Principle 8 – Details as Indicators of Worldviews

The company also negotiates on apparent details. The apparent details contain a different view of the world. When you have to decide which format to give to a training course – choosing to do eight hours in a full day or take the course in spare time – a culture of training and a culture of man is manifested.

We may have different opinions on whether a high-intensity training intervention in full-immersion is more productive (eg: five full days), or that it is better to do one day a month; we can discuss whether it is better to treat participants with gloves (“the customer is always right” cultural trait), or to act decisively to achieve profound change.

Of a possible project, we have exposed a small detail, but we can have different opinions on an innumerable amount of other details. These apparent details – it must be remembered – are not just details – but whole worldviews. Every detail is – from a semiotic point of view – a system of signification, an antenna that communicates the content of entire underlying worlds.

Principle 8 – Details as indicators of worldviews

The success of negotiation communication depends on:

• from the recognition of the importance of details as indicators of world views (details as systems of extended signification);

• the ability to manage details with strategic attention.

Returning to the example, the degree of “morbidity” of the training intervention is considered so much a detail that it is sometimes not even discussed in a course design, but behind the detail lies the more or less martial vision of education and life , people’s history and experiences, and their worldview. Behind the temporal concentration of an educational intervention, or its distribution in several phases, lies the philosophy of time, a philosophy of gradual change vs. a culture of immediate results.

The very way in which a course is communicated, prepared, ritualized – or trivialized – denotes a different vision of human resources and the entire culture of the human being who works. Each apparent detail contains a possible different view of the world. It is for this reason that negotiation – understood as “building something together” – requires commitment and science, starting from the basic issues down to the details.

There is also a different way of looking at trading. We can focus on the level of interpersonal negotiation or on an organizational level of negotiation (corporate, or between entities / institutions). In both cases, what matters is to grasp the different cultural and worldview dimension that the interlocutors possess.

© Article translated from the book “Negoziazione interculturale, comunicazione oltre le barriere culturali” (Intercultural Negotiation: Communication Beyond Cultural Barriers) copyright Dr. Daniele Trevisani Intercultural Negotiation Training and Coaching, published with the author’s permission. The Book’s rights are on sale and are available for any Publisher wishing to consider it for publication in English and other languages except for Italian and Arab whose rights are already sold and published. If you are interested in publishing the book in English, or in Intercultural Negotiation Training, Coaching and Consulting, please feel free to contact the author from the webstite www.danieletrevisani.com 

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L'articolo Apparent Details and Systems of Signification proviene da Dr. Daniele Trevisani - Formazione Aziendale, Ricerca, Coaching.