MasterPeace in a Cross-cultural World

As MasterPeace we are active in 40+ countries on 4 continents. Learning by doing and with tons of “gut feeling” we support the ambitions of changemakers cross cultures.

In our EU project SGA 2024 (co-funded by the European Commission), we discussed how we grow from “gut feeling” towards a way in which “the other” better understands our intention. It is our experience that working together and communicating effectively together with people from different cultures, with different backgrounds, different upbringings, and education, different habit patterns, customs, and rituals require extra attention. Especially in Operations where details matter, and where communication is an important part of the job. How we communicate is largely culturally determined by how we grew up, were brought up and educated in our early years. This is how we developed our personal communication preferences.

‘Look at me when I speak to you,’ my school teacher and mother told me. Punam from Nepal and Nikki from Japan, have never heard me say that. On the contrary. They are expected to lower their eyes down, when an adult speaks to them.

All these different cultural and habitual patterns in communicating, often produce a Babylonian confusion of speech. Even when you have agreed to have everyone speak the same language.

How fun and valuable it is then to discover together, where we differ, and how we can difference.

The Lewis Model and Culture Active are a wonderful and practical tool for this, which we would like to introduce you to. You can use it to discover your own personal communication preferences, and make a comparison with more than 100 profiles of countries worldwide. Take a look at the website https://secu

This is one of the helpful overviews.