Book - The Culture Map

Once you start working remotely, it is almost inevitable you will have to deal with multi-nationality teams and projects. Just last year, I was part of a team where we had, 4 Devs from Brazil, a PO and Scrum master from the USA, the Director of the project from Japan, QE Director from Nepal, QE team from India, all that for a customer in Israel. I was the technical lead for this project, and as a result of that, I would have to deal with all of them, and all of them were a source of information to me and the team I was managing. Each of these cultures has differences, mainly in how they give and receive feedback. How do you identify the nuances in the feedbacks coming from each of these teams? How do you know they are happy with the result of the last delivery or if they get it or not? The key is the book ‘The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business’.

The book is a masterpiece about global business. It has nothing to do with coding nor systems designing, but was one of the most valuable source of information for me in that project (that I just mentioned) and in many others. The book analyses many cultures (including most of the above mentioned) and shows you how they react to many different inputs and situations. I will not quote the text here, because I really want you to go there and read it, but here is a piece of advice from the book that you may wanna get out of this post with; Each culture has its own way of giving negative feedback, some of them are more direct (like Israelis, they will tell you what is wrong direct in your face without any preparation to it) some of them are less direct (like Brazilians, before a negative feedback a Brazilian will tell you everything they like, and then connect it with a “but, you could do xxxx better”), so a possible conversation between this 2 cultures on a demo of a relatively complex user interface could be Israelis: “The label for the button xxx doesn’t make any sense! Fix it.” what he means “It all looks cool. But the label for the button xxx could be better.” What Brazilian understand, “Is it all bad, and the label xxx is garbage!”

That is quite a simple example I created from the book, but that maps well with the day-to-day base interactions. Another great advice and an important one is “Do not try to emulate other culture” the book should serve you as a source to understand how to deal with different cultures. You will know what they meant with what they have said, but you should still act like you are used too. If you try to emulate other cultures, you will be in a significant threat of getting the nuances wrong and sound too aggressive or too passive. “Just be yourself” and use what you have learned from the book to deal better with them.