What’s the difference between culture and stereotypes?

Bear with me.

In Bananas, Woody Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a nebbish from Brooklyn (maybe it was Queens) who finds himself leading a Latin American revolution.

For one reason or another (and, given the source, probably no reason at all), Mellish finds himself back in the United States. His hosts helpfully provided a translator. But because he was a schlimazel from Brooklyn who only spoke English, the translator listened to the welcomer’s English-language statements and repeated them, in English, to Mellish, and then repeated Mellish’s response, also given in English, back to the other conversant.

It’s funnier on screen.

Mellish’s hosts decided to provide a translator based on their expectations. Doing this isn’t wrong, although validating our expectations improves our outcomes even more.

But what we all-to-often do is invert the sequence, basing our expectations on our decisions. That’s when we start to ignore the facts that are right in front of us.

Stay with me. We’ll get to the point soon.

Back when IT was Data Processing, business managers had conversations with programmers about what computers could do. The conversational template went like this:

Business Manager: “Can you get the computer to do x?”

Programmer: “Sure,” after which the programmer got the computer to do x.

A slightly different template went like this:

Business Manager: “Can you get the computer to do y?”

Programmer: “No, computers don’t work like that. But I can get the computer to do z. Will that help?” After this, and a few more back-and-forths, the programmer got the computer to do a. And after quite a few of these exchanges, programmers had the computer doing abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

These conversational templates and their results worked well enough to create the first-generation of legacy applications that businesses ran on for decades. And if you think it all sounds a lot like Agile you aren’t wrong.

Anyhow, someone decided programmers couldn’t be expected to converse with Regular Ordinary People. And so they invented the business analyst to, very much like the translator in Bananas, translate between Geek English and Business English. In the process they convinced both business managers and programmers that they must have been fooling themselves when they thought they’d been having productive conversations.

Which (finally!) brings us to this week’s topic – the difference between stereotypes and cultural norms.

They certainly do resemble each other. A stereotype creates an expectation that all members of some identified group will behave the same way when faced with a given situation.

A cultural norm, in contrast, is the approved response to a given situation exhibited by all members of a self-identified group that’s enforced by the group through peer pressure.

And yet, most of us, most of the time, consider stereotyping to be a bad idea, especially when they are guilty of stereotyping us.

At the same time most of us, most of the time, consider our culture to be one of our strengths and sources of strength.

What’s the difference? First of all, stereotypes tend to be disparaging, used to describe something about them that makes them inferior to us. That’s as opposed to cultural traits, which tend to be complimentary, describing something about us that makes us superior to them.

Bob’s last word:

Still too subtle a difference? Let’s try this: When we deploy a stereotype we rob members of the group we’re stereotyping of their individuality. When we express a cultural trait we’re usually trying to achieve coherence, trust, and membership. Culture preserves our individuality while establishing that we’re part of a larger whole.

Bob’s sales pitch: And on an entirely different subject, hop on over to CIO.com to read my latest article there. It’s about Lifecycle Management and I think you’ll find it useful. Whatever else, I think it will give you a practical take on how to handle one of IT’s most significant architectural challenges.