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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

OPINION: Danish leaders’ inclusion struggles are losing them innovation

Reengineering or 'crowdhacking' Danish work cultures can lead to bigger ambition, more risk-taking and more significant contributions from foreign experts, writes guest columnist Skip Bowman.

OPINION: Danish leaders' inclusion struggles are losing them innovation
Photo: Syda_Productions/Depositphotos

Last week, one of Denmark’s most prestigious and significant companies announced to the world that it is looking for more ambition and risk-taking to maintain its success in the future. And I also read that Copenhagen is poor at making experts from abroad feel welcome.

READ ALSO: Foreigners taking fewer jobs in Denmark: report

Some years ago, I got to work on a PhD project looking at the connection between innovation and organizational culture. The hypothesis was that transactional cultures, where people are selfish and competitive in their relationships with colleagues, are less effective at innovation.

Whereas transformational cultures, where people invest in and benefit from relational capital, work towards more common goals and strive to work by shared values, are more innovative. Now, while we didn’t prove the correlation conclusively, there is a lot of support for this hypothesis.

Now, Danish companies are more high-trust and transformational than most, when we look across the globe. It’s part of the explanation for the high productivity Danish employees have. For example, Danish employees and leaders spend less time managing and supervising each other than in other cultures. This leads to higher levels of autonomy, which motivates.

Secondly, Danish workplaces invest in training and development, which leads to higher levels of mastery, which also motivates. This is all good when we consider some of the drivers of innovation. But we’re missing two other things: ambition and inclusion.

What I have learnt since the PhD project, is that innovation has too forms: 1) exploiting existing ideas and areas of expertise by going deeper; and 2) integrating different areas of expertise in innovative ways.

For example, at GN Store Nord, making a better and more efficient hearing aid is type 1 and integrating the hearing aid with the cloud to create “Teleaudiology” is type 2. When you are doing type 1, you benefit from strong ties (connections) with lots of tacit knowledge and implicit understandings. For this, you need stability of relationships, trust, familiarity and regular close interactions.

For type 2, you need weak ties with many connections to lots of different people AND the ability to bridge between two or more different areas of expertise. Otherwise, you will never understand each other well enough to profit. You also to build trust swiftly: what I call “Fast Teaming”.

Now, the point of all this theory is that Danish leaders and experts are not good at building relationships with new people. They like strong ties and are rather uncomfortable with weak ones. They really suffer from the culture of “not invented here” or “Danish ideas are better than others”; or both. And they tend to shun what they regard as superficial relationships or small talk.

And I know it’s a stretch, but the article about how unfriendly Danes are towards experts from abroad is some evidence to support my provocative and big generalisation. Great ideas and new areas of knowledge come in all sorts of heads and bodies. So, active inclusion and a willingness to spend more time building a network of acquaintances, rather than spend time with old buddies, is a priority.

READ ALSO: OPINION: Why do Danish leaders seem rude?

Speaking English rather than Danish is also critical to including experts from abroad. I spent last week with an executive team, and again I experienced lots of Danish being spoken despite the fact that three out of the eight people in the room were non-Danes. You exclude people in often very subtle ways. It’s unintentional. However, it is highly impactful. If you want to get the most out of your experts and leaders from abroad, you have to do more to make them feel comfortable and confident about expressing their ideas. Without access to informal social conversations, deep trust is never established.

Curiosity is one of the biggest drivers for innovation and inclusion. When you ask questions, show interest in others, work hard to understand the different perspectives, get excited about new and different ideas, encourage people to challenge your assumptions, and put yourself in the shoes of others, you build trust and you create the foundation for solving difficult problems and creating innovative solutions. And the biggest enemy of curiosity is sarcasm.

Danish leaders and experts need to reduce sarcasm to almost zero if they want to build relationships with new and different people and bring the best out in foreign experts.

So what can we do about the lack of risk-taking and ambition in Danish innovative companies?

Danish organizations have a strength in the fact that they are often significantly more participative and collaborative. However, without a strong strategy to create inclusion at all levels and in all parts of the organisation there is a risk that other countries and leaders from different cultural backgrounds will prove better in a world of radical innovation and globalization. And ambition and risk-taking must be addressed at the team and organizational level. When everyone is rooting for change, new ideas and working hard together to make ideas into real products and services, then you have a truly innovative company.

Skip Bowman is CEO with consulting company Global Mindset. This article was originally published on Global Mindset’s social media channels and this version is republished with permission.  

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Down with Danish hygge – Sweden’s mys is more real, fun and inclusive

Hygge, the Danish art of getting cosy, has taken the world by storm. But the Swedish equivalent is refreshingly different, says David Crouch 

OPINION: Down with Danish hygge - Sweden’s mys is more real, fun and inclusive

It is around seven years since the Danish word hygge entered many of our languages. Hygge, pronounced hue-guh and generally translated as the art of cosiness, exploded almost overnight to become a global lifestyle phenomenon.

Hygge dovetailed with mindfulness and fed into other popular trends such as healthy eating, and even adult colouring books. “The Little Book of Hygge” became a publishing sensation and has been translated into 15 languages. It was swiftly followed by a second book from its author, “My Hygge Home”, one of dozens on the market. 

There is nothing wrong with new ways to relax, and certainly no harm in identifying them with Scandinavia. But as a guide to living your life, there are some problems with hygge

First, the original meaning of the word is too broad and subtle to enable a clear grasp of the concept among non-Danes. This probably helps to explain its appeal – hygge is an empty bottle into which you can pour whatever liquid you like.

Patrick Kingsley, who wrote a book about Denmark several years before the hygge hype, was “surprised to hear people describe all sorts of things” as hygge. Danes, he said, would use the word when talking about a bicycle, a table, or even an afternoon stroll. 

So it is hardly surprising that, outside Denmark, hygge is applied rather indiscriminately. Last week the New York Times devoted an entire article to achieving hygge while riding the city’s subway, of all places. “A train, after all, is basically a large sled that travels underground, in the dark,” it said, trying too hard to find a hint of Nordic-ness on the overcrowded railway.

READ ALSO: Danish word of the day – hyggeracisme

Hygge has become an exotic and mysterious word to describe more or less anything you want. It is as if someone decided that the English word “nice” had a magical meaning that contained the secret to true happiness, and then the whole non-English speaking world made great efforts to achieve the perfect feeling of “nice”. 

A second problem with hygge is that, in Denmark itself, it seems to operate like a badge of Danishness that can only be enjoyed by Danes themselves – a kind of cultural border that outsiders cannot cross. You can walk down a Danish street in the dark, one journalist was told, look through the windows and spot who is Danish and who is foreign just by whether their lighting is hygge or not.

When writer Helen Russell spent a year in Denmark, she was intrigued by hygge and asked a lifestyle coach about it. “It’s hard to explain, it’s just something that all Danes know about,” she was told. How could an immigrant to Denmark get properly hygge, Russell asked? “You can’t. It’s impossible,” was the unhelpful reply. It can’t be a coincidence that the far-right Danish Peoples Party has put a clear emphasis on hygge, as if immigration is a threat to hygge and therefore to Danish-ness itself. 

READ ALSO: It’s official – Hygge is now an English word

Outside Denmark, this exclusivity has taken on another aspect: where are all the children? Where amid the hygge hype are the bits of lego on the floor, the mess of discarded clothes, toys and half-eaten food, the bleeping iPads and noisy TVs? “Hygge is about a charmed existence in which children are sinisterly absent,” noted the design critic for the Financial Times. It’s as if the Pied Piper of hygge has spirited them away so you can get truly cosy. 

But there is a bigger problem with hygge. It is largely an invention, the work of some clever marketing executives. After spotting a feature about hygge on the BBC website, two of London’s biggest publishers realised this was “a perfect distillation of popular lifestyle obsessions”. They set out to find people who could write books for them on the subject, and so two bestsellers were born, spawning a host of imitations. 

Sweden has a different word that means roughly the same thing: mys (the noun) and mysig (the adjective). There have even been some half-hearted attempts to sell mys to a foreign audience in the same way as hygge. But the real meaning of mys in Swedish society is rather different, it seems to me. The reason for this, I think, is that mys has become so firmly identified with Friday nights, or fredagsmys – the “Friday cosy”. 

Fredagsmys is a collective sigh of relief that the working / school week is over, and now it is time for the whole family to come together in front of some trashy TV with a plate of easy finger-food. The word first appeared in the 1990s, entered the dictionary in 2006, and became a semi-official national anthem three years later with this joyous ad for potato crisps:

In this portrayal, mys is radically different to hygge. It is a celebration of the ordinary, witty and multi-cultural, featuring green-haired goths and a mixed-race family with small children. Food is central to fredagsmys, and what is the typical food of choice? Mexican, of course! Not a herring in sight.

Why Mexican? It seems nobody is really sure, but tacofredag now has roots in Swedish society. Tacos, tortillas, and all the accompanying spices and sauces take up a whole aisle of the typical Swedish supermarket. Swedes are accustomed to eating bread with various bits and pieces on top, according to a specialist in Swedish food culture, while the Swedish tradition of smörgåsbord (open sandwiches) makes a buffet meal seem natural. The fussiness of tacos is even reminiscent of a kräftskiva crayfish party.

There is no cultural exclusivity here. On the contrary, fredagsmys food could equally be Italian, North American, Middle-Eastern, British or French. And children are absolutely central to a good Friday cosy. 

With Swedish mys, everybody is welcome. Get cosy and relax, but do it by mixing and getting messy, rather than retreating into pure, perfect, rarified isolation. There is a time and a place for hygge. But the Swedish version is more real, more fun, and more inclusive.

David Crouch is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

 
 
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