Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote, “Nothing narrows the mind like travel.” Selwyn Parker finds it hard not to agree with the great sceptic

At most international airports the retailers stock more or less the same books, the same brands of alcohol, electronics, watches and up-market clothing. Business travellers often stay in cookie-cutter hotels and vacationers can easily spend two weeks in a resort without leaving it, playing golf or lying by the pool. Worse, many businesspeople expect to get by speaking only English.

There’s a huge international tourism infrastructure out there whose end result is to submerge or even eliminate the cultural differences between nations. It’s perfectly possible to cross international borders without engaging the local culture in any meaningful way, except perhaps for the occasional taxi ride. It makes life on the road nice and comfortable, but hardly interesting.

But Muggeridge-style narrow travel won’t do the job for anybody relocating abroad. Unless we mix with the local culture, we are doomed to failure. Put another way, it’s easy to forget that communications technology is far more international than we are. Information hurtles to and fro across borders with the greatest of ease, fooling us into thinking that we also bestride national boundaries. Yet when we move to another country for a few years, even an English-speaking one, we enter a different world.

University of Maastricht’s Geert Hofstede is the guru on national business characteristics, having researched the subject for over 40 years. By no means a Pollyanna on the expat life, the professor warns that cultural differences can prove commercially disastrous if not taken fully into account. Based on a longitudinal study of IBM offices around the world, the research takes time to penetrate, but it rates the typical workplace more or less on gender issues, authoritarianism, individualism, strategic outlook and “uncertainty avoidance index”, meaning the appetite of that country’s typical workplace for rules and conventions.

Hofstede only claims to identify general characteristics of workplace behaviour – he can hardly do anything else – but the obvious conclusions of the research is that culture clashes are inevitable and potentially ruinous. As he puts it rather ominously, “culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy.” And there’s certainly plenty of data, anecdotal and otherwise, that attests the number of companies that have fallen foul of the local culture. So how to avoid falling into the clash-of-cultures trap and enjoy your work and life experience abroad instead of putting your foot in it more than is going to happen anyway?

Frame of mind
Actually, all the evidence suggests it comes down to a fundamental principle: you’re there to learn. And that in turn is an expression of attitude, what British philosopher Alain de Botton called “a travelling mindset” in his book The Art of Travel. For the much-travelled de Botton, it’s all about receptivity. We should “approach new places with humility,” dumping any “rigid ideas about what is interesting.” In a new country pretty much everything should be interesting.

Easier said than done of course. Unless we’re missionaries, military personnel, oil-workers and generally peripatetic by vocation, most of us go abroad making unconscious comparisons with home, often unfavourably so. But without that essential sense of receptivity, say experts in relocation, we’ll never get to feel at home, we’ll make enemies in the office, and not many friends outside it.

Think globally, act locally
So how to cultivate the desired openness? To put it bluntly, get your head into the culture. Try not to make negative comparisons about the efficiency of bureaucracy, punctuality of transport services, behaviour of police, difference in foods, general cleanliness, quality of accommodation, relative levels of affluence, weather, insularity of television and newspapers, and anything else that it’s all too easy to grizzle about. And especially not about your fellow-workers way of doing things. As the gurus say, none of it is really worse, just different. Most countries do some things better than you remember at home, and others worse. And after all, that’s why you came. For the difference.

The pay-off from receptivity is immeasurable. Elizabeth Kruempelmann, author of The Global Citizen, enthuses: “Thinking globally means you are able to analyse situations and problems from the viewpoint of other cultures. From a business standpoint, that means you think in terms of global opportunities for your company and career.” As Coca-Cola, which knows a thing or two about working abroad, puts it in the famous axiom: “Think globally, act locally.”

The acquisition of receptivity really starts on arrival. Don’t rush in where more experienced expats fear to tread. In the first few days and weeks, just lay back and get the lay of the land and the office. Anyway, it’s probably been a rush to get organised with all the attendant emotional upheavals and most new arrivals are exhausted, stunned and drained as well as excited. It’s a bad time to take initiatives. Try and relax and look around, walk for hours around your new neighbourhood, take public transport, pop into cafes and tackle the papers, do some shopping and check sticker prices. And especially, talk a lot to colleagues. The first objective is to learn how to navigate the office terrain, and perhaps put Hofstede’s theories to the test. “I cannot tell you how important this point is,” says Leslie A. Strazzullo of Transitions Abroad, a US-based organisation that helps people move seamlessly across borders.

For instance, it’s amazing the wild assumptions that fellow-workers can entertain about a new arrival, especially if it’s the boss, and these can be dispelled very early on. I know this to my cost. At farewell drinks after a seven-year stint in Dublin, I was stunned to learn I had been considered a CIA spy. “Why else would anybody come to Dublin?” was the explanation. And when a British fisheries expert of my acquaintance was appointed chief executive of a salmon-farming and packaging firm in Australia, he was dismayed by the initial reserve of staff. Eventually, somebody plucked up the courage to ask when he was shutting the business down. In fact, he’d been hired to save it.

As you start to embed yourself in the culture, nothing is more likely to break down your new-found receptivity than the bureaucracy, but try not to sweat it. Even if some arrangements such as permits and visas, temporary accommodation are in place, there will be other chores such as opening a bank account (an essential yet challenging experience in a foreign country), chasing belongings such as furniture through the distribution chain, dealing with a landlord. Everybody’s got horror stories. Just try and remember that a lot of them can equally be told by immigrants to our native countries.

Expat exchange
Take your time over accommodation. It’s best to rent for the first six months, suggests Expat Exchange, a great site with a lot of helpful tips. I’d rather rent, period, but it’s advised to hold off for a year because it takes at least that time to get a feel for a neighbourhood, let alone a whole city. Also, buying a house or apartment involves the legal, banking and real estate fraternity with their customary fees and charges, not to mention frustrations. A bad housing experience can blow your receptivity sky-high.

Learn the lingo. This one’s non-negotiable and it can’t be done for less than an hour a day. Most people start on the language long before arrival. How to get fluent? Learning a language is like training for a marathon, except that every day you’re putting one word, one phrase, one verb (and probably one of those maddening irregular ones) in front of the other instead of one foot. The brain aches and frustration mounts. Attempts at communication are humbling as you mumble “Que?, “Quoi?” or “Was?” when locals seemingly gabble at you.

From the ground up
There’s a wide variety of entertaining language courses, to which can be added local television; you’ll hardly understand a word for six months but the footage says a lot about the country. Reading the sports pages and other favourite sections of the papers can accelerate the learning process because you will more easily pick up the English equivalent.

And the more you read geography, politics, culture, sports stars and anything else, the quicker you’ll learn the language. This is because it’s all too easy to mistake a reference to a place or person as a word you don’t understand instead of just a name.

Fluency in the language builds relationships, self-belief, deep-down satisfaction, empathy with the local culture, just about everything. Above all, it opens doors, as culture transition specialist Heather Markel (there are such people) summarises, “Once you can stand up for yourself in a foreign language, you not only earn respect, but you will also understand that your fluency is improving, which inspires great confidence.”

Without the lingo, you’re a rabbit in the headlights. As the culture transition specialists point out, communication occurs on several levels. Anybody negotiating in English in a foreign land is on the ground floor because the communication is formal and one-dimensional. To get to the penthouse and really understand what your opposite numbers are thinking, it’s essential to understand the nuances of their conversations, and that requires fluency. And there’s also cultural fluency, everything that makes us feel at home in another country. To speed this up, veterans of living abroad suggest we get into the habit of going to the same places after-hours, the same few cafes and bars, the same library, gym and shops for the first six months or so. That way, the locals start to get used to you, even expecting you. When bar and shop staff look up and address a few words when you walk in the door, that’s real progress. And when they wander over for a chat, that’s a breakthrough.

Home from home
But let’s go further. If your cultural fluency is broad enough to embrace arts, sport, history, festivals and other aspects of local life that mean a lot to your new fellow citizens, you become part of the community with all that entails. Not only do businesspeople appreciate that you’re taking an interest, it adds another dimension to the conversation. It also builds into marketing, networking and other business insights.

For that reason the experts suggest new arrivals make a point of getting away from office and colleagues, especially if they’re English-speaking. “I can’t emphasise this too much,” adds Markel. Mix with your own kind too much and you end up with the same opinions and even prejudices about your new country.  Some relocation experts suggest joining same-language organisations where you can share experiences and pick up tips. Great idea, but don’t overdo it. Talking with like-minded people only serves to keep you away from the local culture and prolongs the period of adaptation.

A rough rule of thumb decrees that, assuming you’ve ticked the boxes along the way, it takes a couple of years to feel at home. And if you’ve done a good job, you won’t want to go home. But, sad to say, your greatest challenge may be when you have to do just that. On re-entry, many find that their friends don’t want to hear about their amazing life in foreign climes. (Watch their eyes glaze over.) In fact some will studiously avoid the subject, almost as a form of punishment for your daring to go away.

All up, this can be pretty deflating. For what it’s worth, my solution is to stay in touch with your “other” country in a reasonably organised way by reading the papers online, emailing your foreign-country friends preferably in their language and, above all, saving for regular trips back. In short, make that country a permanent part of your life. Think of it as intellectual property you can’t afford to lose, and you will be astonished at the dividends it returns, commercial and otherwise.