Groningen, Netherlands

Developing Across Differences: Building Intercultural Viability in Organizations

when 10 July 2024 - 12 July 2024
language English
duration 1 week
credits 0.5 EC
fee EUR 1495

The whole is more than the sum of its parts. In its positive sense, that maxim describes the synergistic potential of organizations to combine unity and diversity into innovation. But it also can mean that the collective organizational culture can perpetuate ethnocentrism and inequity, despite individual development.

This course will show how to integrate tactical training in intercultural communication with strategic organizational transformation towards the goal of generating sustainable viability in unpredictably changing global and domestic social conditions.

Why Attend?
Join this course to help your organisation—or those of your clients if you are an external consultant—pursue the strategic goal of sustainable adaptive potential to social change.

In addition to predictable changes such as increasingly multicultural societies and greater emphasis on equity and inclusion issues, future social situations are sure to include unpredictable changes such as the ones that have occurred during the Covid pandemic. Since organizations cannot prepare for such changes specifically, they need help in developing a general adaptive capacity.

The course will use the new concept of Intercultural Viability™—the probability that an organization can adapt to unpredictable changes in multicultural social conditions—to guide advanced practical applications of a constructivist paradigm, a model of perceptual development, and coherent activities that foster intercultural consciousness.

Participants will learn how to approach organizational adaptive capacity in a coherent way, how to explain it to stakeholders, how to coordinate program design elements, and how to select appropriate assessment methods.

Course leader

Dr. Milton Bennett

Target group

Level requirements
The DAD is for multipliers who help individuals, organizations and societies better recognize, appreciate and use differences as a way of better communicating, working and thriving together.

These are (in-house and external) trainers, educators, consultants, coaches, researchers, scholars, facilitators, HR staff, advanced-level (MA+) students, and professional development specialists with 5+ years of experience/study in the greater Differences field. Contact the organisers at ic@rug.nl or info@iddifferences.org for consultation about appropriateness and eligibility.

It is expected that the participants have a sufficient command of the English language to actively participate in the discussions and to present their own work in English.

Participant profile
This course is for you if are a mid- to senior-level in-house professional or consultant/trainer/multiplier/educator who helps those who:

- Are implementing diversity and inclusion initiatives within their organisations;

- Offer training and on-the-job professional development to help colleagues better communicate and collaborate;

- Work with those who appreciate “hard science”-based evidence for making system-wide and personal change.

Course aim

After this course you —and those you work with— will be able to:

- Recognize the challenge of preparing organizations for unpredictable social change
- Acquire conceptual tools for understanding and explaining the idea of collective intercultural adaptability to emerging social conditions.
- Consider various methods for tactical and strategic intervention that will support collective intercultural development.
- Learn how to select appropriate assessment methods to create credibility, diagnose needs, and demonstrate effectiveness.

Credits info

0.5 EC
Workload
18 hours of in-class learning and active participation using experiential methods.

Upon successful completion of the programme, the Summer School offers a Certificate of Attendance that mentions the workload of 18 hours (28 hours corresponds to 1 ECTS). Students can apply for recognition of these credits to the relevant authorities in their home institutions, therefore the final decision on awarding credits is at the discretion of their home institutions. We will be happy to provide any necessary information that might be requested in addition to the certificate of attendance.

Fee info

EUR 1495: includes course and materials, optional evening programming

Register for this course
on course website