You may not have noticed but May 21 was UNESCO’s World Day for Cultural Diversity, for Dialogue and Development. As a change to the cliched international fair of ethnic cuisine Debbie Swallow, crosscultural expert based in the UK, decided to start a blog called the World at Work. The idea would be to invite people to contribute critical incidents on the actual day of May 21st. Since she announced this on about May 14th I thought that this was an
interesting initiative and might garner about half a dozen posts. I also thought it was potentially very useful since the one thing I miss when doing intercultural training is often the right critical incident to start the whole process off. In fact there have been many contributions and the archives stretch back over about 4 pages now. The contributors come from far and wide and the topics range from business to small talk. So I think that in the end Debbie has created a very useful resource here. The big challenge becomes what to do for the next WDCDDD day in 2011! Contributors include George Simons of Diversophy and SIETAR, Sanda Ionescu of the Culture Broker and Richard Cook of Global Excellence
I was happy to give Debbie’s initiative a mention in the latest edition of the Absolutely Intercultural podcast which also includes an interview with the author of a new course book on intercultural matters, Adrian Pilbeam. The show also features extracts from a webinar on Language and Lifelong Learning which took place in April in Finland and featured new paradigms of culture as a box and as a peninsula!