Word-Dancing Together Towards Noble Outcomes

[ ABC  is the Association for Business Communication.] This October (15–18 October 2025), I had the privilege of joining the Association for Business Communication’s annual conference in Long Beach, California. It was a vibrant gathering of scholars and practitioners dedicated to exploring how communication shapes organizations, leadership, and learning. I was fortunate to contribute in two very different formats: a 20-minute presentation and a two-hour workshop. Each offered its own rhythm, its own kind of attention, and its own possibilities for connection. The presentation, From Embodied Practice to Linguistic System,  followed a more traditional academic structure: a slideshow, clear sections, and the familiar discipline of fitting a complex argument into a tight time frame. In these twenty minutes, I first traced how experiential learning — including aikido-inspired pedagogy — deepens clarity, engagement, and retention far beyond what knowledge transfer alone can achiev...

The idea of national identity remains prevalent in this day and age, shaping how individuals and societies perceive themselves and interact with others. This perceived identity consists of behaviours and values that are reinforced through everyday experiences. Robert Dilts’ logical levels is a model that explains the relationship between behaviour and values, helping us understand how national identity may influence intercultural communication. Additionally, Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism provides insights into the subtle ways ideas of national identity are continuously reinforced in daily life. By integrating the model and the concept of banal nationalism, we can explore how national identity operates at different cognitive and behavioural levels, shaping both cultural self-perception and intercultural interactions. Dilts' model, however, does not apply solely to national identity; it was originally developed to explain the different levels of an individual's pe...

Considering that many intercultural misunderstandings, whether innocent or not, have their origins in inequality and not just difference (Blommaert, 2005, p. 77), the need to achieve a goal together, even if only for strategic purposes in the military, diplomacy, and business, has often led to results. The results are generally an effort of either cooperation or competition; similar processes take place in everyday micro-level intercultural encounters. When an intercultural interaction leads to an effective — and preferably appropriate — outcome (Deardorff 2006, 256), it is indeed at least because the interlocutors have a goal they want to achieve. Intercultural interaction ‘does not just happen’ (Deardorff 2009, xiii). Kecskes (2018) explained that intercultural communication relies more on emergent common ground, because of the limited availability of core common ground resulting from little or no mutual prior experience. Co-construction, which is the co-creation of emergent common g...

Intercultural communication typically refers to challenges and corresponding opportunities in communication that occur when people from different cultures meet. In many people’s minds, a static notion of culture prevails based on approaches that explain challenges in intercultural communication through cultural differences linked to national norms described by scholars of comparative intercultural studies (like Hall, Hofstede, Lewis, and Trompenaars). The identification of cultural differences with norms and values that are supposedly characteristic of the corresponding nationalities from which the leading management of a given multinational company stems generates conclusions whose simplicity is worrying. The resulting classification of cultures according to their degree of individualism versus collectivism or of masculinity versus femininity is so stereotyped and ethnocentric that it can hardly contribute to the study of intracultural and intercultural dynamics. (Dietz, 2018, p. 12) ...