Information Philosophy: Can East Meet West?

By Oleh Rozvadovskyy

Despite the impacts of globalization and cultural integration, the differences between nations remain strong.  Often, what underlies the differences is the way different cultures process logic and reason.  This is starkly apparent in the differences between westerners and those from the east.

These basic differences can often cause the failure of even effective ideas if they aren't communicated in a way that facilitates understanding. Most of us understand the need to translate words, but how many understand translating ideas?  That's a far more daunting task, yet this is often required of international marketing and public relations practitioners.  These disciplines are vulnerable to cultural differences.
In Ukraine, we find western and eastern styles. During the past two decades, western business practices have taken root, yet managers continue to apply an eastern approach to thinking, proof that it is easier to change ways of working than ways of thinking. Change promises to come, albeit at a glacial pace.

Speaker-centered vs. Listener-centered. 

In eastern cultures, the right to speak and to share information was ordered according to a fixed hierarchy. The person giving a speech almost always is the person issuing orders as well, and speakers don't try to adapt information to their audience. It is understood that the more complex the speech, the more authority the speaker carries. Complexity imparts the impression of competency.
In western cultures, everyone can speak and share information as they wish.  Rather than a hierarchy of speakers, western culture embraces listeners as consumers of information. This leads to speakers seeking audiences for their ideas, rather than listeners seeking speakers to receive instruction. 

Because eastern societies tend to value speakers and equate them with leaders, information is structured to be convenient to the speaker or writer. This often results in analysis and conclusions being relegated to the end of a speech.

Attentiveness vs.  Attractiveness.  When information is delivered in a listener-centered way, the main task of the speech or text is to conserve the listener's or reader's time and to make the process of consuming information easier and more convenient.

That's why western journalists use descriptive headline and write in the 'inverted pyramid' style, conveying the most important information first, then providing progressively less important details. Today, most writers subscribe to the rule that an essay or speech should begin with the topic sentence.

Storage vs. Processing. Ukrainians remember learning poems and passages from literature classes, and dates from history classes by rote memorization in school.  In eastern societies, the human brain is regarded as storage for memory. Books used to be available only to the wealthy, and the poor were largely illiterate. Thus, eastern cultures placed great importance upon developing a good memory.

In the west, a good memory, while important, is not as highly regarded since external memory sources - books, tapes, discs, flash-drives and Internet archives - are widely available and generally seen as more reliable. Given the wealth of available information, a westerner is less likely to be concerned with its storage than with its classification and analysis.  The ability to combine and analyze facts from differing sources makes it easier to manage information, without regard to whether you are a speaker, writer, or listener.

In the next issue:  Are you a creator or a copycat?  The answer may lie in the way your brain is trained to think.  

Oleh Rozvadovskyy is an associate at Willard in Kyiv.  He may be reached at Oleh.Rozvadovskyy@twg.com.ua