Three Ways to Reach Beyond Words Through Cross-​​Cultural Communication from Italy

Dur­ing the two months since my last blog entry a lot has hap­pened: I got mar­ried in Min­neapo­lis, I arranged for a sub-​​letter for our New York apart­ment, I moved into a new apart­ment across the Hud­son, and I took a two-​​week hon­ey­moon in Italy!

All this travel kept me from blog­ging, but it pre­sented more than a month of daily oppor­tu­ni­ties to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple out­side of my usual com­fort zone, none more out­side it than Ital­ians. They speak a lan­guage I’ve rarely heard in per­son, they don’t hide their pas­sions, and they nap in the mid­dle of the after­noon, even at work!

This expe­ri­ence rein­forced some of my ideas about com­mu­ni­ca­tion and gave them a new rel­e­vance: com­mu­ni­cat­ing across cul­tures requires more than just lan­guage. Here are three insights:

A pic­ture (or a sculp­ture) is worth more than words

Nowhere in the world is there bet­ter art­work than in Italy. Most art on dis­play in Rome or Flo­rence, unfor­tu­nately, doesn’t have much in the way of descrip­tive text, whether you speak Ital­ian or English. Then again, how much descrip­tive text do you need?

I didn’t need a guide­book to tell me Michelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s Cathe­dral com­mu­ni­cated a mother’s divine grief over her cru­ci­fied son. Climb­ing the duomo of the Basil­ica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Flo­rence told me (in a very phys­i­cal way) how high and hard Renais­sance artists and archi­tects strived towards the spiritual.

Most com­mu­ni­ca­tions, whether from phil­an­thropies or non­prof­its, don’t effec­tively use visu­als, apart from how words appear on a printed page (this is true, even of my blog). But think of how much more effec­tive phil­an­thropies and non­prof­its would be if they could find and use the right pic­tures to com­mu­ni­cate mes­sages across cul­tural lines. In fact, maybe we should use words only as a com­ple­ment to pic­tures and graph­ics (and not the other way around).

Com­mu­ni­cat­ing emo­tions can be just as effec­tive as using words

I wasn’t sur­prised to see how much Ital­ians use their hands, arms, and facial expres­sions to empha­size what they’re say­ing. We all know this from Scorcese films and TV sit-​​coms. But emo­tion is an even big­ger part of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with Ital­ians (or any­one else) when you don’t speak the language.

Peo­ple point at and mimic the things they’re talk­ing about. They smile or they frown or they sim­ply walk and ges­ture for you to fol­low. With­out speak­ing a word, I could under­stand most, if not all, of what peo­ple wanted to say to me.

Every­thing you com­mu­ni­cate, even if only through words, has an emo­tional com­po­nent. So often, we’re try­ing to remove emo­tions from com­mu­ni­ca­tions, as if we’re dis­pas­sion­ate observers. But, really, we need to embrace the emo­tions of what we’re say­ing. This is what grabs our audi­ence and deliv­ers the impact of what we want to say.

Limit assump­tions about your audi­ence; ask ques­tions and anticipate

My wife and I stayed at a delight­ful bed and break­fast in a quiet local neigh­bor­hood in Flo­rence on the bor­ders of the Boboli Gar­dens. The lit­tle old lady who ran it hardly spoke a word of Eng­lish. But com­mu­ni­ca­tion wasn’t much of a prob­lem (see 1 and 2 above). Assump­tions were.

Because we’d paid online through Expe­dia, we never brought up the issue of the bill; we’d assumed she was like Amer­i­can hotel man­agers and knew how online reser­va­tions worked. But on the last day, when a taxi was arriv­ing to take us to the train sta­tion, she came run­ning out of the house plead­ing with us to pay.

We spent the last 20 min­utes of our time in Flo­rence show­ing her our receipt and strug­gling to pre­serve the cama­raderie that we’d enjoyed all week. Had we been more unas­sum­ing, we would’ve antic­i­pated her uncer­tain­ties (and her likely unfa­mil­iar­ity) with online pay­ments and men­tioned the bill the after­noon before, when there was a guest present who spoke both Ital­ian and English.

For­tu­nately, between the taxi dri­ver and a call to another B&B man­ager, we were able to inter­pret our exchanges and resolve the issue.

But just because we’re charmed with, and even kind to, some­one from another cul­ture, we shouldn’t mis­take this for under­stand­ing. We need to ask ques­tions so we can antic­i­pate com­mu­ni­ca­tion break­downs before they harm our relationships.

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Although these three insights aren’t earth shat­ter­ing, they’re essen­tial to com­mu­ni­cat­ing with peo­ple from other cul­tures, and when you think about it, even within our own culture. Yes, words are impor­tant. But there’s so much more to com­mu­ni­ca­tion than words. Our work as com­mu­ni­ca­tors has to reach beyond words. There’s noth­ing like trav­el­ing as a reminder.

Tagged as: Communications, Cross-Cultural, Cross-Cultural Communication, Non-language communication