Across cultures

Jim was furious. He had tried to come to an agreement with a group of teenagers, but they didn’t comply. For Jim, it was simply a matter of better communication and finding a way to set the rules.

However, the rules he wanted to set were his and what he assumed was that they would follow them once explained.

This might work in a family and maybe in an organization. That is, in a place where the rules are known and shared. But Jim was discussing these rules with teenagers who had no authority relationship with him nor any other partnership they could see.

The teenagers experienced Jim as someone who wanted to enforce rules and gain authority over them. They saw no reason to do so, even more so as they couldn’t see the value in the rules he was seeing.

The problem wasn’t one of having better communication or knowing how to ask for such rules to be integrated. The problem was that Jim and the teenagers had different frames of reference while assuming them to be the same. They could not see why someone would have other rules than them, or how they were prioritizing different values.

He couldn’t see that he was interacting with a different culture.