The art of reconciliation or how proprietary AI is revolutionising CQ

Welcome to Insight Connect, an initiative where we invite a range of international and local experts to share their views, experience, and insights on cultural intelligence and why it matters. Today, I'm delighted and honored to be receiving Fons Trompenaars, one of the leading thought leaders and figures in cultural intelligence.

He is an organizational theorist and management consultant and author, a speaker. Well known for his work throughout the years and contribution academically to the currents of cultural intelligence, Fons is well known for his work around the Seven Dimensions of Culture and Dilemma Reconciliation. He's spent his career finding innovative ways of reconciliating cultural differences.

Today, together we'll be exploring Fons' latest innovation in this space where he combines AI and CQ (cultural intelligence) to support growth and finds ways to resolve complex market tensions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANHXYpTeI14

Transcript

INT!: Welcome, Fons, it's a pleasure to have you with us today. 

Fons Trompenaars: Pleasure is mine. Wonderful. What an introduction. I I can only go downhill now.

INT!:  Amazing. Thanks, Fons. So, to kick us off, I really love to hear people's backstory and to understand why they've decided to advocate for cultural intelligence and in your case reconciliation. Could you tell us a bit more about how, when, and why you landed in the cultural intelligence space? 

FT: Yeah, the deep one is that I have a French mother and a Dutch father, which helps you from child onwards to see the enormous differences between the two families at top, down, bottom up, central, decentral, et cetera.

After my economics degree, I got the opportunity to do a PhD on this topic. And that was in fact by an advisory committee in Brussels where people like Geert Hofstede but also the highly acclaimed André Laurent, Giorgio Inzerilli were in a jury. And, I was very much into cybernetics system theory and they say: "why don't you combine system theory with cultural, what is now called cultural intelligence?"

And I really got excited because everything came together and I went to Wharton to do my PhD in this area, and I'm talking about 79. So, it's a long time ago. It was avant la lettre and I tried to get into the new model because in fact there was a lot of criticism on the existing models. They saw that most models that were used at the time including of state, it was measuring how Dutch you are, not cultural differences. If I had to call power difference, distance is typically Dutch. If you look at the definition of feminine versus masculine, it's how the Dutch would define the traits of a woman versus the traits of a man, et cetera. So, I had to develop my own model, and I got my PhD by comparing 10 refineries of Shell and looking at what is the effect of national culture on organizational culture.

And cutting a long story short, the first day that I joined Shell, after that, I worked eight years with Shell. I met Charles Hamden Turner, and he said, Fons, think we can work together because I reconciled all your dilemmas. And I said, what the hell is this guy talking about? He said, Fons, let me give you an example because I can see you don't understand. If you are an individualist at the cost of the collectivity, which your questionnaire assumes, then you are an egoist and it doesn't work. If you are a collectivist at the cost of the individual, you are a communist and it doesn't work. So, if both ends of your scale don't work, why don't you try to combine them? Because what is a great individual? An individual is great because he or she gives it back to society. And what is a great society? That's a group that tries to help individuals to excel. And I said, my God, he is quite right. Now this would be called cultural intelligence. How do you combine opposites? So, it's a long answer to a very interesting question, Melanie, and I hope that helps.

So that's how I came into the field by intellectually being challenged that our bipolar models are linear, while reality is not.

INT!: Yes. And that's particularly true today. I mean, you were talking about how Dutch you are. All of this binary sort of combinations aren't relevant in a day where there are so many mixed and rich identities, right? We need to be able to be a lot more agile in how we view this. Amazing. So, looking into AI and CQ specifically, can you tell us a bit more about your latest work in this space and how AI leverages decades of data that you've gathered to solve these global business and societal deadlocks.

FT: Yes, it's an interesting path. You know, when Corona came, I lost a lot of my business because nothing could be done in the analogue sphere. Then AI came and I said, wow, this is a great opportunity to see as a co-pilot what AI can do, not as a pilot. In other words. The major dilemma of AI and I think digitalization in general is high tech versus high touch, digital versus analogue, if you like.

And, that's how we took AI as a great opportunity to help clients, first of all, in better diagnostics. Let me give you an example. Over the years, we have gathered 60,000 dilemmas because we, in our workshops, very often ask clients, what is your dilemma? What is your challenge? It could be cultural dilemmas, like in a merger and acquisition between the French and the Dutch. If I stick to the same example, and they say, ah, but leadership in France is much more top down and people expect to get direction. While in the Netherlands, it's almost the opposite. You know, you become a boss if you don't have a sense of direction, it's us, the labor that does it, I'm exaggerating on purpose.

And so we were working on those dilemmas first, diagnosing them, and then in a workshop, ask the famous question, what can I do with top down that helps us to be better in bottom up? And what can we do by listening bottom up in order to give better direction and we call that servant leadership, but what I'm trying to say is: 60,000 of those dilemmas, and we gathered also 10,000 solutions. And I said, wow, why don't we develop a tool that could be used in an analogue discussion like I was just describing. Namely, there is a dilemma. Bottom up, top down. What do you do about it? Oh, servant leadership is the reconciliation and normally a workshop like this takes an hour, so I'm cutting corners now.

And if you give AI 60,000 dilemmas and 10,000 solutions, the rest is history. So what we have developed is an FLM, a focused language model, not an LLM, which is ChatGPT, but protected. And we have developed what we call a dilemma solver because marketing people like to think that dilemmas are solvable. So yeah, I think Dilemma Solver would be a better name, but it's too academic anyway. It's a device that records a discussion, the analogue discussions around a dilemma, and then it doesn't only, when you stop recording, go into AI, it takes advantage of our database, including the methods for dilemma reconciliation, and we have nine approaches for it. And it comes out with the sub-dilemmas and it comes out with directions of solutions of reconciliations as we call them. And to be honest, at the moment, people are just flabbergasted about the quality of what comes out, including myself, you know. So, they have a discussion about the type of leadership and, and then AI comes out with: have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? So, that is one tool. 

Another tool we develop is in my keynotes, having a QR code on a question, for example, how to become a transnational organization? People go with a QR code and get an opportunity to give the response, and then, the response is put into AI and five minutes later with an avatar, it comes back in with what the audience have said.

And again, the quality is just amazing. Now, does that mean that I don't hold keynotes anymore? No. On the contrary, people like the keynotes, the analogue stuff even more by the copilot, which we call life consulting. And there was once, by the way, a French company where the CEO came to me and said, Mr. Trompenaars, we just had a big accountancy firm, uh, excuse me, a consultancy firm and they took six weeks and one and a half million dollars of our time and money. What you did in five minutes was not only better, but much cheaper and that opens my heart that people get it. And again, combine analogue with digital.

INT!:  Amazing. It's so right. Actually, you almost answered every question I had in one answer. You're right. It's very effective in five minutes. Amazing. So, what I think is really interesting is your perspective that AI is not used only for efficiencies, which is what most people are sort of putting forward at the moment, but also, it really revolutionizes the cultural intelligence space and strategic decision making really, which is fantastic. Interestingly, I recently wrote a piece about nomad culture and how we could learn from nomadism because effectively nomads weren't just traders. They were learning and taking skills and innovation and understanding how other countries that they didn't know anything about were doing things. And they were embedding these learnings into how they could improve within their society or their local groups. I think what's really interesting with this tool is that often when we use AI at the moment, either it makes us hear what we want to hear. It goes, "Yes, great. You're going the right way. This is what you should be doing." So it doesn't challenge us, but also it has a very binary way of working, whereas what you're describing has much more nuance to it because effectively, much like the nomads, it takes from all the different parts, gathers them together and makes you think differently about how you can do things in another way. I love it. It's great.

And as you mentioned, another point important is that it's a proprietary model, and obviously for big organizations it's good to know that it's not out in the public. Everything is relevant and compliant of privacy and confidentiality, which is brilliant.

Another topic that is also really interesting is employability or the employer space. And we've seen a lot of horror stories in the news and in court recently about companies using AI to do mass recruitment and candidate selection, which was unfortunately tainted by a lot of cultural and social bias. You take the dilemma the other way around, right? Because you think that the narrative has changed over the years. It's not the employer dictating the narrative and the matching time is over effectively, but it's more the candidate deciding this. So you've developed a tool called the Employability Scan. Again, great name. You mentioned marketers love things, and one of them is great names and that's a great one. So how does the tool work and how do you ensure that there isn't this cultural mismatch, which is often the big challenge with international hires? 

FT: Yeah. Another good question. I'm so pleased you are so well informed, Melanie, because all these products are, we're still in the marketing phase and the reliability, the security and the privacy space to say how can we protect people? But coming back to your question, the employability scan, by the way, in the discussion with marketeers, they said perhaps "Employability Guide" is perhaps a better one because people are worried about scans. It's not an intelligence test, but let me tell you what we do with the scan, which is called a guide now.

Anyway, cutting a long story short, it starts with biographical data: age, gender, your last three jobs, if any, et cetera. That gives immediately feedback. So, if you're behind the screen, you can stop and say, oh, I did my biographical data. And what AI does then, because the input goes to AI and back with a little video, and what we do is very often the little video is the person, him or herself. So, we take a picture of the screener, obviously after asking, is that okay? Then with AI, the picture becomes moving and gives the feedback: Hey, what we found is that your education is very much in the area of X. While your job that you did is in the area of Y and we see some tensions there. Have you thought about this? Right? Okay.

Then we go to the second stage, and I think it's one of the most important questions, and that is what are your hobbies? With hobbies, you see what a person really likes, where his or her passion is, and it goes back into AI and you get feedback and you say, for example, what we found is that your jobs and education are very individualistic while your hobbies are all team. Have you thought about? And it not only diagnoses the tensions within a person or his, or her experience, but it also gives advice and have you thought about this? Then it goes into the next level, and that is about values. And we have a way to measure the values of the person and it goes back.

Then it goes into personality type. So we don't use MBTI, but our own ITI. It's also based on you, but it also measures how good and willing is this person to combine, for example, thinking with feeling. So, it's not only measuring your preference but it also measures how do you combine. So, we very often say we go beyond handwriting, what is your preference? Right or left hand, but how good are you in clapping? In other words, how do you coordinate the opposite? Why? Because we need that information to see how good that person might be in combining the different demands of teamwork with individual excellence. Right? ... to stick to the same example.

And then the last one is, what is your desired organizational culture in which you want to work? And we use our model of the guided missile or task oriented or no, I like rules and to follow them because I'm into compliance - the Eiffel Tower we call it - and then we got the family. It's all about commitment and relationships and the incubator, which is more about innovation and creativity.

And that goes back and it ends in three roles that we suggest for that person. And then you click on the role. You get 10 little vignettes, little cases, testing how the person deals with dilemmas in that job, in that possible role, and you get four answers. 1-10: my way or the highway. 10-1: I fully adapt. 5-5: I adapt a little, I compromise. And 10:10, I combine the two and then the person gets kind of implicit training. How do you deal with the tensions in the role we suggest and it ends with a PDF, which gives you the full report.

Now, I, I gave you a lot of detail, but it's all about helping individuals to find their own path. Nowadays, like you said, very nicely, Melanie, people are selecting the organizations they want to work for while in the past, it was the organization selecting the candidate. And obviously you need to match the two. But, it is amazing the traction we get on this tool, which is still in the MVP. It works, but have we yet worked out the reliability? Let me give you an example on an iPhone, my wife calls, oh, it stops. Everything done, gone. Oh my God! On Android, you don't have that problem. It just continues when you stop. Now, those kind of things, we now have some IT companies taking care of that. But the idea philosophically of developing this tool is that apparently research shows that in Europe, 62% of the people don't like the job they're actually doing. We need to give them help rather than organizations or placement companies that only match: "oh, you were a banker, you are in finance, and you have worked with three financial institutes. We have a job for you, financial institute" and they match. While we are saying, if the hand is like this, how willing and capable is the person to do this, right. We're working with defense, and as you know, in Europe, there's a lot of need for new recruits. But if we recruit on matching, namely, how good are you saying punk, punk, punk, then you are good for the army. No, there are people who don't say punk, punk, but they can still be used. But, you know, in defense, for example, nine of 10 jobs are not in the fighting mode. They are in the supporting mode. Have we really the right tooling for giving people guidance? Also, the other way, are you okay in defense, I'm giving this as examples, but also how we use AI in a staged approach to give people also the tensions in themselves, which are you willing to exploit because most interesting people are people who match contradictions in their own personality.

INT!:  That's great to hear. I find the tool really interesting because effectively you're bringing EQ and CQ to IQ. It's the emotional element and the cultural one added to what was originally the forms of matching people and businesses and roles. It is a lot richer in this case.

And you said it's to support the employee or the candidate, but you're doing a favor to the business at the same time because what a beautiful world, if you could match the right people to the right jobs, and everyone's very happy and very productive in that sense. So, to conclude, I guess what would be really interesting is to have your point of view on the future. What do you think the future of AI and CQ combined looks like, whether it's the ideal future or the realistic future? What are your thoughts on that? 

FT:  Again, I start very abstractly and I hope to come down in a second, but I think we have had a period of polarization, or we are having a period of polarization and I think there is a good thing about polarization, namely, to help you to define where you don't want to be.

We call them epithets in dilemma thinking. Epithets are, if the dilemma is global versus local, the epithet for global is my way or the highway. Or you may use any color as long as it's black. Yeah. The epithet for local is the Tower of Babel. Everybody speaks their own language, but nobody understands each other.

Right. And in polarization, you know, the way Trump acts, the state of the Union, ah, we're great. They're not great. Yeah. And people will find out he's an idiot. And it's okay. On the other hand, polarization has led not only to define where we don't want to be, like bragging people about things that are not true, but also for Europe to say, Hey, perhaps we should be a bit more independent. Right? And if you do that in a constructive way, that you use polarization also in the positive sides. Every negative has a positive. If you say, sticking to the same example, global versus local leads to chaos. Yeah. But can you say something positive about local? Oh yeah. It keeps us flexible, close to the customer. So the risk is if you don't do it well, it leads to chaos. If you do it well, namely to combine it with global, then you do it well. It can lead to great stuff.

And so you come to the question, what can we learn locally that is so good that we want to globalize? Right? And what, what I'm trying to say, Melanie, is polarization is the state of the art and it's an intermediate step for the world to come. Namely if we don't want to destroy ourselves, because wars are very often about polarization, is to make it constructive and ask the question, what can I do with your preference that helps me to develop my preference. And, you know, I recently have done some work which I normally haven't done. And it was not only because of the fees that they were not willing to pay, but in governmental work. I see that people, politicians are fed up with polarization. We have had the demagogues that have found that it doesn't work. Right. And now they're saying, gee, what have we learned from the demagogues? Because they are a voice of the people, and the people in a way are correct, but they have overdone it. So it becomes an epithet, right?

So what can we do to take the voice of the people? So the positive, the demand of what the extreme myths have shown. In order to combine it with more reasonable people, which obviously are us, we are obviously much more reasonable. Right. And you see there is an enormous traction in dilemma thinking, which I think is the essence of intercultural competence, intercultural intelligence, if you like. Namely how do you deal with opposites? And that's I think where the world at least needs to go if it's going there. I don't know. But I found with the help of AI, with the right questions, how can AI help us to become even more human? That's what we are trying to do. Then we're in great shape.

INT!: Brilliant. What a brilliant way to summarize it. Every negative has a positive, and how can tech make us become more human? I like that and I like the tension in both. Thank you so much Fons again for your time today. All your wisdom, knowledge, and sharing the innovations that you're involved in. It's been super interesting and to all of you watching this is Inside Connect where Cultural intelligence lands. Watch this space for more culture-first chats soon. Thanks again.

FT: You are very welcome. And Melanie, thank you for high quality questions, which is not normally the case. I really appreciate, let's say, the way you guide me for an interesting talk. Thank you so much.