This is your introduction to the topics of "intercultural competence" and "intercultural communication". My name is Holger Witzenleiter and I promise you that while dealing with intercultural issues, you will have at least one, if not several "aha moments". Let's start with what intercultural competence and intercultural communication are not:

So let's start by clearing up common misconceptions. People often think that they will learn a lot about "other" cultures in workshops, courses, lectures and seminars on intercultural competence. That is not [necessarily] wrong, but it misses the point. In intercultural competence we first learn about ourselves and our own cultural patterns of thought and action. It is only once we have developed a good understanding of our own culture that we can meaningfully observe and analyse the behaviour and actions of other cultures.

Culture is often understood as a synonym for nation. Intercultural communication would therefore be communication between a Frenchman and a Pole, between a Spaniard and an Italian and between a German and a Dutchman.
But if we look at a nation, i.e. a country, here Germany in a little more detail, we quickly notice that people from Hamburg greet each other very differently than people from Bavaria, and that people from Saxony in Dresden may speak much more directly than people from Offenburg in Baden. If we then look at communication between different professional groups within a region or city, we will quickly have to admit that the craftsmen in a carpentry workshop have different communication habits than the employees in school social work. A granddaughter probably uses different words and phrases than her grandfather. Finally, imagine that a person from the city comes to the regulars' table of a village shooting club on a Sunday morning during a short vacation and a conversation starts. Both sides will most likely experience feelings of otherness and strangeness.

Intercultural competence helps us to reduce this otherness and strangeness. Intercultural communication is your tool to overcome perceived otherness and strangeness and achieve understanding and consensus.

In order to develop this tool, we need to develop skills. This includes knowledge and experience, but above all the ability to question and clarify our own perceptions, to control our emotional involvement, to tolerate ambiguity and to change perspectives. We learn and practice all of this in lectures, workshops, courses and seminars on intercultural competence.

Sometimes people express a fear of "cultural loss". Questions about whether globalization will produce a uniform culture or whether we would have to give up our culture in order to understand others and live together with them are evidence of precisely such fears.

Even if in a globalized world [where] influences "from outside" often lead to changes, the changes due to these influences are very different in different cultures. This was observed during the Covid pandemic, in which governments reacted simultaneously to the crisis and yet with very different measures, which in turn led people in the respective societies to deal with the pandemic very differently.

Cultural behaviour patterns develop in societies due to economic and social challenges and not infrequently in response to natural disasters, wars or challenges in a society's natural environment. Cultural behaviour patterns are, so to speak, the collective response that a society finds to certain developments.

So do we risk losing our culture if we deal with other cultures? This fear is often not only expressed but even fuelled, especially when it comes to the topic of migration.

Can we lose our culture? Hardly. Culture is what we live, how we live, how we celebrate festivals together, how we deal with birth and death, how we live with each other, how we show gratitude or helpfulness, and much more. We can understand engaging with other cultures and developing intercultural competence as an "add-on" or an "app" that allows us to communicate with others, but also to learn from others. People who work in an environment that produces many intercultural encounters are bridge builders who learn to understand both sides and to create understanding.

Differences within national cultures, for example within German society, are often greater than the difference between the average trend values ​​of national cultures. If we compare Chinese and German society, for example, the differences appear huge. However, these differences between Chinese and German average values ​​are in fact smaller than the differences between the extremes within German or Chinese society.

In addition to further training in intercultural competence, training in “diversity and inclusion” is also [important/ beneficial] for improving communication in diverse teams or in a multicultural society. Intercultural communication and competence or transcultural competence are narrower than “diversity & inclusion”.

“Diversity & inclusion” deals with all differences between people, so called “diversity dimensions” and the inclusive handling of differences. Examples of these differences are gender, age, individuals, organizations, countries, professions, minorities, sexual orientation and many more.

The key to living well together in a diverse society, a diverse team or even a patchwork family lies in Friedemann Schulz von Thun's value ​​and development square.

This is based on the assumption that people - even identical twins - will always perceive each other as different. For example, he might think of her that she is a very frugal person and she of him that he is very generous. If a conflict arises, he might say of her that she is stingy and she of him that he is wasteful. Every value also has an anti-value. Intercultural and interpersonal learning try to gradually reduce foreignness and build understanding.

In lectures, workshops, courses and seminars on intercultural competence, we first consider cultures as equal to one another. It is crucial not to judge behaviour and actions from other cultures, i.e. we need to avoid devaluing or romanticizing them, in order to be able to understand these behaviour and action patterns as best as possible. With this understanding, we achieve the greatest possible chance of intercultural understanding. We are talking about cultural relativism here. However, if we understand cultural phenomena in a relativistic and therefore value-free way, we would have to see child labour or child marriages, blood feuds (fjood) or honour killings as well as genital mutilation as justified in culturally relativist terms.That is not the goal of intercultural competence. I would like to invite you to see cultural relativism as an approach that makes it possible to understand cultural phenomena.

Only when I have spoken to an Afghan family in the countryside about marrying off their 12-year-old daughter will I be able to understand their intention to marry off their daughter to a wealthier family where her survival and provision are assured.

Of course there are universal values, such as human rights, which give the 12-year-old Afghan girl the right to free personal development. Of course genital mutilation can never be reconciled with the physical integrity guaranteed by human rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I hope that you will encounter exciting self-discoveries and insights as you build your skills for strengthened intercultural competence.