Cultural Detective is an extremely useful tool for those committed to developing intercultural competence. Why is it so effective?
- Cultural Detective is skill-based. Users learn:
- To understand themselves as cultural beings (subjective culture).
- To anticipate others’ possible motivations for specific behaviors (cultural empathy).
- To bridge cultural differences, recognizing them as assets rather than as obstacles to minimize or navigate around.
Learners are able to put their new skills to work immediately!
-
Cultural Detective is a process-based model.
Users can easily and seamlessly dovetail their learning with other processes such as communication, collaboration, leadership, and conflict resolution. Cultural Detective also integrates conveniently with existing curricula, designs, and materials, or can be used as a backbone to build a custom training program.
-
Cultural Detective develops organization-wide ability and systemic competence.
By cultivating a shared vocabulary and mental model for transforming diversity into inclusion, innovation, and engagement, Cultural Detective encourages continuous process improvement and organizational learning.
-
Cultural Detective is theoretically grounded.
Its elegantly simple and practical design incorporates state-of-the-art intercultural thinking, and avoids stereotyping and the rote memorization of lists of do’s and don'ts.
-
Cultural Detective develops both culture-general and culture-specific competencies.
Real intercultural competence means the ability to react and behave in a culturally appropriate way. Cultural Detective helps users learn how to determine useful options when encountering cultural difference (culture-general ability) and how to figure out culturally correct behavior in unfamiliar contexts (culture-specific).
-
Cultural Detective fosters critical thinking and problem solving.
It promotes real-time, accelerated learning, and ongoing candid dialogue. Offering an approach that recognizes and values differences, Cultural Detective encourages all voices to be heard, and provides an easy, non-evaluative process for conflict resolution.
-
Cultural Detective is developmentally appropriate.
Learners are suitably challenged at every stage of their cultural-competency development. It is an excellent choice to use with mixed groups of learners at various stages of development.
-
Cultural Detective is versatile and flexible.
Useful in a broad spectrum of applications, it can be incorporated into a team meeting, an existing management course, a coaching process, or used as the basis for longer-term learning. Its deceivingly simple approach lowers the intimidation factor and allows easy accessibility for all levels of learners.
Cultural Detective Online provides the ongoing, structured reflection that research has shown is required to develop intercultural competence. It is available 24/7, includes most of the content in our series, and provides structured learning in a highly personalized and immediately useful manner.