The Stiletto and the Balloon: Information Processing Across Cultures
by William R. Dodson
22 March 2002
“The Americans drive me crazy,” a British friend said. “They just do things. They act. They don’t think about the best way to go about anything at all.” The South Africans in the after-hours group agreed. One of them said, “But they get things done, don’t they? Not like the Europeans; or even the South Africans. The French and Italians just sit around and talk about what needs to be done; not much different from the British. The Germans make plan after plan, and then get around to doing something by committee.” Finally, everyone at the small table agreed with the South African’s summary: “If only we could get the Europeans to plan and the Americans to follow the plan – that would be the best.” Satisfied we had settled the problems of the world, we ordered another round of beers.
Richard Lewis in his book When Cultures Collide sees the way a culture processes information as a defining characteristic of the culture. Though Lewis uses three academic-sounding parameters to describe information processing styles, here we’ll use two of our own: stiletto cultures at one end of a spectrum and those with balloon world views at the other. Stilettos slice information and action down into atomic components they find easy to grade, discard, digest and act on. Stilettos measure their productivity by the least amount of time it takes them to dice information then act on it. Balloon cultures take in as much of their environment as they can before moving forward. Balloons seek to understand all the relationships that support an issue and the ramifications of acting on the whole problem. Balloon actors measure productivity by the degree to which they are able to maintain the integrity of the relationships that must shift in light of new realities. Time is important to balloon cultures only to the extent they have enough of it to identify with the total context at hand. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner write at length about cultural perceptions of time in their book Riding the Waves of Culture.
At the stiletto end of the spectrum then are the Americans, Germans and Swiss who, to lesser degrees, respectively, tend to break down a situation and then act. Toward the middle of the spectrum are the French, Spanish, Italians and Latin Americans, who require yet more contextual information before they act; while at the extreme end of the spectrum are the Chinese and then the Finns and Japanese, who can sometimes seem to have infinite capacities for listening and consideration before acting.
It’s no wonder then that a Belgian fellow on secondment to an American branch office of an international consultancy once told the author, “Business is slow now… I just sit in my cubicle with nothing much to do, while these Americans are so busy also with not much to do.” He explained to me that in Belgium there was greater camaraderie in the consulting office in which he worked than in America, and when there was nothing to do, people didn’t do what the author calls “manufacture work.” Instead, the Belgians talked with one another or took longer lunches than they would otherwise.
Balloon thinkers are the people in meetings who you know are intelligent and who do good work, but who are quiet during the session and don’t seem to have much to contribute. Actually, balloon thinkers are sucking in information; weighing the assumptions of the meeting; finding the most appropriate time to add value to the conversation. Balloon thinkers are the planners, the architects, the ones who will likely see the pitfalls of a stiletto approach before the others do. Balloon thinkers have a value beyond that placed on speaking or doing for the sake of speaking or doing. They can help linear thinkers genuinely “think out of the box.”
Managers must become facilitators in meetings instead of mere directors to use balloon and stiletto thinkers effectively. Managers must pause the slicing-momentum of stilettos to give balloon thinkers the seg-way they require to comfortably contribute in a meeting. At the same time, balloon thinkers must know upfront there is limited time for them to digest the ramifications of an issue, and that they should perhaps use time before the meeting to become intimate with the details. If managers balance the information processing requirements of stiletto and balloon cultures, they’ll find a universe of approaches to productivity that can make their departments and teams work better – not harder. I’ll drink to that!
William R. Dodson is Managing Director of Silk Road Advisors, L.L.C., a management consultancy that builds and improves working relationships across cultures. He is the international business editor of the American Management Association’s (AMA) MWorld Journal of Management, and writes the weekly column “The Cultured Business”, found at www.silkrc.com and at the Global Perspectives section of the AMA’s member website. He can be reached at sradvisors@gmail.com or +1 (847)722-7817.