 We have slides. So I guess we're ready to go. Thank you, Ann, for the wonderful introduction. And I'm going to start with a story. So I'm the girl who's always late. And in this particular story, it's three minutes after 9. And I am late again, even though I had notifications set up to warn me about this call. And then they all started popping up. Google Calendar, my computer's notification system. But I got stuck writing something in the agenda for the call. So here I am, late for this call. The bad news is, my call is with my American colleague. And she is a project manager just like me. And she really appreciates people being on time. So when I get in, she is pissed off. And she's pissed off because this is not the first time I'm late for a call with her. And to her, that is deeply disrespectful. And she lets me know that this is turning into an issue. And I get pissed off at her for being pissed off at me. Because I don't think three minutes are that big of a deal. And because we are wasting, kind of wasting, precious time being angry with each other, by the end of the call, even though we carry on, we probably do a little less than we could have if it was easier for us to understand why being on time was important or not important. For representatives of the Anglo clusters, global cultural clusters, being on time is important. It's the most important thing. Because during the Industrial Revolution, when these cultural clusters were kind of developed, time became money. Somebody was late for work in the factory, and that literally meant the company was losing money. But I was born in communist Bulgaria. I spent my first seven years during the regime. And then it fell when I was seven. And I spent my teenagers rebelling against any rule out there. It was a point of pride. So I almost got thrown out of school, my last year in high school, because I was late for every single class, even though I was top of my class. Being three minutes late means nothing to me, even if somebody is late for my calls. Three minutes is nothing, like five, still fine. But for my American colleague, being late was a sign of me disrespecting her. Time and the way time is perceived is one of the big differences that exists across cultures. And as businesses go remote, making sure that we understand these cultural differences between ourselves, when we hire talent and work with clients across the globe will be more and more important. In a world where we all speak really good English, most miscommunication actually happens due to differences in our cultural programming. In the beginning, there was IQ. Businesses wanted to hire smart people. So it was important as you started growing your career as a professional to be smart. Then at some point, people realized that to be successful in business, you had to be able to work with other people. If everything was done without people, it would be so much easier, wouldn't it? So emotional intelligence was introduced as a concept, and that meant being smart and being able to interact, communicate, and collaborate well with others. CQ is the next level. Cultural intelligence means being able to work with people who are not like you. This is a famous concept of Danish social psychologist whose name I'm not going to try to pronounce because this is one of the things that I always get wrong. But I love this. He says that culture is the software of the mind. It's the operating system that invisibly runs your life and the way you've been programmed to see the world. Before we begin, I want to make a short note because we talk quite a lot in the WordPress community about stereotypes. So when discussing cross-cultural learnings, habits, and behaviors, quite a lot of people make the argument that you shouldn't look at the culture. You shouldn't look at the country. You shouldn't look at where a person is coming from and immediately draw conclusions. You should look at people at an individual level because anything else means putting things in a box, putting people in a box. And it's true. We're all unique. But if you ignore the cultural context, you're missing one very, very big thing because ignoring cultural context means that you're judging everything with your own culture as a benchmark. Cultural intelligence is an outsider's seemingly natural ability to interpret someone's unfamiliar or ambiguous gestures, behaviors, the way that that person's compatriots would. So I've done two jobs that have been different but also related in the past eight years. In 2014, I joined HumanMade as a project manager, their first project manager. And since then, we've assembled a big, big theme across the three regions at Asia-Pacific, I mean, Americas. And we started working with cross-cultural and global clients as well. At the same time, in 2011, I got involved with the WordPress community and started translating to Bulgarian. And then in 2013, got involved with the global polyglots team. What does it mean? It means you're helping people from across the globe from, you know, translating into 200 different languages to get started, to keep going. And there is a lot of politics when people insist on translating into language. Yesterday at the Polyglot stable, we discussed why there are eight English variants and 13 Spanish variants and very different perceptions of what happens. So I was thrown into a situation where I had to very quickly be able to get along with people from anywhere and in a fully remote environment. And the biggest question that I had in front of me was, how? How do you communicate with people across so many different cultures? How do you know everything about everyone? The best advice I got back there by my then mentor was that you can't know what will think about people. And you also don't have to. Because in its essence, cultural intelligence means being able to suspend the judgment based on your own culture. And when I picked the role of the Polyglots team, they told me, people just want somebody to listen to them, Petja. So do that. And you don't have to have all the answers. Cultural intelligence is just emotional intelligence with a pinch of genuine curiosity about things that you don't understand. David Livermore, a researcher from the U.S., defines 10 global cultural clusters. And these are some of the research that I've read to kind of try and create a structure around my personal learnings from the past eight years based on the work that I've done with my fellow human-made people, clients all over the globe, and also, of course, the Polyglots team. It's important to understand how high-level these definitions are. And culture is very, very multilayered. It doesn't only mean geographical location. You have clusters that have spread, cultural clusters that have spread across the globe. You have clusters that are situated in the same place. But culture is multilayered. It's geographical location, the way you were brought up, the economic state in which you were brought up. And even within the same geographic locations, there are so many different cultures. So you might be born into one cultural cluster, but highly influenced by another, just like me. I have to admit that my genuine interest in cultures didn't really start before I joined the Polyglots team. It's just that organically threw me into the necessity of trying to and getting to understand. And I never was able to really put any structure around my learnings until I read Erin Meyer's book, The Culture Map. So Erin Meyer is an INSEAD professor, and she defines eight cultural differences among the 10 global clusters, which shape the way we communicate, evaluate, persuade, we lead, we make decisions, we trust, we think about time, and we disagree. So we won't have time to dig deeper into each of them, as you can imagine, like there are so many things that we can talk about. But I'm going to share some stories and some learnings for the most important of them that I've used in my practice based on some of my colleagues. Some of these faces might be familiar to you. Others you will see running around, work on PAsia. Some of them are at the work camp for the first time. Some of them have been known in the WordPress community for a very long time. And let's dig into the eight scales of the culture map using some of their stories. So communicating, low versus high context cultures. In low context cultures, good communication is precise, simple, and straightforward. Messages are expressed, understood. There's no reading between the lines. You say something, you mean it. In high context cultures, good communication is sophisticated and multi-layered. Messages are both spoken and read between the lines. Messages are often implied, but not explicitly expressed. And in high context cultures, body language and the way you deliver a message often means way more than what the message itself literally means. So when you have multicultural teams, you really need low context processes. Multicultural teams need low context processes, and non-native English speakers need to be invited to speak. Because if you think about it, remote work strips people from specific cultures from being able to perceive and understand situations based on those cultural environment, the interactions, the body language. Remote takes that away from us. And when you have your camera turned off, you also don't see a facial expression. The Japanese are famous for being able to read the air in a room that's an actual expression. So in Confucian Asia and Southeast Asia countries, the environment surrounding a person is as important to them when they're getting a message as it's the actual words coming out of your mouth. And it's important when you're creating your company culture and the expectations around behavior to have these things in mind. When you're in a situation with people from very cultural backgrounds in the room, defaulting to low context communications, straightforward communication, making sure that everybody understands that that's what we're doing is very important. My colleague Miguel is from Brazil. And our America's region consists of people from the US and from Latin America. So for my Latin American colleagues, it's always hard to understand why they need to be initiative to speak up. Because some of these cultures, and when there's a little bit of a language barrier, need to be invited to speak. They're waiting for you to make room for them to share your message. It's often hard for them when they're called out. Because that doesn't necessarily mean that they are comfortable to speak. And we're going to dig a little bit into why that is looking at the way people lead across cultures. This has been one of the most interesting things that I've explored and I witnessed during my tenure at Human Made. Doesn't really happen that much in the polyglot community. But it has been very prominent when we started expanding our team at HM. So a low versus high power distance cultures, egalitarian versus hierarchical structures. Human Made is a very low power distance company. What does that mean? It would never occur anybody to call our CEO Tom anything but Tom. He runs around barefoot during retreats and wears the same pants for seven years. Nobody really pays attention. You can chat to him about editorial workflows and age of empires and his daughter and various different things. It doesn't really matter who you are in the company. You can call him out in meetings. You can disagree with him in public. And that doesn't really happen in cultures where power distance is very high. And there are a lot of cultures that we hire from that actually default to that, especially in the Asia Pacific region. Human Made's behavioral framework is based on the way the founders founded the company. So because Tom is very low power distance, kind of by default being accepted, that that's OK for everybody to do. But it's not something we explicitly communicate or pay attention to when we hire in our Asia Pacific region. People have to see that it's OK to kind of go play a game with Tom to understand that that's the norm. And sometimes it's perplexing. About a year ago, I had to hire an allocations team. And I had to hire in two opposite regions. I had to hire in APEC. I had to hire in the Americas. I hired Shannon, the wonderful allocations manager in the Americas. She's from Chicago, Illinois. And I hired Vanita, who's over there, who is from Bangalore in India. And they, to me, were very similar girls, really initiative, really driven, like very high motivation, energy, love people, love attention to detail, and like very organized, very precise, very smiley, very friendly. I wasn't prepared for how different they were, however. We started with the concept of how I'd like to give feedback because I was their manager. And I have to make this point, like they were my team and I was managing a team for the very first time. So the first thing that I really made sure that they understand about me is that, you know, I'm a little blunt. I like feedback in context. I like to tell you as things happen about my perception or the approach that I think would be better. And I like to receive feedback in the same way. If I piss you off, come tell me. If I do something that you don't agree with, just tell me, call me out right there on the spot. We're in a call, we're in a 101, whatever. Just tell me, it's best to work these things out as they happen and to clarify these things. They both said, yes, this is great. Very enthusiastically accepted this approach. Which Ann and I had no issues, but the first time I had to provide feedback for Vanita, in context, we were on a call, we were collaborating, co-working, she said, let's do this. And I said, no, I think X will be better. She all of a sudden went blank. And then we went on a 101 after the call and she started crying. And I'm just like, Vanita, what's happening? And she's like, you're gonna fire me, aren't you? I was like, what, why, why do you think, why do you think I'm gonna fire you? She's like, you just disagreed with me in public, in front of people, you corrected whatever I said. You know, obviously I'm not doing well, obviously I'm gonna get fired. But we agreed, feedback in context, you know, while things were happening, of course I'm gonna agree with you, you're my boss. I was like, thank you very much. And Vanita's from India. India has one of the highest power distances when it comes to leading. And it took me a while to understand that. It took me a while to understand that I cannot approach the same situation with my team in the same way, you know. I have to be a little bit more gentle, I have to be mindful of how I correct if I have to correct or I provide that feedback. And it's still hard for me to come to me with direct feedback as well. We've talked about this over and over. I now make sure that I make room for that. Or I think about my behavior as things are happening and try and read her body language and cues. So in hierarchical structures, the boss is a strong director who nobody can disagree with, let alone in public. How do you trust across cultures? So there are two basic types, task-based and relationship-based. In task-based cultures, you fulfill your commitments, you do what you said you will do, trust. You're on time, trust. In relationship-based, in relationship-based cultures, you have to shape a personal relationship before you actually can trust a person, a colleague or whoever. And in 2017 was very important here for me because I learned two very important things. You cannot do business in Japan without going to karaoke. You cannot do business in Portugal without overeating. There's absolutely no way. Multicultural teams, multicultural remote teams need FaceTime. That is a known fact for everybody that runs a remote company. But it's an especially remote, sorry, an especially important part when you have people from a relationship-based, trust cultures. Decisions, how do you make decisions in a cross-collaborative remote team? A lot of companies in the WordPress world were started in the same way. You, a bunch of nerds, start a company and make all the decisions together. And at some point, you have to scale, you have to grow, you have to introduce a structure, you have to start introducing hierarchy. How do you make decisions when the people representing the egalitarian way of leading are used to making decisions all at once? Everybody is consulted. And the people that are from high power distance coaches are expecting the decision to come from the top down and actually feel quite uncomfortable often when they're asked to partake in decision making, especially when the stakes are very high. The first thing you need to decide in a multicultural team, if you're doing a cross-regional team, is how you're going to make decisions. And it's not always easy. Because sometimes teams are, in terms of location, they're in the same place, but in terms of culture, they're very different. I'm gonna bring up our America's team again, where, you know, people let the people they perceive have the most authority be the decision makers, even if they are invited to partake in the decisions. Embracing conflict is the next one. Disagreeing, are you able to confront in public or not? On the one side, we have our APAC colleagues who are so agreeable about everything in public, who are so polite when they're trying to disagree with you. On the other side of this, we have Frank, our colleague Frank, who will co-unit it in a post and then have absolutely nothing against going for beer with you. The big difference is that, you know, for our APAC colleagues, if you yell at each other in public, that's it, relationship over. For our German and Luxembourgish and Dutch colleagues, you yell at each other in a meeting, and then you go grab lunch. There's no issue at all. Here's Catam speaking a little bit about the dynamic that the America's team has. And just in regards with the fact that you cannot call people out in public and cannot disagree in public, and some people in our America's regions just don't do that. So frankness or diplomacy? What do you do with feedback? Negative feedback is provided in public or in private? Are you speaking truth to power in public? Is speaking frankly a gift or a slap in the face? It's important to think about that when you decide how you will be evaluating and providing feedback, especially in a multicultural environment. Why versus the how and the art of the persuasion across cultures? I'm going to skip this one because I'm kind of running out of time, but if you want to talk about it, we can do that after the call. It's one of my favorite ones, and the example that I once read that I remembered was when you were at school during math class, did you learn theory first, and then learned for the equation, and then learned by doing? That's the big difference between the way people perceive that across cultures. So let's go back to time and the perception of time in across cultures. And the big question here is, do you work to live, or do you live to work? And that's what differentiates the people that perceive time differently. Linear time, project steps are approached in sequential fashion, completed one task after the next. In flexible time, everything happens at the same time. Things can move and shuffle and shift. Many things are dealt with at once, and interruptions are accepted. The focus is on adaptability and flexibility, and that's valued across the organization. So then, why is being three minutes late for a call so important? Why is it such a big deal? Well, I'm going to give you the answer to that question for myself at the end of this talk, but the truth is, because the culture map is very relative, it depends so much on the context. How do you develop your cultural intelligence? As individuals, leaders, and as a business, it starts with thinking about what your core values are. So, which bits make you you? What are the values, behaviors, and habits that absolutely define you without which you wouldn't be you? That is your core. The rest is your flex. The rest is your ability to adapt to people who are different than you. So, I was with a friend on a trip in Bulgaria, funnily enough, so my parents are not religious. We weren't really brought up religious. So, I didn't know that to go in the monastery, you need to wear a headscarf and you couldn't show your arms. So, this nun really scolded me in front of the monastery and said, like, you're not going in there like I was wearing a tank top and jeans. You're not going in there like that, like cover your head and do that. And I was just like a rebellious 20-year-old woman. I was just like, what's going to make me cover my head? Like, come on. My friend looked at me and said, it's an amazing experience because you're being stubborn and unwilling to budge even that much. So, what's in your core and what's in your flex? On the left is your typical corporate salesman who will sell you anything. Like, you don't trust them for nothing because their core is like, you can't understand what their value is. On the other side is my grandmother who insisted that the only valuable way to live as a woman is to be a mother and a wife, and that is it. There's no other way. There was no flex there. Like, the flex there is just so that, you know, I kept going back to see her. She was compensated by food. The tricky bits between your core and your flex are your knots. The things you are unsure about that you wonder about of who you are in principle because they've been there all your life, but that you kind of feel uncomfortable about. My knots, one of my biggest knots is my tolerance for bullying, for toxicity, because I was raised in an environment that allowed for that to happen and I perceived that that would, the only way to kind of survive and thrive in that environment is to accept it, and unfortunately sometimes partake. I've done that. But I started questioning that and that's what needs to happen to develop your cultural intelligence, questioning your knots. CQs developed by having the courage to have those conversations that make you deeply uncomfortable can only develop cultural intelligence if people decide to share their differences with you and they will only share and trust if you show them that you have enough cultural intelligence to understand, and that is the paradox. So have the willingness to admit to your knots and either move past them or accept and acknowledge them. You're willing to listen, but like listen, genuinely interested in what the other has to say. Even not to reply, but to understand. Be aware of your knots. Learn to make a fool of yourself. It really happens, and to laugh at yourself. Recognize and stand to cultural intelligence. Tune your head, body, and heart towards listening. And you might not understand, but you will definitely learn. Curiously enough, cultural intelligence actually starts with reverse engineering your own culture, understanding why you are the way you are. I'm late again, over time. But after that meeting that I told you about at the beginning, I made a decision. And now I'm never, never ever late for a call anymore. I set up a reminder three minutes before, I jump on the call immediately and just like sit there until anybody else joins. Because being on time is in my flex, but for some of my colleagues, it's in their core. It's easy for me to change that. It's less easy for them. And that's a very simple example of how easy it is sometimes to adapt to others. There are much harder, much bigger topics. But the important thing is to question ourselves and to think what we're willing to do. Thank you. Thank you very much, Petra, for your wisdom and sharing some personal stories as well. The blend of the professional and the personal, the open source and the client facing industrial all comes together. We have time for some questions from the audience now. I'm sure there are some people wondering maybe how these lessons can apply in your professional life or as you contribute to open source now. So do I see any hands from the audience right now? If not, I can follow. Oh no, there we go. Down there at the front. Can we have a microphone down here to a couple of people asking questions at the front? That would be great. Thank you, Petra. An inspiring talk. How do you manage this in the Polyglots team? Because that's where the complexity gets really complex. Well, you make room for people's stories and for their truth. Because everybody has theirs. You know? The first very, very valuable lesson was not to react when, especially on WordPress lack, and that's not just the Polyglots team. Not to react when somebody seems rude. Not to react when someone's language seems aggressive. Not to react when somebody passionately defends something. Not to react with correcting behavior immediately. But trying to read and understand and ask questions to get where the person is coming from. That's always been my absolute kind of default mode when dealing with Polyglots drama as well. Try and get to understand why people are the way they are. There are very interesting happenings in the WordPress community. People kind of fight for community leadership in their regions even though they don't get paid for volunteering in WordPress, but it's so important that you are a name, a prominent name in the WordPress community. And in some places people are unwilling to kind of give up that role ever. Make room for others. So then you start exploring their core and their flex. You start bringing the global cultural awareness into their lives without preaching. Just telling stories. Telling stories of others. Sharing your own stories. That's what's worked the best. It works with the Italian community. It works so well with the Italian community. Once we got, there were a couple of people who had worked on WordPress for years and WordPress translations. They were great, great people, but they didn't want to budge. They didn't want to let anybody else in. Then we organized the Contributor Day in Milano for our enthusiastic about actually joining their efforts without taking anything from them. And it happened. So that's how. There's a question there. I think we have another question down here. Yes, sir. So there are some regional cultures, as you mentioned, and then there are some company or professional cultures. So how can we differentiate them and how we can embrace regional cultures and regional cultures? Well, it depends where your organization starts, right? Because usually where your organization starts and the values that the people who start the organization are the first cultural values, the first values that the company has in general. First of all, it's really good to define your values as a company because a lot of companies don't really explicitly do that for a very long time. So get together and talk about what's important for you and what's important for your culture to be like. Define those things and then start from there. As you add a new member of a team, ask yourself whether they come from the same background as you, and if not, involve them, get them to kind of comment on your current cultural values. The interesting bit is like people usually join companies because of the values that they kind of present to the world. I don't know how many times I've heard I've joined Human Made or I've loved Human Made or I noticed Human Made because I saw your behavioral framework and your company values on the website. So lead with that. That will help you attract the people that are attracted to the same things that you are. And then when you already have a company or you're in a company where their cultural clash is, the big thing for me is to not implement like a cookie cutter the same approach towards everybody. So allow people to be who they are and to see whether there is adapting your behavioral framework and your cultural values so that they can work for the majority of the people. And if not, because maybe that won't be possible because your clients for example are representing a specific cluster. Then you have to make sure that people buy in to your company culture and company values. Otherwise you sort of plan. Do we have any more questions from the floor? Yes, sir, over here. Hello. Thank you for such an insightful talk. My question was specifically around how do you manage your core and flex to not appear say on the one hand duplicitous, on the other hand being too accommodating, especially in a situation where maybe there are a range of people who have a core and flex configurations I guess. Absolutely. Well, I can safely say that I've not had a single comfortable moment since I joined the WordPress community. My beliefs have been challenged all the time by different perspectives. How do I manage this? It starts with like just a gut feeling, but it moves across time as well. I feel like I become more and more flexible. At some point I had to kind of stop. I've become accommodating across the years, especially when dealing with like conflict situations because you can't accept everybody's position. At the end of the day we have to make a decision. It's different when it comes to behavior versus rules within a company. So it's different in the WordPress community where people are allowed to be much more of themselves than you can actually do in a company culture in a professional environment. I guess I test my core and my flex against my company's my company's values. This is the best answer that I can give. I know that there can be differences there in regards to some of the behaviors, but I make sure that I'm bought into whatever my company says our cultural values are. Otherwise, you know, we wouldn't just feel comfortable first of all asking others to abide by those cultural norms and I wouldn't be comfortable doing that myself as well. But the other important thing is to question whether things are changing, not just inside of you, but also in your company because as more people come in maybe they're bringing something valuable that you're missing on if you just insist that this is us. This is us forever. So, yeah. I guess does that answer your question? Yeah. Okay, I think Stefano has a question. We have one? Yes. Yes. Thank you for the great talk. I was wondering, do you have suggestions for how to implement this on your team or how to get people to understand about cultural intelligence? Yeah. So, gathering together and talking about it and exploring the different scales and mapping out where people are there is the first. There's a very simple yet a little corporate and like whenever something in relation to culture comes from the kind of western corporate world, I question it a little bit but there technically is an available CQ test across the company in relation to tolerance and like how people perceive others. So, there are actually tools. I can probably I've got the slide deck with slides and a couple of references on there. So, I think some of that stuff is linked in there but, yeah. There is a tool that you can like almost a questionnaire which you can send to everybody where they answer simple questions to map out where they are in regards to understanding the other people's differences that are around them and, yeah, we can look into that a little later. We haven't tried it though, like I haven't tested it. I started digging into this structured exploration of cultural intelligence quite recently. So, we are still a human made to actually like do anything about that. We are very culturally aware and we try and be more and more adaptive. For example, when we're implementing a company strategy, you know, recently adopted high performing teams or high performing teams specs has a point where you have to be able to embrace conflict as a way to move past obstacle. That's easier in some regions than others where like just arguing in public is unacceptable to begin with and ruins relationships. So, adapting and working with your teams when you're doing company strategy and trying to implement a similar approach in different regions adapting that so that people can understand what that means and practice better is very helpful. On that, no. Could we possibly have Petch's last slide up on the screen again because you've left your presentation up, it's on SpeakerDac so people can go and have a look at your presentation. Oh, it's speakerDac slash Petia. Yeah, okay. So, you can find all the links and references will be on there. You're on Twitter as Petia. I'm on Twitter. I'm going to link up a bunch of references. I think we're out of time and I don't want to be late. No, no, not again. Okay, Petia, thank you very much indeed if you'd like to. Thank you and I just want to say