When I was growing up there was a popular crime drama on TV called Dragnet. The star, Detective Joe Friday, was renowned for getting key details of the crime they were investigating from witnesses. His most famous line of dialogue was “Just the facts ma’am, just the facts.” The original series went off the air in 1959 but was revived in the late 60s and then again briefly in 2003 to 2004. Today police dramas usually feature a police officer who follows his or her gut to come to the truth of a crime.
Between the first and second revivals an anthropologist by the name of Edward T Hall described in his book entitled “Beyond Culture” a concept called high and low context. He explained that some cultures tend to favor communication which is extremely explicit. These low context communicators speak directly to the issue on their mind and are not influenced by age, status, relationship, appearance or other “soft” facts. They highly appreciate communication in writing since it’s tangibility hinders the other party from statements like “that’s not what I said”.
In high context cultures deference may be given to a senior person, someone with an impressive title, coming from an important family and dressed for success. Difficult topics will be addressed in a roundabout manner using extreme sensitivity. Imagine a team of four Japanese, one of whom has not been performing up to expectation. When they meet to discuss this problem, a somewhat surprising course of events may take place. Without any prior arrangement it might well be that the oldest person of the four would begin speaking. Rather than directly addressing the problem he might instead choose to talk about a table in which three of the legs are bearing the full weight and the fourth is not. He may talk about the risk that such a table will eventually crash to the floor resulting in a complete failure of its intended purpose. He might speak about the limited time left that the other three legs can bear the burden. But he won’t talk about the poor performer in the team. His high context message is understood by his colleagues without the loss of face of the poor performer.
If you can ignore the “computer voice” on this video, the content is quite good:
People who say “it’s not just what you know but who you know” are acknowledging high context behavior at work. In Germany (a low context culture) people show up at a job interview with copies of their diplomas and their certificates unless they sent them ahead. They are building a factual case for their expertise to do a particular job. In southern Europe and the Middle East, having been referred from a highly regarded person carries much more weight as does dressing impeccably.
Low context people expect others to get right to the point and may actually miss a message that has been carefully couched in the middle of a discussion or piece of correspondence by a higher context person. Conversely, for a high context person to receive very direct critical feedback can be seen as rude and insensitive.
One example of this is the need of some people to present their ideas in the most minute details while others focus mostly on the big picture, vision and benefits. Thus research and observation indicate that low-context Germans have double the attention span on average for business presentations compared to somewhat higher context Americans. In other words, a presentation which might take 30 minutes in Germany might need to be reduced to 15 minutes to maintain the attention of the American audience which prefers to explore details in a more interactive setting (question and answer session, post-presentation one-on-one discussions, etc.)
Herb