Andrew Calvert posed the above mentioned question on LinkedIn, to which the note mentioned below was my response
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My experience has been in training all across the Asian population, but I would like to restrict my expertise to the Indian Sub-Continent. The following are the points that I would like to keep in mind... 1. Deep understanding of the culture 2. Use of simple lingo 3. Use of tools & aids that help in learning 4. Staying away from theory (you mentioned training and not teaching) 5. Tools that help Self-Efficacy 6. Constant reiteration of WIIFM (what's in it for me) 7. Include a lot of formative evaluation sessions like holding 'rapid-fire quizzes' during the session. 8. Have a certificate sent after a few days acknowledging their effort. 9. Conduct a session-ending test bases the objectives; keep it tough to the extent that participants find it logical yet tough. 10. Be simple and speak with clarity. 11. Expect digression and hence keep time for it. 12. Encourage asking questions. 13. Expect questions that may set you off-track, and hence the trainer should prepare well. 14. Stay away from technology (e-based learning) to the extent possible. 15. Be cognizant of the learning style, ensure you have all aids required to all the 3 types. 16. Be formally attired, unless one is training in neo-economic companies like BPOs, where less formal atire is acceptable (still depends on the company's policy) 17. Donot have two diverse level of participants, i.e., do not have the General Manager sitting with a Junior Executive. 18. Participants' current expertise levels, education levels, responsibility levels, and maturity levels. I have kept in mind both 'designing and delivering of training'. This is not a comprehensive list, but a list that one could start with
THE BEST ANSWER
There is this historic chip on the shoulder between Asians and Americans and American models. Since everyone's TV has lots of American content and since American TV has absolutely no content from other nations, you get Americans going around the world utterly oblivious to how things work and differ while the people they meet know everything about how Americans live and work and think. This imbalance has created the conviction, in Asians, that Americans are genetically boorish, culturally clumsy, arrogant, and barbarian (approximately). In literal terms this a highly accurate assessment, confirmed at least every 2 minutes in the conversations I observe in random places in 4 Seasons and Ritz Carltons all over Asia. Therefore, training such persons, if done by a Western non-American, by an American, by a Western-aping Asian, or by a Western-disliking Asian will have rather different issues to attend to. I get around this by going to recent brain research--we all have brains and research has confirmed astonishingly little that is different between Chinese and American and Vietnamese and Indonesian etc. brains. fMRI studies have moved us well along towards understanding lots of brain constraints of all sorts of learning. Fischer's The Brain and Learning by Jossey-Bass, for example, lays out 250 particular brain subsystems core to 28 types of learning and what learning and teaching systems have to do to conform to those brain subsystem contraints. By talking about the brain dessiderata, I bypass wasteful, overly emotive, and imperialism history conversations that do not get business done. Brain research confirms the powerful role of emotion in fixing memories of many kinds, the powerful role of sleep in fixing emotional memories, and the powerful role of muscle memory, associative memory, conceptual memory, and procedural memory--all four interacting--in learning and teaching. All culture effects can readily be transcribed into different emphases and weightings among these brain subsystems, taking a lot of the heat out of arguments and making learning effects much more precise and less "us versus them"y. The banal commonsense of East West training mixes: 1) east sees whole scene and context factors; west see main figure and deed factors 2) east is concretist; west is abstractionist 3) east wants steps; west wants reasons and explanations 4) east adjusts all to feelings of others; west runs roughshod over feelings 5) east is rather feminine overall; west is rather testicular overall etc. These cultural shibboleths do not do me a lot of good anymore and I have moved to brain science to get beyond them. Nizbet et al found that Japanese did see and think differently than Westerners BUT he also found that 1hour of training two days earlier sufficed to change Japanese thinking habits into Western and vice versa. Culture is there, it is powerful, but it is shallowly rooted and easily supplanted--if you credit Nizbet's recent research with Matsumoto. I forgot to mention there are 64 dimensions to any culture, each of which helps us distinguish one culture from another. The model of it is in free articles you can download from the scribd link below and is given near book length treatment in A Science of Excellence a book purchasable at the youpublish link below. Those 64 dimensions tell you what you must change when transplanting leadership practices from west to east or vice versa, when transplanting training from west to east and vice versa, or when making other similar transplants.
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