In this solo episode, Trisha unpacks a concept that often masquerades as unity but can quietly erase the experiences of those it claims to include. What happens when "treating everyone the same" actually means treating everyone as if they share your starting point? How do well-intentioned statements like "I just see you as a person" land on someone whose difference has shaped their entire life?

Drawing on insights from her conversation with Chika Miyamori about the Intercultural Development Continuum, Trisha explores the minimization stage, where we focus on what we share while downplaying the significance of difference. She contrasts this with the overview effect experienced by the Artemis II crew, showing how one mindset expands our capacity to see while the other diminishes it. For cultural trainers, coaches, and facilitators, she offers a practical three-question reflection sequence to move groups from minimization toward genuine co-creation.

Resources mentioned include Episode 78 (Moon Joy and the Overview Effect) and Episode 75 with Chika Miyamori (Intercultural Development Continuum and the IDI).

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I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Shift. I'm Trisha Carter, an organizational psychologist and an explorer of cultural intelligence. For those of you who might be joining for the first time, in this podcast, we look at the moments of awareness, the shifts in thinking that help us to see somebody else's perspective, to help us to see things differently, especially through different cultural lenses.

I introduced myself before by saying that I'm an explorer of cultural intelligence, and if you haven't heard that term before, I'd just like you to know that it really means the capability to be effective in situations of diversity, so when you're dealing with people who are different to you. And there are four main parts to it.

The first is CQ Drive, the motivational aspect, because you've got to want to deal with people who are different to you. The second is CQ Knowledge, what you might need to know or learn about how cultures are similar or different. The third is CQ Strategy, and that's really unpacking the thinking about our thinking so that we can plan, we can be more aware, and we can see how our thinking does impact how we show up with people who are different to us.

And the final area is CQ Action, how we can do things differently so that we can relate better to people who are different to us. So the shifts in our perspective that we're talking about here, they come under that part called CQ Strategy, and they are really important. Now, last episode, I was talking about moon joy.

Well, I was talking about the Artemis II expedition to the moon and the overview effect. And I ended it with a bit of a query- Because I said there was a concept that can sound a lot like the overview effect, and one that we've heard a fair bit recently in Australia, but it actually pulls in a really different direction, and I wanted to come back and unpack that.

So this is what I want to do today. And I don't think it's just something that's relevant for Australia. I do think that if you're listening from the US, from Europe, from Asia, from even from Africa, you may be hearing this sort of story and this sort of pattern as well. I'll come to it in more detail in a moment.

But, sometimes in the US it's referred to as colorblind framing. The idea that the most just way of thinking is simply not to see race. In Europe, it sometimes threads through debates about immigration and integration, in that new arrivals must set their cultural identity aside completely to become fully part of the civic whole, because that's what equality looks like.

I mean, the intent is quite genuine. It's to create unity, to create solidarity, to create equality, but the effect is often erasure. It's, it's eliminating or rubbing something out that can be really important to people. So let me tell you about how I've been hearing it here in Australia. There's been a lot of public conversation about Indigenous Australians, about Welcome to Country, about land acknowledgements, and even heading back to, the Voice referendum from a few years ago.

And people are tying it into what it means to recognize difference. So I keep hearing these comments. They're something like, "I believe in treating everyone the same," or, "I'm not against Indigenous people. I value all Australians," or, "We need to stop dividing people. We're all human together." I want to say this carefully.

I don't think people saying these things are bad people. I don't think they're saying them to cause harm. Most of them, I think, genuinely believe that they're taking a fair, open-minded position.

So maybe you've been somewhere where this has happened to you as well. Maybe you've been in a workshop or a team moment, you know, it could even be a cultural training session. And the stated goal might have been to bring people together across some kind of difference. And the facilitator, often with the best of intentions, starts by finding common ground, which is good.

They say something like, "We're all here because we care about this organization," or, "We're all here because we're committed to achieving this project," or, you know, "We all want the same things. We're all professionals." And people nod. And, you know, there's this feeling of tension that drops because we are all professionals.

And we may very well all want to achieve the project. But then often it just stays at that level, and the session keeps building on the commonalities. The differences might get acknowledged really briefly, maybe with a slide, and then everyone moves off onto some sort of shared values exercise. And overall, it might feel like a positive experience.

It might feel collaborative and respectful. But if you were one of the people in the room whose difference was the reason that the training existed in the first place, you might have walked out feeling something quite different. You might have walked out feeling politely unseen, like the thing that mattered most about your experience had been gently put to one side.

That feeling, that experience even, is what I want to talk about today because it does have a name, and understanding it changes how we can do our work, how we can facilitate difficult conversations. The concept that I'm describing is called color blindness. It's what happens when we respond to the difference by deciding not to see it, or sometimes by deciding that the fair thing to do is to treat everyone as if that difference doesn't exist.

And I can understand that impulse. If we're not supposed to treat people differently based on their background or their color, then isn't the solution just to not see those things? To say, "I just see you as a person." But the problem really can be that it may feel to someone else as though some important difference about themselves has been ignored, and that can have real consequences or can be, a feeling that meaning has been denied to the people who are living with those differences.

And when we say, "I'm going to treat everyone the same," what we're actually saying is, "I'm going to treat everyone as if they come from my starting point, as if my norms, my ways of thinking are the neutral ones, you know. As if my culture is the culture that counts the most." It's a bit like inviting people to dinner and saying, "I treat all my guests the same," and then serving a meal with nuts in it and without asking anyone if they have any allergies.

The intention might have been equality, but the effect can really be something different. Now, if you heard in episode seventy-five with Chika Miyamori, what I'm about to say might, sound a bit different to you. So if you haven't heard that, I strongly recommend that you go and listen to it.

It's a wonderful episode. Chika is a CQ Fellow. She's the chief culture officer at Ideal Leaders. She's the founder of the CQ Lab Japan. Um, she's a good friend, and she really brought clarity to some of these ideas. In that conversation, we talked about the Intercultural Development Inventory, the IDI, and the developmental model that it's built on, which comes from the work of Milton Bennett.

It's called the Intercultural Development Continuum. And there was one stage that she described that really relates to what we're talking about here. It's the minimization stage. So it's what we wanna think about. So here's how it sits on the continuum. At the very beginning of that continuum, when we're least developed in our intercultural capabilities, we tend to experience other groups as threats.

You know, we might, we might see them as us versus them. It's called the polarization end of the curve. It's where strong tribal responses often come out. We spoke about a little bit in the last episode when I was referring to social identity theory. But as we develop in dealing with people who are different to us, we can become more open and more comfortable with difference.

So we move into what sounds like a much better place, and we start to focus on what we have in common. We say those things that I mentioned before. We're all professionals here. We're all just people. Chika was very clear, this is real growth From the earlier stage. It's not a bad thing. At minimization, you can build relationships across difference.

You can appreciate others in ways that are genuinely warm and real. But it does have a limit. The limit is that when we're operating at minimization, we're often still using our own worldview as the template for what's normal. We think that what we share is more important than the differences, and so we downplay the significance of those differences.

And if we're facilitating groups or if we're leading teams, we might find ourselves saying things like, "Oh, you know, people are people wherever you go," or, "Deep down, we're all the same." So Chika helped me see why those statements, even though they're meant well, can sometimes land really awkwardly. They can feel dismissive when those differences are important, when they've shaped someone's life in real ways.

So you can see how that idea might show up in something like a cultural training workshop. We say, "What we share is what matters most, so let's focus on that." Or if someone raises something that relates to identity or race, we might even unconsciously shift the conversation back to safer ground, back to professionalism, back to values, or maybe just what our goals are here.

In minimization, difference is tolerated, but it's not yet fully valued or understood. And I think it can happen really easily if you're someone like me, from a dominant culture, because when your own identity has never really been a problem for you, you don't always see how much it matters to others. It can feel like the fair thing is just to set culture aside.

But what Chika helped me understand even more deeply is that it's this which is the difference between minimization and the overview effect.

So when Victor Glover, he's a mission specialist on that Artemis II crew, when he talked about looking back at Earth from space, he said it made him think of the whole crew of humanity, all of us on this tiny shared lifeboat. And I mentioned this in the last episode. But in that conversation, he didn't minimize the differences. He named them.

What they experienced was a profound appreciation of shared humanity alongside all the beautiful, complicated, real diversity that exists on that lifeboat. Glover specifically said, "No matter where you're from or what you look like." So that's not erasing difference. That's holding difference and oneness at the same time.

So the overview effect says, we are one thing, one crew, and we are diverse, holding them both together. Cultural blindness, in contrast to this, says, we are one thing, therefore, the differences don't matter, or they are a problem. So as you can hear, one of these mindsets expands our capacity to see, and the other diminishes it.

But the frustration to me, or the irony, I guess, if you're really writing about it, is that cultural blindness comes wrapped up in the same sort of language as the overview effect. We're all one people. Victor Glover said something very similar from the moon, we just need to focus on what unites us. But he said it from that vantage point of genuine expansion after an experience that opened him up, not as a way of shutting down someone else's experience.

When those words are spoken from a position of power to a group who's asking to have their specific experiences acknowledged, like Indigenous Australians, they land very differently than when they're spoken from four hundred thousand kilometers away while watching the Earth glow against the dark sky.

Is it a sky? Against dark space.

So- I want to make something clear 'cause I don't want anyone to walk away thinking that naming the things we share is a problem. It isn't. There's a communication move technique, if you like, that I've used a lot over the years. I've seen other more skilled facilitators than me use it too. So it's -- before you name a difficult thing, you name what you share.

So it might be, "We all want this project to succeed," or, "You and I are both here having this discussion because we care about , how you are performing," m-manager to team member, or, "We are here today because we care about this team." Those sorts of comments, they create just enough common ground to make the next part of the conversation, which is probably gonna be a hard conversation, feel survivable, feel like things are safe so that you can go into the tougher thing.

That's not minimization. That's not saying that difference don't matter. It's actually saying the opposite. It's saying, "I trust this relationship enough," or, "I trust this shared purpose that we are standing in so that we can then afford to look honestly at the difference or the problem that we're facing."

So commonality is a bridge into the conversation, not a reason to avoid the difference or the challenge.

So the question to ask yourself is: What is the commonality doing in the moment? Is it opening the door or is it closing one? Is it creating safety to go deeper, or is it being used to signal that we're going to not discuss this any further? That distinction maps beautifully onto what Chika described as co-creation.

It was the-- one of the higher stages of development on Bennett's Continuum, where you're not tolerating difference or politely setting it aside, but you're actively building something together with that difference. The shared goal becomes the launching pad, not the destination.

So for those of you who are cultural trainers, coaches, and facilitators, especially if you're still building your practice and finding your way into these frameworks, here's a simple reflection sequence that I encourage you to think about with your groups when you're opening up the conversation about minimization and difference The first question, what do we have in common here?

What unites us? Let people sit with that, let them feel that because it is real and it matters. That's the approach that builds CQ drive, the motivation, the wanting to belong together. So don't be afraid to sit in that. And then the second question, what differences exist in this group that we often don't talk about out loud?

Not because you need to judge them, but just to notice that they're there. You might even need to hold some silence, especially if you are coming, like me, from the dominant culture. This is a harder question. Some groups will probably resist it, but that resistance in and of itself is useful information.

And then the third question, what might those differences be costing us if we're not speaking about them, in terms of what things are we missing? What needs are met, but what discomfort is going unnoticed, or what are we missing? So you're not asking people to abandon that first question. You're asking them to add on the second and the third.

So that's moving from minimization towards acceptance in practice, mirroring exactly what that continuum of development describes.

So the place I keep coming back to through all of this is CQ strategy, that metacognitive piece of cultural intelligence, thinking about our thinking. Because most of the time, cultural blindness isn't a deliberate choice, it's what happens when we stop noticing the assumptions that we're making.

CQ strategy is what helps us to pause, to take a breath, and to say, "Wait a moment. Whose normal am I assuming here?" Or, "Whose normal am I using here?" Or, "What am I not seeing?" Or, "Who isn't in this room?" Or, "Whose voices aren't we hearing?" So that metacognitive habit can move us from minimization towards something more honest.

It does take more than goodwill. It takes a practice of noticing and choosing to slow down and look again So I hope this has been helpful to you all. Next episode, I'm hoping to bring a guest into this conversation. More on that soon. In the meantime, if you haven't listened to the Moon Joy conversation, go back and listen to that episode because, the story of Artemis II and the experiences of the astronauts is really uplifting and encouraging.

And so too was episode seventy-five with Chika Miyamori. It's a wonderful place to go deeper into some of these aspects. Both of these episodes will be linked in the show notes. Thank you for being here with me on The Shift. If this episode sparks something, I'd love to know about it. So find me on LinkedIn, and let's keep the conversation going.

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