Strength-Based Clinical Supervision by Wade John;Jones Janice;

Author:Wade, John;Jones, Janice;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Diversity: Searching for Higher Ground, Not Just Common Ground

“We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.”

—I. F. Chamberlain, Abdu’l-Baha on Divine Philosophy, 2007, p. 83

“Diversity is not about how we differ. Diversity is about embracing one another’s uniqueness.”

—Ola Joseph

In the book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell (2008) grippingly tells the story of the 1990 flight of a Columbian airliner that crashed onto Long Island, killing 73 of the 158 passengers on board. The tragedy occurred because the New York air traffic controllers did not grasp that the Columbian pilot was trying to communicate that the plane was almost out of fuel when he was instructed to remain in a holding pattern for over an hour because of air traffic delays. The pilot was trying to convey the urgency of the situation about the diminishing fuel supply, but given his understated communication style, the plane’s imminent danger of crashing did not register with the New York air traffic controllers. Used to very direct communication, the air traffic controllers in New York simply thought the pilot was communicating the very common situation that many planes are running low on fuel as they approach landing. The plane ran out of fuel and crashed simply because both the pilot and the air traffic controller were attempting to communicate from their own cultural perspective and were unable to cross the cultural divide and understand each other.

Obviously and regrettably, the crash was very avoidable. If the pilots had just been able to communicate that they needed to be moved up to the front of the line for landing, or if earlier in the process, they had asked to be rerouted to land at Philadelphia, these flight plan changes could have been easily made and catastrophe avoided. Gladwell also recounted a similar situation with a Korean Airlines flight in 1997 that crashed on its approach to the airport in Guam, one of several crashes over a several-year period for the airline. At the time, the loss rate for Korean Airlines was 17 times higher than the industry average—so bad that the United States Army, which has thousands of troops in South Korea, forbade its personnel from using the carrier. Fortunately, Korean Airlines began implementing cultural training shortly after the 1997 crash, and now has an unblemished safety record, illustrating that change is possible.

Although there were several contributing factors to both crashes (as with most tragic outcomes), Gladwell attributes much of the difficulty in both catastrophes to the breakdown in communication due to cultural misunderstanding between the air traffic controllers and the pilots. Western communication typically has a “transmitter orientation,” which means that it is considered the speakers’ responsibility to communicate information clearly and unambiguously. Conversely, many Asian and other collectivist countries tend to have a “receiver orientation,” in which it is the responsibility of the listener to make sense of what is being said, even when communication is presented indirectly.

In mental health, the failure

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