There's a great new LinkedIn Group Mediators and Peacemakers that anyone interested in the dynamics of conflict and its resolution should think about joining.  Recently, a group member posed this question:

How do you as a mediator recognize the signs of cross cultural differences and how do you resolve that type of dispute? How often do you come across this type of dispute?

I was thinking about how I might answer it when I noticed that my colleague and friend, mediation guru Lee Jay Berman, had taken the time to jot down his thoughts, which were better than any I was having, yet precisely expressed my own experience mediating conflict.

Here's what Lee Jay had to say:

I think that some is easy to recognize, like two Korean businessmen walking in with their counsel, knowing that they will have a value system that is based around how Korean businesses conduct themselves, and knowing that trying to overlay that onto an American legal system is going to be awkward for them.

But my belief is that NEARLY ALL conflicts are cross-cultural. The vast majority of what I see as cross-cultural conflicts don't present themselves as such at first glance because they may occur between two people of the same color skin, same nationality, same faith and even same family. I think we risk falling into the belief that cross cultural disputes only exist when we have people of different racial cultures at the table. We sometimes think we can turn our cross-cultural radar off when both people sitting there look the same to us. But to me, most conflict comes from different cutltural perspectives, different expectations based on how we were raised and what they see as "normal" or how people "should" conduct themselves.

The example I live with is that my wife and I were both raised Jewish, both families grew up with Christmas trees in our homes, too. We both went to UCLA, we both love sports, and the list goes on and on. When we married, we had the expectation that we would be relatively the same when it came to living our lives together. But when it came to communication styles, especially around disputes or disagreements, what we each learned from our families (the tribes in which we were raised and where we learned our norms) could not have been more different. Early in our marriage, this created constant cross-cultural disputes, which turned into conflict because of the assumptions we each made about what was the "normal" way to deal with disagreements. On paper, most people would never say that my wife and I were cross-cultural, but in real life, we had a huge cross-cultural rift that was invisible to most, and even to us at first.

The moral of this story is that we must ALWAYS be looking for evidence of cross-cultural issues, even when they don't present with different skin color.