Having talked with Elisabeth Plum about her version of Cultural Intelligence I next got in touch with the Cultural Intelligence Center in the US to find out about how their approach differs or not. I talked with David Livermore who has a very interesting background in preparing missionaries for foreign placings. In the case of the CIC there is a very deliberate attempt to align themselves with the other intelligences and they follow the same framework of action, knowledge and emotion and strategy. It is the strategy factor which differentiates the CIC brand of Cultural Intelligence with that of Elisabeth Plums, where strategy equates to meta-cognitive awareness about what you are doing and why. In fact Elisabeth Plum also mentioned this aspect but did not separate it out.
The CIC approach is based on international research and they do talk of a cultural quotient which means that they have tools which give you a score for your cultural intelligence level at the end. When I expressed doubts about this numerical approach, David Livermore was quick to reassure me that, unlike IQ which seems relatively fixed during an individual’s lifetime, CQ is flexible and you can be trained or train yourself to improve your score. Whew! What a relief!
In fact there are a clutch of quizzes which you can try out on the CIC webpage so that you can get an idea of which areas you need to work on. So that is definitely fun and potentially useful. David Livermore is about to publish a book called ‘Leading with Cultural Intelligence’ about how cultural intelligence can be applied to business situations so this approach will be better known.
This whole strand on the podcast started with a reader comment and we got another comment, this time from Debbie Swallow in the UK, who asked a timely but difficult question, namely, can you name someone who you regard as culturally intelligent and who some of us might know. I thought long and hard about this one and had difficulty in naming anyone and when I thought even harder about it, it occurred to me that maybe, by definition, most famous people do need to be culturally intelligent because their fame reduces the need for these skills. In the end the only name I could come up with was Ray Mears the survivalist because his approach to survival is about extreme awareness of his environment and where that includes people, he tends to be culturally intelligent in his dealings with them. So there’s the challenge. Can you think of anyone who is famous and could be labelled as culturally intelligent?