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Encompassed: Training Management Corporation’s Cultural Navigator

The Cultural Navigator is a featur-rich online center for training, coaching, and advice on cross-cultural issues in business. Attractively designed and professionally executed, it’s a powerful supplement for professional cross-cultural trainers and consultants and a helpful encyclopedia of cultural norms and general approaches to cultures for both the experienced and inexperienced globetrotter.

The Cultural Navigator is the product of Training Management Corporation, based in Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1984, TMC has been offering training and consulting services on bridging cross-cultural issues.

The Cultural Navigator homepage, www.culturalnavigator.com, displays a brief description of its features and gives new users an opportunity to create a new account, current users to access their current account, and anyone the ability to try an online demo.

The Cultural Navigator menu is a graphic compass point that follows the movement of the cursor around the screen. The compass displays seven points in blue circles; the text inside specifies a Navigator activity. When the user places his or her mouse pointer over the circle, text to the right side of the screen displays a description of the activity:

• Cultural Profile supports the Cultural Orientations Model (COM), a framework for addressing cultural difference, and the Cultural Orientations Indicator (COI), an online assessment tool that profiles an individual’s cultural preferences that can help users understand their natural orientation and match it against the norms of other cultures.
• CountryScope displays the economic, social, and cultural norms of scores of countries around the world, including general management practices in each of the countries.
• Learning Zone presents tutorials and coaching sessions to orient users to the specifics of dealing with other cultures in general, as well as with specific cultures.
• Ask the Expert is an email vehicle that connects users to experts in cultures around the world with responses promised in 72 hours.
• Research Zone delivers material about the COI so users can perform their own benchmarks as well as read other studies on cross-cultural models and indices.
• The Bookstore offers online and print books on a variety of business-related cross-cultural topics. A search engine helps users locate publications.
• Toolbox supports surveys on various aspects of cross-cultural engagement. TMC calls the surveys InfoPacks; they offer background information, software tools, and resources to further research various issues.

Using Cultural Navigator

I started using the Cultural Navigator through the Cultural Profile module. The 108 questions I had to answer were straightforward, an eclectic mix meant to gain multiple perspectives on an individual’s cultural reactions. Some of the questions were formulaic. Others force you to reflect, such as “Moving ahead with plans even if everyone is not in agreement.” For those experienced with cross-cultural models, it’s sometimes a challenge to answer honestly since the user knows ahead of time how an answer can skew a cultural model.

Once I answered all the questions, I was shown a rainbow-colored wheel that expressed the COI’s dimensions of cultural response to Environment, Time, Action, Communication, Space, Power, Individualism, Competitiveness, Structure, and Thinking. Each title appears on the outer rim of the wheel; between each spoke, the program displays the user attribute. For instance, under Environment, I saw “Control” and beneath that “Harmony.”

Interpreting the COI sometimes requires professional guidance. The readings from each of the 10 dimensions may conflict with each other, which can confuse the user. For instance, my COI said, “Individualistic” (“you see the value of conflict between individuals as the natural way in which they assert personal interests, reach their goals, and meet their needs”) versus “Direct/Indirect Continuum” (“…you see conflict situations as threats to personal integrity, dignity, and/or ‘face’ ...you may prefer passive resistance or the use of formal or informal mediators … to address, manage, and resolve contentious issues for you”) versus “Environment—Control” (“… you want to take charge of situations and do not shy away from conflict and risk”).

An innovative use of the online medium is the ability to do a gap analysis between the user’s COI and a country’s or set of countries’ COI. For example, the gap analysis made clear that as an individualistic consultant doing business in China, I should consider consciously adapting my actions to engage my more group-oriented Chinese counterparts.

The heart of Cultural Navigator is the COI. As the user moves further away from the COI, the application becomes less interpretive and more encyclopedic. The Learning Zone is the next most applicable module. It supports in its Cultural Simulator component questions to cultural scenarios based on the COI. It scores your answers and explains why or why not answers are appropriate. The Web Learning component of the Learning Zone presents an online training series for which users must schedule attendance. The Coaching Zone component of the Learning Zone also requires users to schedule time with a personal coach at TMC which will help individuals craft individual programs within, at this writing, a couple topics.

The CountryScope will likely be the portion of Cultural Navigator most often used by managers on the go. It presents information on everything from communications behavior within a culture through management practices, negotiation tactics, and etiquette—pretty much all the soft concerns that can waylay business relationships with counterparts from other cultures. The information is concise and a good start to most any engagement across cultures.

Cultural Navigator is a full product, overwhelming, really, in the amount of information it offers. The product is so feature-packed that it requires a professional guide to orient users beyond the CountryScope as to how to use and interpret results from other portions of the product, especially the COI. I don’t think it’s a product that a company can invest in and turn its employees loose on. It will take them as long on their own to learn their way around as it would to actually acquire relevant information.

A company should designate a Cultural Navigator guru who can direct busy users to the most appropriate functions of the product. The guru may also interpret results from the COI and the Cultural Simulator.

I found the qualifications on cost and package features in practically every other paragraph of the marketing materials to be annoying. I’m still unclear what a user will actually receive should his or her company invest in the Cultural Navigator. It seems that a user can be prepared to use a particular module only to be stopped in his tracks by the lack of a license for specific functionality. Then, one imagines, his company has to call TCM to negotiate access to the features he would like to use.

Recommendation

Ultimately, the Cultural Navigator is a well-conceived application of technology in the field of cross-cultural business that requires a human navigator to make the most of the product’s potential. The pricing information could be far more transparent, though.

	The Cultural Navigator
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