How far are you willing to reach in order to gain a new perspective?
I am writing this blog entry from the airplane, coming home to Colorado from India. This week I attended the International Conference on Management Cases at the Birla Institute of Management Technology, near Delhi. It’s a small but diverse conference and this year there were scholars from 15 different countries. It’s the perfect place to gain perspectives from around the globe, as scholars and practitioners come from Europe, the West and the East to exchange ideas grounded in experience and scholarship. The people who attend are mostly warm, inquisitive types, and many long-term friendships have developed on the bus to the Taj Mahal over the years. With many of us returning to this conference for multiple years, there is a sort of “India family” that has grown up with the organizers’ careful cultivation. Many organization development scholars know one another from other settings and yet there are some friends and colleagues who only see each other in India, even some who live in the same town back in America!
This year Dr. Daphne DePorres and I presented a paper exploring fractal patterns in the perceptions of Western yoga practitioners. This study follows the methodology from my doctoral dissertation, where I did the same kind of thing with a group of nonprofit professionals. In each case we asked people about the patterns they observe within their social networks, then analyze that information to map out key ideas that characterize that group and how it functions. The stories people tell tend to be colorful and heartfelt. They get us beyond statements about espoused values and into the meat of what is really important to any given group of people. Our patterns are a more reliable indication of who we are as a group than what we overtly say is important to us, and sometimes the two paint very different pictures of our values.
While our contribution is something we are proud of and we certainly enjoyed presenting, it is the diversity of ideas and cultures that makes this conference unique. This week we learned about microfinance in Nepal, education in Australia, airport privatization and branding of commodities in India, mobile health services in Europe, church management in the USA, and a host of other business cases. Topics ranged from serious human rights issues to quantitative marketing studies, and everything in between. When you attend a conference like this it opens you up to new modes of thought, and to new understanding; people from different cultures sometimes present topics you thought you knew, yet ground them in different contexts and applications. The host of unique experiences and outcomes is mind-blowing. It becomes impossible not to learn and grow when one is immersed in this kind of cultural and intellectual soup.
What if you want this kind of learning, but a trip around the globe just isn’t on the agenda any time soon? Arguably, you don’t have to purchase a passage to India to find diversity, although these forums are well worth the trip.
You can cultivate this kind of learning in each new environment you enter, simply by being open-minded, friendly, and inquisitive!
Why not up the ante when it comes to embracing diversity in your work and life? There is much to be gained by listening to a broad variety of perspectives, and that guy in the next cubicle whose customs are strange to you? He might just have a new way of looking at your problems that can give you an edge. Better yet, the two of you might invent something new and exciting in the course of becoming friends.
Can you consider new perspectives that are very different from your own?
Are you open to that? Do you want success enough to reach across cultural lines and find new people to learn from?
Why not give it a try? Lean into the experience!
You might even end up giving as much as you get…
Copyright Gly Solutions, LLC 2014
