Facilitation, Cultural Sensitivity and other soft skills I don't understand very well..

After bombing an interview I had at an amazing non-profit organization here in NYC, I climbed out of my depression and self-flagellating mood to engage in what I should have done the minute I stepped on Manhattan soil - I should have been taking advantage of the preponderance of wonderful resources, talks, conferences and meetings being held by thought-leaders, social-impact gurus and academians in this wonderful, breathtaking city.

So that's exactly what I did, with my first stop at Columbia for what they advertised as a "Facilitation Workshop for the Global Environment." It wasn't really that, but I did get quite a bit out of this workshop.

As a science and math person with reasonable social skills, I've never really appreciated the soft skills skill set. But what this workshop did do for me is put into the right perspective how much it's needed to really connect with and understand a person. We did a series of exercises that demonstrated how we judge someone who interact with on sight, and how the story underneath is usually much more complex and often completely different from what we perceive. Often, the difference between connecting with another individual is the difference between being able to describe what's going on (and formulating after all the details are gathered) rather than leaping to judgments, which we almost always do. This was immensely helpful as we've all experienced misunderstandings with our friends and neighbors, nevermind someone from another part of the world where English may not be their first language. I personally don't possess the arrogance that my way is the best way, but it is often the go-to crutch when we can't understand where someone else is coming from.

One of the more concrete/analytical pieces of this workshop that I can share with you was the reference to Edward Hall's theories of high and low context. The speaker made nice venn diagram bubbles to help us understand that in more modern countries, context is low, which means the individual is defined by the individual, and very little by their gender, job, family, and caste. But most of the rest of the world operates very opposite to that in a high-context - the individual is perfectly drawn by these details and the individual is buried somewhere deep within that, shaped by their relationship to the world and community around them.