ABSTRACT
Intercultural Management is a topic that both Isabelle and Kirsten have been teaching for decades. Both are German and have a lot of experience collaborating with people from all over Asia: China, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, India and Kyrgyzstan. They are also solution focused (SF) coaches and are sometimes surprised at how intercultural diffi culties seem to disappear when you consistently work with an SF attitude. SF consulting is sometimes labelled ‘very American’ both by German and by Asian audiences. The focus on what works well is sometimes misunderstood as Pollyanna positivism and problem phobic. However, none of this seems to matter in actual SF work with clients. It seems that SF provides a third, joint lens for people of two or more differing cultures to use when they are collaborating. Following intercultural models such as Hall (1982); Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars (2004); Hofstede, Hofstede and Minkov (2010) and Lewis (2002), which seek to help explain the differences in general patterns of thought and socialisation, it would seem very unlikely that any approach in coaching would work with similar success in such diverse cultures as European and Asian cultures. We know that European and Asian cultures are both very diverse, so our labels ‘European’ or ‘Asian’ are here used for simplifi cation. So why does SF work, chameleon-like, in all cultures that we have experienced?
