What I Did on My (2023) Summer Vacation: Relocating Across Cultures in the Post-Global World.

In today’s changed world, cross-cultural training just isn’t enough.

What we now need is something new, that goes beyond traditional cultural training for living and working in another culture, which gives us the skills to be culturally agile anywhere and everywhere, what I prefer to call global skills development training.

Organizations and individuals working across cultures have long known the value of cultural training: most companies with a presence in global markets have, either through bitter experience or wise awareness, come to appreciate the bottom-line advantages that cultural preparation provides, for the expatriate and family being assigned to a foreign location, or the global team attempting to work more effectively across time and culture zones. Cross-cultural training is no longer considered a “nice-to-do”, but for most companies with any international experience, it is recognized as an essential tool for global business success. Accordingly, the art and science of cross-cultural training has developed over the last 20 or so years, from an infant discipline to a mature management training intervention, with a body of knowledge and a training methodology all its own.

There’s just one problem: most of the research, methodology and orientation that is the bread and butter of most cultural training programs was designed in what I would call the “pre-global” world, while most organizations…