Leading with Cultural Intelligence, 2012a

Chapter 2
Understanding Culture
When my parents came to the United States in 1979, their world became vastly different than what
they had known. Before their arrival, they lived in a small hilltop, tribal village in the mountains of
Laos, like many of their ancestors before them. They had the simplest tools for doing their work and
for living their lives. The natural world provided everything they needed. If they wanted to use the
bathroom, they went outside—not to an outhouse but to the woods. When they were hungry, they
cooked the meal in a pot over a large fire pit. When relatives asked them to attend celebrations and
notified them that the celebration meal would begin sometime when the sun was to set, my parents
knew that the path of the sun would let them know when they should leave their house.
There were a lot of assumptions my parents made about their world. When they had to relocate to
the United States, they found out how different their assumptions were when they were tested in an
environment that contradicted their ways of being. They were not aware of a different way of living
their lives, because the norms that shaped their lives influenced their actions and behaviors. The
norms helped them to learn that what they did was the correct way to live.
One of their most difficult challenges was to unlearn what they knew in a different context and with
different materials and tools that they did not have before. What naturally occurred was a process of
culture shock and then a period of acculturation. When my parents’ sponsors showed them how to
use the toilet by gesturing what to do and how to flush, my parents were embarrassed. Coming from
a culture where modesty is important, they did not know how to respond to the American sponsor’s
gestures, yet their embarrassment quickly turned into fascination when they saw how a toilet could
dispose of materials.
Interpreting body language became a critical piece of adaptation and learning. My parents found the
exaggerated gestures of their sponsors turning on and off the stove “different.” But it was paying
attention to the facial gestures and body language that helped them to understand how to operate a
stove. They realized certain things were the same across cultures: taking out a pot to boil water,
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