Feeling positively driven to engage into a cultural situation and knowing what possible cultural differences you can expect to encounter is only the beginning of becoming culturally intelligent. You should also be consciously aware of cultural differences and being able to strategize your efforts in dealing with them.

After completing this section you will be able to:

Understand the concept of strategy.
Plan your cultural undertaking.

Why do you need to strategize?

Many people spend their days on a sort of autopilot. Most of our responses are automatic: we use unconscious scripts to guide our actions (think about brushing your teeth, eating breakfast, or cycling to work). This automatisation of thought frees up our limited mental capacity. Routine responses become habits and enable us to focus our attention on new or more complex experiences. However, it has a few downfalls:

Failure to adapt. While automatisation works well in familiar, stable settings, it is problematic in new or changing environments. For example, when you study abroad, your circumstances change. The behavioural and mental scripts you were using might no longer fit. When our responses are driven by past routines, we cannot adapt to new experiences or challenges.
Stereotyping is an automatic mental process. It saves time, but we are often unaware how and when stereotypes are influencing our responses. Going into a new environment we cannot rely on using the stereotypes to survive, we need to be fully aware and responsive to the new environment to respond appropriately.
Cultural scripts. We share many of our automatic responses with members of our own culture. We habituate behaviours and mental responses that help us to fit in and succeed in our cultural setting. These become our cultural scripts. Moving to a new environment, like with study abroad, means we cannot trust our usual cultural scripts anymore and we need to develop new scripts.

Make sure to put your newly acquired knowledge into practice by completing exercises 3.5.1.

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