Potential results of my training

Possible result of my training could be, among others, the following:

• Participants are more aware of their own working preferences, f.e. their 'Dutch bias' and how these stand in the way of clear communication. Participants receive background information about the biggest gaps between their own and other community's perceptions. 
  
• Participants can discussing their own needs and expectations and those of foreign partners. They decide where to go along with the local partner, where to stay on their own course and where to compromise. 
  
• Participants can convert the similarities and differences in perceptions, expectations and needs of different parties into adjustments in educational training programs and materials, such as announcement / PR, participant list, location and catering, training set-up, working methods, learning and communication styles and evaluation.
  
• Participants gain insight into intercultural communication processes and their own reactions to them by playing a simulation game.
  
• Participants know how implicitly biased we are when having to make quick decisions. They become more aware of the biases (researched by neuro-science) that are used by our brain and can use their attentive mind to broaden the perspective of the biased intuitive mind.  
• Participants know a tool to question their own first interpretations. This tool helps you to get more interpretations than the one you always have and to check them before believing them. 
• Participants practice themselves with other than the most preferred (and by them most commonly used) communication styles in order to connect with participants in the training and to communicate effectively. Dutch people are most of the time more direct than indirect speakers. Direct speakers could get more skilled in understanding and speaking indirectly and vice versa. Overlappers could take more into account the needs of reflectors and turntakers and vice versa. 
  
• Participants can use specific methods for international groups or migrants to be more effective, such as the Teach-back method and / or the 1,2-group method to resp. to check whether the content of the message is understood and to facilitate group interaction.

Target groups

Based on the needs of your team, you can make a mixture of those or other results. Based on preferences in learning style and language, the trainer will adapt her program, methods and speech. When I work with Applied Physics students they will answer to my question: which languages do you speak? 'Java, Python, HTML, Javascript' and other computer programming languages, I have never heard of. In other contexts, language is more related to national languages or regional dialects. In my training I try to communicate past each other as close as possible. In Dutch we say: 'zo dicht mogelijk langs elkaar heen praten'. 

Methodology 

I use interactive methods of learning in which the application on daily work routine is central. Furthermore, I like to use deep democracy methods of dialogue to include all perspectives on challenging issues. 

E-learning

It is possible to ask participants in preparation to follow a e-module on intercultural communication. In this way participants already gain some knowledge on the topic before the training. As a result, they are more likely to encounter dilemmas and questions about intercultural knowledge and skills in their training practice abroad. The disadvantage is that it takes time for the participants to immerse themselves in an e-learning. It works best to choose 1 e-learning and to let participants choose a few specific parts and exchange about them in the training. We can discuss which e-learning would be suitable for your team. Below you find some e-learnings on intercultural diversty:

• GoodHabitz (Cultural diversity), 
• Mo-vision (Intercultural Craftsmanship)
• Pharos (Working with people with a refugee background). 
  

The training program is tailor-made. This means that in addition to more general information and possible working methods, specific attention is paid to both the possible blind spot of your employees with regard to their own cultural assumptions in their work practice and the cultural dilemmas that the employees consciously experience.