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“Trompenaars’s model of national culture differences is a framework for cross-cultural communication applied to general business and management, developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. This involved a large-scale survey of 8,841 managers and organization employees from 43 countries.

This model of national culture differences has seven dimensions. There are five orientations covering the ways in which human beings deal with each other, one which deals with time, and one which deals with the environment.”

From Wikipedia.

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The last course, which was in design phase when I dumped it, was to address problems of cross cultural communication and the tensions inherent in it. I {we} have had plenty of instances of Franco -Britannic cultural differences. If one side imagines that the way they do things is right and dandy it can be very difficult to show to them other ways. They may get ultra-defensive and imagine themselves more highly organised and efficient than they actually are. One might have to learn new ways and adapt to the system in which one lives. These “growing pains” can cause premature baldness. One can be seen as pushy and not “sympa”.

There is a balance between nanny state control and last minute.com freeform. There is also a need to decide and stick to said decisions without continuous flexing. Making shit up on the fly can cause clusterfucks of considerable dimension. Preparation and planning prevent piss poor performance.

One of the things I never put on my CV as a bullet point was

• Able to organise a piss up in a brewery.

It does not sound like an important life skill but it is. One of things that I am good at is organisation which needs contingency. Organisation should be, wherever possible, simple and clear. The person who has oversight needs to be updated and exercise that over sight. Although not my natural team role I have ended up being Monitor Evaluator on a number of occasions to keep things on track. Slippage is a real problem.

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner identify France as a diffuse culture in which so-called responsibility is spread out and it is not clear who has oversight or indeed if there is any. Process has been developed and used but rarely questioned and updated. Demain, quinze jours, are not as bad as the Jamaican “soon come”. But time is vague like many other things.

As a INFJ timing is important to me and sticking to what you say about time is vital. I can’t help it but people running late irks. I have literally thought while waiting, “shall I just go home, fuck it!”

I am anticipating a hip-replacement operation. It is down to us to organise a pulmonary and cardiovascular screening before a meeting with the anaesthetics geezer / geezer-ess. We have to order and provide crutches and compression stockings. We have to organise full blood tests including blood typing. The surgeon will have blocked out a space in his diary. No bugger has yet done an assessment if it is safe for me to return home. There is a quasi-magical assumption that everything will fall into place. A couple of cardiology outfits have suggested a screen a week before the operation!! Really?

If there is a problem and the operation needs cancelled there is no lead in time and the slot will have to be abandoned. This kind of “planning” makes me nervous. It lacks foresight. It may be the way things have always been done but that is not good logic.

The possibility for fuckwittery is huge and the probability of things which are time critical going wrong, high.

In the UK no civilian would be given responsibility for collecting very expensive granulocyte-colony stimulating factor from the pharmacist and giving it to a district nurse for injection prior to a harvesting of stem cells. The factor is temperature sensitive. To trust this kind of thing to joe public is in my opinion unwise. The key thing could go very badly wrong and everything need re-scheduling. Do normal people really understand temperature dependent reaction kinetics?

“But that is the way we do things….”

The feeling that I {we} have to be on this is an unnecessary added stress.

Am I a control junky?

Am I sane?

Will this aid my post operative recovery?

Should I just go with the flow in this case?

In my view professional organisational oversight might be a better approach. I could tip up at hospital and have a whole day of tests done a couple of months out. The go / no go question would be answered and, if needed, some interim medical adjustments made ahead of time. Rather than a week before finding out some kind of unknown heart anomaly.

I understand that the summer is in the way and that everything stops for summer. Unfortunately this is not in my cultural DNA.

A bit edgy…