A Culture Code for a Civic Society?

By Michael Drew - Sep 15 , 2011

Malaysia, where I’ve been working for the last few weeks, is a Muslim country that has strict rules about comportment, but it’s also a country that absorbs the influences of many other cultures. For example, here you often see people greeting each other in the European fashion, with a kiss on both cheeks.

Americans sometimes think this is way too affectionate a greeting (I know that I was a bit surprised to see it at first), but it’s a greeting, not an amorous embrace. We Americans, and even North Americans, are often too nervous about appearing “feminine” by seeming too physically close. Relax, fellas. Life’s too short to worry about stuff like that. And anyway, there’s nothing wrong with expressing respect in such a gentle fashion. But American culture often looks askance at such things, where we’re all supposed to tough it out, even during the innocuous hello part of an encounter.

That isn’t the case here in Malaysia. There are rules of propriety, of course, and men and women interact differently than they do in western, and westernized, countries. But I’ve been struck by the way that Malaysians accept certain attributes of other cultures and make them their own. It’s a welcoming society, despite its religious restrictions.

I’m a student of society and of social change. I’ve spoken often about societal shifts in North America in my popular “Pendulum” presentation, which examines the approximately 40-year fluctuations in how we look at the world. We go back and forth every few decades between an individualistic society to a more civic one. We’re in a civic cycle right now where, despite the rancor you can see from certain misguided politicians who believe in party over country, the general feeling is that we need to work together to achieve things.

I mentioned in my last post that I recently read Clotaire Rapaille’s illuminating book, “The Culture Code,” which my colleagues and I found often to be right on the money about finding terms that can help define a society. Every society is filled with contradictions, of course, and you can’t really reduce each one to a single word. But just as in my work with personas, where we look at the choices that people make that lead to a categorization of someone as extrovert or introvert and so on, you can define through a word or two certain national cultural characteristics that are true without being clichéd or reductive. Did you know that the British code words for America are “UNASHAMEDLY ABUNDANT”? To the British (and to a large part of the world) America is the place not only of opportunity, but of abundance (even excess).

I’ve been trying to think of a word to define the culture of Malaysia, at least that culture that I’ve experienced in my month here. And it actually ties in to what we as a society in North America and some other western countries are experiencing right now. Given the embrace that Malaysians show for others, and the way they work with each other to move forward, I think the culture code for Malaysia is: CONSENSUS.

Now, I’m curious about what you think is the culture code, or the defining word, for your country. If you come from somewhere else, this makes it even more interesting.

Let me know – your ideas help illuminate ours.