Cultural Dimensions

PERSUADING

How Different Cultures persuade others

Managers and business people working internationally frequently need to persuade others about decisions and plans. How you influence others and the arguments people find convincing though are deeply rooted in culture’s philosophical, religious, and educational assumptions and attitudes.

Erin Meyer classified worldwide cultures according to whether they are principle-first or application first focused.

Key Characteristics

PRINCIPLES-FIRST

APPLICATIONS-FIRST

Individuals are trained to begin with a fact, statement, or opinion and later add concepts to back up or explain the conclusion as necessary.

The preference is to begin a message or report with an executive summary or bullet points.

Discussions are approached in a practical, concrete manner.

Theoretical or philosophical discussions are avoided in a business environment.

The focus more on WHY than how or what

Individuals have been trained to first develop the theory or complex concept before presenting a fact, statement, or opinion.

The preference is to begin a message or report by building up a theoretical argument before moving on to a conclusion.

The conceptual principles underlying each situation are valued.
Focus more on HOW than why

COUNTRY COMPARISON

The chart shows examples of where certain countries fall on the persuasion scale.

EXAMPLE Nr. 1

Jens Hupert is a German director at the company Williams worked for. Having lived in the United States for many years, he had experienced similar failures at persuading others, though the cultural disconnect ran in the opposite direction. Hupert recalled the problems he’d had in making persuasive arguments to his American colleagues. In starting his presentations by laying the foundation for his conclusions, setting the parameters, outlining his data and his methodology and explaining his argument, he was taken aback when his American boss told him, “In your next presentation, get right to the point. You lost their attention before you got to the important part”. In Hupert’s mind, “you cannot come to a conclusion without first defining the parameters.”

EXAMPLE Nr. 2

When Kara Williams, an American engineer, began working as a research manager for a German automotive company, she didn’t realise how different her approach to persuading her colleagues would be from the way she persuaded Americans.

Her first project with the company was providing technical advice on how to reduce carbon emissions from one of the group’s “green” car models. Williams developed a set of recommendations that she felt would meet the company’s strategic and budgetary goals. She travelled to Munich to give a one-hour presentation to the German directors.

Williams delivered her presentation in a small auditorium with the directors seated in rows of chairs. She got right to the point, explaining the strategies she would recommend based on her findings. But before she had even finished the first slide, one of the directors raised his hand and protested, “How did you get to these conclusions? You are giving us your recommendations, but I don’t understand how you got here.”

In the following video, you will see how culture impacts the way we reason and thus how we persuade other people. This dimension is specifically important to know about when giving presentations to an international or culture-specific audience.

HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THIS DIMENSION

Different cultures have different systems for learning, in part because of the philosophers who influenced the approach to intellectual life in general.

Although Aristotle, a Greek, is credited with articulating the applications-first thinking, it was British thinkers, including Francis Bacon in the 16th century who popularised these methodologies. Later, Americans with their pioneer mentality, came to be even more applications-first than the British.

By contrast, philosophy on the European continent has been largely driven by principles-first approaches. In the 17th century, Frenchman René Descartes spelled out a method of principles-first reasoning in which the scientist first formulates a hypothesis and then seeks evidence to prove or disprove it.

In the 19th century, the German Friedrich Hegel introduced the dialectic model of deduction, which reigns supreme in schools in Latin and Germanic countries. The Hegelian dialectic begins with a thesis, or foundational argument; this is opposed by an antithesis, or conflicting argument; and the two are then reconciled in a synthesis.

a statue of a man sitting on top of a cement block

Source: Erin Meyer, The Culture Map

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