How do science and tech enhance cultural identity and convergence?

Welcome to Insight Connect, an initiative where we invite a range of international and local experts to share their views, insights, and experience on cultural intelligence and why it matters. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Peter Mousaferiadis, CEO, and Founder of Cultural Infusion, a cultural enterprise utilising arts, education and digital platforms to build cultural understanding. Involved with corporates, governmental, and non-for-profit organisations, Cultural Infusion are official partners to the Australian National Commission to UNESCO. Together, we're going to explore how science and tech can enhance cultural identity and diversity as well as convergence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA89X0p5i1I

Transcript

INT!: Welcome, Peter. It's an absolute pleasure to have you with us today.

PM: Thank you very much for welcoming me to this fabulous interview with you on a wonderful blue sky day here in Melbourne, Australia.

INT!:  Amazing. Very lucky. I can't say the same. It's raining currently with me! So, as means of background, Peter, would you like to tell us how, when, and why you landed in the cultural space in the first place?

PM: I suppose there was always this common thread in my work, which was working with artists from diverse backgrounds, and of course music is an international language, and during my early days as a student, I managed to travel globally. I studied in Czechoslovakia before it split. I spent some time in Italy about eight months in the US so I was always in contact with people from different parts of the world. But I quickly moved into this sphere from studying Western classical music to a space of understanding musical traditions of the world. So, I wanted to give a voice to music traditions of the world, which were often considered subservient to 18th, 19th century Western classical music traditions, because these were superb traditions in their own right. So very quickly that was my introduction to discovering cultures of the world. But I suppose as I started to move from becoming a conductor to a creative director of large intercultural productions, well, I worked with leaders from the across the world, spiritual leaders, including the Dalai Lama. In many ways it was a difficult task in the beginning. How was I going to fuse together a Japanese performer with a flamenco dancer, with an Aboriginal didgeridoo player, and so many other traditions? This didn't come easy. I quickly realised that this concept of diversity and in particular cultural diversity required a lot of management, and in and of itself, diversity is not a great thing.

It's an amazing thing if you know how to manage it. But it also required me to have an intimate understanding of the other, it required me to get everyone to buy into a culture. We tried to create a new and articulate a new framework in this process. So there was a huge creative process that went on, but I also realised that certain traditions had to let go of certain things because if you're talking about musical traditions across the world, not everyone adopts an equal temperament system where we take a scale where we go from C to C and we divide it into 12 equal halftones. The tuning system from one culture to the other often varied. So this required a huge compromise. It required a discussion and everyone to buy into it. So you needed to create a new set of rules almost, and that required a lot of discussion.

And sometimes people didn't want to buy into those rules, which also I began to realise the role that the nation state space in trying to manage the diversity of cultural expression. So that was really my introduction to this work. So there was this common thread in all the work that I did: How do I create this balance?

How do I create this harmony? Hence why we develop the slogan building cultural harmony and which is the aim of cultural infusion and how we do that through intercultural actions. So I hope that gives all your listeners some insight into my background. You know, I never went to university, well, I did go to university and I did study as a conductor and I got myself to a point where I could conduct symphonies from memory and I could analyse schools and then get up and conduct them literally without having to take them to a rehearsal because I knew them so well. But I was able to also apply that paradigm of how I conducted an orchestra, to how I even manage my operations today and really begin to synthesise all these different elements together to allow me to do what I'm doing now. So that's the background, the science, we'll get to that shortly.

INT!:  Amazing. It's fascinating. I think it's interesting. People always think of arts and music as being something that is pretty universal because music travels and the arts in general travel. But I love your take on all the codes and the intricacies really, and how you break it down to make sure that people (we won't all perceive it the same way obviously), but people want to discover and see all the different layers of what that may represent, that's really fascinating. And in fact, an interesting fact I saw about your name, Mousaferiadis, I'm sorry, I hope I say it well. I saw it means traveller or visitor in Uzbek, Greek and another few languages. Surely it was a premonition about what you would do with your life mission moving forward, right?

PM: Yeah. It's interesting you picked that up, Melanie. It was the name given to my paternal grandfather. He was exiled from the Ottoman Empire as it went through that process of being nationalised. They had this massive exchange of populations and there were even death marches that they were sent on and survived.

His first name was Aaron Artin. And from the research that I've been able to do, he was definitely half Armenian. And according to my nephew in Greece, he said he was also Jewish. I know because there's a big Jewish community living there too, and that's a Jewish name. So he was probably forced to proselytise to a different fate.

So, he was a Turkish speaking Greek that came from Cappadocia. And in 1922 there was the Asian minor catastrophe where the city of Smyrna was completely erased of literally the space of the earth and an amazing polyglot city where you could buy newspapers in 15 different languages.

And it was really an amazing city where you could discover musical traditions from so many different cultures. Anyway, that city was burnt to the ground and you had these family dynasties that had been living there for so many years following that catastrophe, which was I think the second largest fire in the history of the world.

There was this agreement, the treaty of Lausanne, which resulted in this exchange of populations. My grandfather in 1905, before that catastrophe, let me go back a little bit further, he changed his name from Aaron Artin to Anastasios Athanasiou, which was the literal translation of his Armenian name. And the reason why he was required to change his name at the age of five was because there was a programme going on to exterminate all the Armenians in the area.

And his uncle came up to him and he said, from this moment forget your name. This is your name, otherwise you're history. And of course, he lost his whole family except for his brother and grew up in an orphanage. Then, the Asian minor catastrophe came along. He moved to Greece as a refugee and because he could never sit still, and he was always on the move, they said, here comes the Mousafe, the visitor, the traveller.

And of course that's how the name Mousaferiadis came about. And whenever I travel to many parts of the world, they go, here's Peter the traveller. So, you know, in India, in Hindi, in Urdu, in Arabic, in Persian, in so many languages throughout Africa, Mousaferiadis means the traveller. So do I have the wanderlust gene in me?

I don't know. They say these things skip a generation. Because I find myself spending four or five months of the year traveling, which I love doing. And I, as soon as I get home, I just can't wait till the next trip.

INT!:  Amazing. You are everywhere all the time. Every time I speak with you, you're somewhere different or you're going around, which is brilliant. It really is. So, we're both in the cultural intelligence space in slightly different areas, and we've dedicated our careers to better understanding cultural diversity and how it translates into behaviours and how we can pass on the knowledge to one another.

What's your motivation in all of this? What gets you out of bed every morning?

PM: Yeah, I get asked that question all the time. In many ways, my work gives me a sense of purpose. I have this strong conviction to make the world a better place, and I have this strong belief that our greatest asset is our collective cultural heritage. It's our cultural diversity. And I've always seen it under threat, even as a child, seeing my parents' traditions who came out to Australia as migrants. My mother's still alive. She came to Australia at the age of 17 and she's almost 90. She still doesn't speak a word of English, but they came here with all these traditions and within those traditions there were these value-based systems, knowledge-based systems encoded in these traditions and seeing all that disappear at a cataclysmic rate, as I'm seeing through globalisation, I wanted to create an organisation that would not only conserve these traditions, but more importantly revitalise them through an intercultural setting. Because every time a tradition disappears, something of humanity is lost. And I also realise that by bringing together different traditions, we can also innovate because knowledge is based on the diversification of ideas. So I wanted to really understand these traditions in a much better way.

That was one of the motivating factors. The other motivating factor was that I was often victim of discrimination that took place, ethnic discrimination. My original name is Panayotis and most people don't know that's the name that appears on my license, on my birth certificate or my passport.

When we were growing up in the seventies, we all changed our names. We changed our names because they'd often get used against us. And I've seen even how that plays out now. Sometimes I want to make a purchase in regional Australia, I would send an alias in there who has an Anglo-Saxon name, because I know in some communities they don't want people with different names binding into those communities.

So, ethnic discrimination is still alive in Australia because it's a predominantly Anglo-Saxon country. I even see how that plays out on boards and in committees. Another reason that I've established what I've done and what motivates me to get out of bed every morning is this notion of otherising and how that plays out on almost a daily basis across the world.

That's when I started to move into this space of data and taking a scientific approach to: how do we understand these concepts of cultural diversity? How do we define them? And that took us quite a few years to try to come up with a definition of cultural diversity. So this concept of otherising, just to give you an example, the amount of times I would do a survey and there would be a box there called "other".

And I would tick it and look around me and I'm thinking, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's ticking this box called "other". And now this organisation is going to develop a strategy for these invisible people that it has no information on. So, that really paved the way for us to begin to move into the space of technology, which we didn't have available to us three decades ago, to how can we manage the social sciences? This understanding of this concept called cultural diversity with technology.

INT!:  Amazing, and I know what you mean about the "other" tick box. And I think it applies to many, many areas of the world, cultures, business. I think this tendency to try and simplify and standardise everything means you miss out on the granularity. And on that note, you've developed some technology, and we're going to get into this in a bit more depth now. As part of Cultural Infusion, you've developed a range of tech products that help map cultural diversity in organisations. I'm thinking of the Atlas product, obviously. I've tested it and I've worked on it before. I love the nuance of it, and I really liked the fact that., for once, there was something about cultural influence. It wasn't just the identity based on where you were born or your parents or where you grew up. It relates to how are you influenced by other communities. Your identity doesn't have to be what was on paper to begin with, it's where you built your influence around you. So, can you tell us where the idea started, and also how you see tech being at the service of culture and cultural diversity?

You mentioned it briefly, but I'd love to hear a bit more about that.

PM: Well, about 11 years ago, my CTO walked into my office. He was an intern at the time doing an internship with us and there was something quite remarkable about him, and I later came to realise that his great-grandfather was the last King of Persia. He said to me, you always talk about this concept of cultural diversity and you throw away these terms like "diversity".

If I wanted to understand whether I was more or less diverse, how would I do that, Peter? I couldn't answer the question. He said, well, you know, all these big companies that you quote, McKinsey's and Deloitte's and PWC, they make these claims that if you are more diverse and inclusive, you can be up to six times more innovative and responsive and adaptive to change, and you can improve your bottom line. But if you wanted to track that focus, what does that look like? If you wanted to develop a strategy for cultural diversity, well, what aspects of cultural diversity? I couldn't answer the question back in 2014, 2015, and that really ignited the idea for us to try to define these terms better. And as we started to embark on this journey, it was just like, my God, this onion is never going to stop. We're never going to get to the core of it. What we thought would be a six-month task took us the better part of five years, and we never thought we were going to develop this tool called the Atlas that can provide these comprehensive insights into hidden diversity into organisations.

Through our survey and inclusive data and data sets, as we started to unpack it, we then were able to come up with a definition, a new working definition of cultural diversity. No one had really done this work beforehand. It was poorly defined. It was analytically neglected and it was in many ways in need of just a new way of understanding this concept.

There would be policy papers that would talk about it, and we needed to do more for cultural diversity. Okay. Well, tell me what aspects? So that really ignited the idea and where we are today and it's been an iterative process. We're constantly learning. We have a technical paper that I had the fortune of presenting last year. UNESCO invited me to present it at MONDIACULT in Barcelona, beginning of October. And it's been well received across the world. So, the way we define cultural diversity now is: we really look at four distinct areas: country of birth, going back three generations; we look at the primary languages that people have been brought up speaking; we also ask what other languages they speak; we ask what cultures influence people, what cultures they subscribe to. And they can, of course, subscribe to more than one. And with the platform, we recognise that culture is not static. It's dynamic. It's constantly shifting all the time.

We ask what belief systems, because we recognise that how we make sense of the world around us varies and informs. Absolutely every lived expression and encounter and what we eat and what we wear, it informs the cognitive processes as well. And of course you would know this better than anyone.

We also ask what tribes people would affiliate with. So, we've desegregated cultural diversity into the country of birth, languages, belief systems, and what cultures as well as what ancestors. Now, ancestors really play a minor part but can play some part. And we are beginning to realise now, especially in health and diet;, ancestry can play a really important part, which we're starting to pick up. And we're noticing how clinical trials have a lot of bias built into them because when they tested, for example, new medicines, they never tested it on the diversity of the human population. And I know that because I take Allopurinol medication, which I've been taking for 17 years, for gout. So, if you are a Han Chinese person or if you are a Korean person, there's a huge percentage up to about 30% of Han Chinese and Korean people where Allopurinol medication doesn't work on them because it was never tested on them. Now that's only one illness. There's something like 5,500-6,000 ethno-specific illnesses. So I've brought a few things here together now just to try and explain how we moved into technology and how we have defined these concepts. What I haven't talked about is the concept of diversity.

How we define that now, if you had asked me years ago, I would've just said, okay, let's have a bottle of wine, Melanie, you and I are good friends and we're going to talk about it. It means so many different things to so many people across the world. And I think in many ways that's because some cultures sometimes oversimplify concepts, sometimes they overlay them with all these social constructs.

Diversity, if I translate it in my culture and if I translate it in many cultures out there, it means just one thing. It means difference. It doesn't mean anything more, anything less. Diversity is an aggregate of two or more things. No one thing can be diverse. I often hear people say "I'm diverse" and I think "Now what are they talking about when they say I'm diverse?" If diversity means difference, then we can apply a series of metrics to that. So, we've come up with these four metrics, which were informed by academic literature, one metric is variety, which looks at the absence of homogeneity. The next metric is disparity, which is looking at the dissimilarity of what we're looking at. So let's say in one group we had three Romance speaking languages, Italian, French, Portuguese, and in another group we had Italian, Arabic and Japanese, then the dissimilarity in those languages will be much greater, and that's how we structure the data in the backend. Then, the next metric is looking at balance. A lot of organisations might say they're diverse, but the further north they go, often there's less diversity. And I get that and I understand why that is. We've done a lot of work to achieve gender parity in many parts of the world. But that's created many unintended consequences as I've experienced personally and in many parts of the world because we've just looked at diversity through the lens of gender, and we haven't intersected it against in a cultural diversity, disability, sexual orientation, and so many other dimensions of diversity.

The last and most important metric is mutuality, which is looking at to what extent are organisations reflective of the communities that they're serving or delivering products to. And this is becoming a very important issue in many developing communities across the world. The global South is now struggling with this. Nation States like Nigeria, where you might have 510 ethnic groups, often, what you find in some of these countries and in Kenya, for example, you have sometimes 95% of a public agency is made up of maybe one ethnic group and very little representation. So, they might be going to communities, representing communities where there is no, no cultural alignment, and that's creating a lot of resentment throughout Africa, throughout Southeast Asia, even in places like India, it's creating enormous resentment. So we need to get better at understanding this concept of diversity, cultural diversity in its entirety and how it relates to the complexity of human identity.

INT!:  I think to your point, when the intersectionality is missed is probably yet again because of this urge for people to always oversimplify and standardise, right? We don't like things that are multilayered. We need to make it really simple, but in doing that, we're missing out on a lot of the richness.

Do you feel tech and science are the answer to that? Is that how we bring back the multi-layered and more nuanced point of view? What's the role of tech and science? Because often humanities and sciences are portrayed as being very antagonistic. A bit like soft skills and hard skills, but the reality is they need each other. Right? So what's the role in tech in this or science?

PM: Before I answer that question, I might take us back to 1989. I think of 1989 as being a milestone. Why? Because that was the year Tim Berners-Lee gifted us the worldwide web. It was also the year that Kimberlé Crenshaw came up with the intersectionality theory. It was also the year that Fukuyama said the Berlin War has been brought down. We're all going to be holding hands, singing kumbaya. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the period of three decades, we experienced massive economic globalisation. Without the globalisation of values and ethics, the world started to become compressed.

We started to find ourselves in this hyper diverse world where everything was communicated instantly and we had access to information from all over the world, and we had access to perspectives from all over the world. At the same time, we had the rise of social media around 2008 and 2009, and at about that time is when peace across the world, according to the Economics Institute for Peace, started to decline.

Is there a correlation between the rise of social media, the adoption of it and peace being steadily in decline. I'm not saying it's the major contributing factor, but it is a definitely a contributing factor, and we've seen how we're becoming more fractured than ever. The point that I'm trying to make is that if technology is not serving humanity, it's not serving us at all, and we are becoming more polarised than ever.

So I'm concerned with AI. I think AI is amazing. I use it all the time. We all use it, but if we race to adopt it too quickly and don't address the biases that AI is bringing about, then more and more people across the world are going to feel left out. I think of what it means for linguistic diversity, I think of what it means for cultural diversity. I don't think AI is available in all the eight and a half thousand languages that appear in our database. It's probably only 80, 90 languages it's available in. So what does it mean for all those people that aren't, don't have access to this technology? So I think we need to begin to center culture, humanity in absolutely every design process.

So when we're building something, we need to think about what's going to be the impact of this new technology. So how does it relate to the work that we do? Well, the ability to relate to the other and navigate our world, our way through the world of how everyone sees, every encounter has become more integral than ever.

So the work that you do, Melanie, that I do, should become central to education. It is this competency of intercultural understanding. And I'm proud to say that in Australia, our curriculum has identified intercultural understanding as a core competency that sits alongside numeracy, literacy, ICT capability, critical thinking.

But what does it look like in a classroom that still hasn't been figured out? And we're doing a lot of work in that space now where we're trying to creating a graded system starting all the way to year 10 students where they can start to work their way through a curriculum that can build up this value of intercultural understanding not only as a core value but as this capability of what it means to be a citizen of the world. And this notion of a citizen of the world is note a modern notion. It goes all the way back to Sinope, I think it's called Bursa today, or one of those cities in Turkey on the northern coast where Diogeneses who lived the life of a dog and said "I'm a citizen of the world".

I think he was one of the very first people in the world to enunciate that. So this idea of: what does it mean to be a citizen of the world? It's not a new idea. People have been interacting with each other every other day. It was probably less so during the formation of the nation states where we started to try to essentialise culture and put a border around a specific ethnic group. So people were mixing with each other all the time, you know?

 I heard these stories from, my father who would talk about the stories that he was told from his father growing up in the Ottoman Empire where Greek Armenians, Jews, they all got on really well with each other. They loved each other and then that all changed very quickly.

INT!:  Yeah, of course. It's just about reviving that curiosity, right? I think more than anything, and wanting to learn from others who are different and think differently. But anyway, I'm not going to expand on this. I would love to make this last much longer, but I guess I would like to conclude our conversation with maybe you giving us a success story that you're really happy about or that is really memorable for you that relates to the tangible impact that this in depth understanding of cultural identity and diversity has meant for one of the organisations that you've worked with to date.

PM: Well, thank you very much Melanie. I might start off with the education programme because we have quite a few different arms at our organisation. There's events and experiences and our education, but I've seen how our education programme has changed the life of children on so many levels because when you create that lived experience of the other, you create enormous empathy.

Enormous curiosity where that individual begins to embark on a journey to discover more about themselves through that whole journey. So we now have students who participated in our program more than 20 years ago, back all the way back to 2000 and two, where they've now become teachers and they're now continuing to adopt our programmes.

For me, you know, that's enormous success because that programme now is delivered to 400,000 students across Australia. But I think the big work that we've really been able to do is how we've been able to get large companies out there who have really been focused just on their audiences, on their markets, where they invest all this technology in trying to understand the marketplace.

And we know that's like a $250 billion industry today in trying to understand customers and we see how this plays out with tech technology, where the big tech companies know what we're going to purchase before we've even worked out what we're going to purchase. They hear you have a conversation and the next thing you go to your phone and stuff starts popping up. Now I see that all the time on my phone, but often they don't know themselves. And they have no idea of their organisational identity. And when they begin to discover their greatest asset, we've seen how companies have been able to build retention strategies to build retention of their staff, to deepen their engagement with their workforce, which means their staff are now staying longer at their organisation because they've been able to create strategies where they've gone: "we understand that we're a global organisation and we know that these days are probably not important for you. Let's engage in floating days. Oh, we have a workforce now that may have the cultural knowledge because we're tapping into new markets now". They have that knowledge now that they can do upon because they have those insights through.

The Atlas that's really able to cast this spotlight on the hidden diversity that can bring about really great at social and cultural and even economic value, finance value for organisations. One organisation we worked with had an issue with engagement, which was quite low in about four out of their 12 departments, and we were able to pinpoint that the issue was a cast problem that they had and that allowed the organisation to really pinpoint the issue and develop a whole little range of psychological and cultural safety programmes that could really build up the confidence of those areas and address that issue where they would never have been able to find that out beforehand without a tool like the Culture Infusion Atlas.

INT!:  Amazing. What an impact. 400,000 students, 20 years in. I love it. It's brilliant and thank you for doing all you do. I think maybe people don't say that enough to you, but if you can get that impact so widespread, and I know you go internationally and you speak at lots of different conferences, eventually it just sinks in.

We just need a bit of time and unfortunately, our lives times are always a bit too short to see the impact, but I know that you're definitely having a lot of impact fore sure. Thank you ever so much, Peter, for sharing your experience and your view on cultural intelligence has been really, really interesting.

There will be another interview or exchange in the next few weeks about AI and responsible AI and all around cultural bias. So I invite you to check that one out when it's live and to those who were watching or listening, this is Insight Connect where cultural Intelligence lands.

Thank you very much.

PM:  Thank you very much Melanie, and thank you to intention!