Collectivist and Individualist Cultures

!! WARNING !! this blogpost is written in the spirit of Bob Marshall´s Agile Blogging method …

Cool! We have great friends and they took care of our 1 year old daughter the whole day, so my wife and I could attend a workshop on intercultural marriage!

I heard of all that in snippets before but the guys from Team F put it together really well. I realized how much I represent the individualist culture whereas my wife definitely comes from a collectivist one. I am direct in my communication, I wanna hear yes and no, for me it is important what´s right and wrong, true and false. For my wife it is more dancing around a topic, her experiencing the world is more whole, contextual, for her the group she belongs to is important. I do low context communication, my wife high context communication (oh, by the way, I´m German, my wife South Korean!).

Communication with different cultures is not easy, but it enriches so much to learn about how other cultures tick!

As a sidenote, I wonder how Scrum works in a collectivist culture, where loosing one´s face is the worst thing that can happen to one.

Let´s see how communication with my wife improves