African dilemmas

She warmly thanked me for the intercultural workshop that had just finished, but said that something was missing: I had failed to use any examples from the African continent. This was particularly embarrassing, as the woman speaking to me was herself African.

I started to wonder why I had done this and realized that over the past few years I had travelled to many countries around the world but not to Africa. There’s a saying that you hear in London City circles: "It’s Dubai, Shanghai, Mumbai or Goodbye." For these people, Africa seems to be missing from the equation of places that set the pulse for economic activity.

I used to wonder what the abbreviation "ROW" meant on company statistics. Now I know that it's "Rest of the World", a category into which a whole vast continent is put.

The interculturalist Fons Trompenaars has developed a problem-solving method called "dilemma reconciliation", which helps to solve apparently unsolvable problems — for example, cutting costs at the same time as you innovate. Maybe using his approach would help us to change our perspective, and to even conclude that more interest in African affairs could be the key for us in the non-African "rest of the world" to solve our problems.