Extrait du livre audio "La règle ? Pas de règles" de Reed Hastings et Erin Meyer lu par Jean-Philippe Renaud et Ingrid Donnadieu. Parution numérique le 31 mars 2021.
https://www.audiolib.fr/livre-audio/la-regle-pas-de-regles
[...] two young fish who encounter an older fish swimming the opposite way. He nods at them and says, « Morning, boys, how’s the water? » — which prompts one of the young fish to ask the other, « What the hell is water? » When you are in and of a culture—as fish are in and of water— it is often difficult or even impossible to see that culture. Often people who have spent their lives living in one culture see only regional and individual differences and therefore conclude, « My national culture does not have a clear character ».
When I was sixteen, I took an elective class at Minneapolis South Highschool on giving effective presentations. This is where I learned the traditional American rule for successfully transferring a powerful message to an audience: « Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them ». This is the philosophy of low-context communication in a nutshell.
I work in English and also in French, a much higher-context language than English. For one thing, there are seven times more words in English than in French (500 000 versus 70 000), which suggest that French relies on contextual clues to resolve semantic ambiguities to a greater extent than English.
As with so many challenges related to cross-cultural collaboration, awareness and open communication go a long way towards defusing conflict.