For instance, Beta's tended to be very formal in their responses and gave vague answers instead of "No's". Alpha's considered that rude and unproductive, focusing on the task rather than the relationship.

I would suggest that when we don't understand the models of other people (literally in this case as not having read their behavioural instructions, but in more pragmatic terms as not having lived and breathed a different culture), we tend to project our own models on them. Therein lies the problem, that our models (polar and absolutely different) break and we are unable to understand what is happening. The incongruency is then read along the lines of: "Why are they doing that? I would never do / think that. They must be stupid or evil.*"

* Roger Martin's criticism of "conventional thinkers" is exactly this... That what they don't understand is often labeled as a lack of competency or as evil.

One of my favourite commercials of all time, from HSBC a few years ago, highlights this idea:



HSBC has always bragged about having a good understanding of international business and culture and I think this commercial is a great example (I love the Englishman's face at the end). (Also, this is my apology to my readers for having text and formula only posts in the last few days... This MBA is very involved and I don't usually have time to draw graphs like I used to).