Here is the full transcript of Mondå founder Julien S.

Bourrelle’s TEDx Talk: How Culture

Drives Behaviours at TEDxTrondheim conference. This event occurred on May 31, 2015.
Julien Bourrelle is the author of the best seller series “The Social Guidebook to Norway.”

Julien S. Bourrelle – Founder,  Mondå

I was in Brussels. I was sitting on La Grand-Place, which is a beautiful square in the center
of the town. Suddenly, a man came and sat next to me, and started talking to me, so I turned
to him and I answered. Then I turned back and I asked myself, “Why is he talking to me?”
Suddenly, I realized, “Julien, you’re becoming Norwegian.”

So I turned to the man and I said, “Sorry, I live in a country where people don’t speak to
each other.” The thing is, in Norway, it is not that people don’t speak to each other; it’s that
socialization takes part in a much more framed and organized manner. I was not expecting
this man as a stranger to come and talk to me.

However, this is surprising, because I come from the French-speaking part of Canada
where that type of behavior is totally normal. However, my mental programming has
changed. My brain has been rewired, because during the last five years I’ve lived in a tiny
little country in the north of Europe which is called Norway. When you move to a different
country, there are three ways that you can relate to the culture: you can confront, complain,
or conform. When you confront, you believe that your behaviors are the right behaviors.

When you complain, what happens is that you will isolate yourself into social bubbles of
foreigners living in segregation with the society. When you adapt your way to behave,
when you conform to the whole society, then you can truly benefit from diversity. But that
implies that you are observing, learning, understanding the behaviors of others, and
adapting your own, so that it fits with the behaviors of the society you’re in.

I was in the north-east of Spain, in a beautiful region of Catalonia, and I was there with a
very good friend of mine. He is two-meters tall, blond hair, and blue eyes. We were visiting
the beautiful region where they’re making the cava, the Spanish sparkling wine. After the
guided tour, we asked some more questions to the very charming guide that was there, and
she was explaining us with passion about what she was doing, and then suddenly she
stopped.

She took a step aside, she took my friend, and she shook him. And then she looked at me
and said, “Why is he not interested in what I’m saying?” Because she was not getting the
emotional feedback she was used to. She was seeing his emotional feedback through her
own cultural glasses, meaning that she was interpreting the fact that he had a neutral face
on what it would mean if someone from her culture would have that face, and that would
mean that the person was not interested or didn’t want to be there.
And we all see the world through cultural glasses. The lens through which your brain sees
the world shapes your reality. If you can change the lens, not only can you change the way
your brain perceives behaviors, but you can change the way people relate to cultural
differences. Embedded within that statement is the key to benefiting from diversity.

Three years ago, I was sitting on the board of directors of one major university in Northern
Europe and I was representing 2,000 academic staff, and I wanted to become a better
leader. So I’ve looked around the whole university for a leadership class that would be
suited to my position, and I found one, and I was thrilled, because not only would I learn
about leadership, but because I would also learn about how women lead, because the class
was called “Leadership for women.”

And so, as naive as I was, I’ve registered for the class. The next morning, the gender
equality adviser of the university calls me and says, “Julien, this is leadership for women.
You’re a man. You cannot attend.” It was the first time in my life that I was denied
education based on my gender. This is my cultural perspective about what happened there.

However, why is the university doing this? Because the government had been putting in
place a scheme that allowed the university to take candidates in full academic position
before someone that has higher academic training if the candidates can document
leadership training. By offering leadership training only to women, the university was fast
forwarding the track of women into full professorship position at a place where less than
20% of women had professorship; I call this equality of result.

Not equality of opportunity; equality of results. I did not have the same opportunity to
flourish to my full potential, but the result is that we have a balance in society. We enforce
diversity, and there is a good reason to do this. Studies show that boards composed of both
genders will perform 15% better then boards that are composed of mainly one gender. But
studies also show that boards that are composed of different cultures will perform 35%
better than boards that are composed of only one culture.

Cultural diversity increases problem-solving ability. It increases creativity and innovation.

The real challenge here is to make people being able to communicate well together. And
this you do through explaining cultural differences.

Two years ago, I was sitting in my living room. I was sitting there with a friend and we
started to draw typical cultural situations. Then we made a Facebook page, and then we
made a free website, and then I started to lecture all around the country. I’m happy to say
we’ve just crossed one million people that have seen these drawings to help to connect
culture. And the idea behind that project is to create a simple, humoristic way in connecting
people of different cultures, especially in Norway.
You know that most people around the world are raised with the idea that they will need to
contribute to a group, that they will be part of a group and interdependent on their
members. And it affects the way people behave. Other parts of the world, especially the
Western world, we raise our children to be independent and to be self-sufficient, and we
create certain independence in society, and it changes behaviors. You see the difference?

This basic principle tells a lot about how you’re going to expect a friendship to look like. In
certain societies where the group prevails, the friendship will be much stronger, in terms
that people will live in symbiosis with each other and dependent on each other, and they
will be expected to be invited to every single event that the very good friend will do.
However, in other cultures, friendship will be much more distant.

I’ve asked a Scandinavian man one day what a good friend was. You know what he
answered? “It is someone I can sit in silence in a room and feel comfortable.” If you tell
this to a South American, they won’t understand what the principle is. This is about
friendship and love, and contact with people is one of the six basic human needs. If you’re
not able to see how this friendship and love is communicated to you because you are
blinded by your cultural glasses, you will spend years believing you have no friends.

You will spend years believing that people are rejecting you. It is about changing these
cultural glasses. This is when you know that a Norwegian bus stop is full and that you need
to stand. What happens if you sit in the middle? It could very well be that one of the two
persons stands up, takes a step aside, starts playing on his phone.

Now, what if you look different? What if you’re wearing a religious symbol? How easy it is
to believe that the person has moved away because you’re of a different skin color or of a
different religion? A typical cultural misunderstanding and a very basic of human
interactions: you’ve come into the personal space of someone who has a much bigger
personal space. In most cultures in the world, there’s place for four people on that bench.
Not understanding these very subtle physical differences with people will actually lead to
lot of miscommunication.

If you want to observe it yourself, go to any international conference and try to observe a
South American that tries to communicate with a North European. What will happen there
is that the South American will be very eager and will stand at a distance that’s comfortable
for him. The North European will be also very eager, but stand a little bit further away,
because he’s not comfortable that the South American is so close.

If you observe it over time, you will see that a little dance starts and people go around the
room, none of them realizing that they are feeling uncomfortable, or they both feel
uncomfortable, but they don’t realize why. It’s just a simple thing of culture and being able
to feel that distance between people, which is different in every culture. And that has to do
as well with politeness.
Politeness is a concept which is very much culturally related. It’s a group of norms and
social codes that everyone obeys to, so that communication goes well in the society, and in
certain societies it is very strict, and you have a way to talk, and you have a way to
behave. You change the way – you’re changing the words in the sentence.

In other places, politeness might only mean not to disturb others, to leave more space, both
in friendship and physical space. And if you move to another country and no one explains
you what politeness means, how can you expect people – how can you expect that someone
will behave as he’s expected to in a foreign culture? The key here is to benefit from
diversity. Everyone sees the world through cultural glasses. It’s not about what you see; it’s
about what you perceive. It’s not about what you see; it’s about what you perceive.

And it is by taking small steps that we will one day help the world to truly benefit from
diversity. Thank you.