The contrasting styles of communication represented by the managers from Spain and say Japan are often referred to as low-context and high-context, respectively.

In order to understand the implications, suppose you are having a discussion with Sally, a business colleague, and you both come from a culture that prefers low-context communication. People from such cultures are conditioned from childhood to assume a low level of shared context—that is, few shared reference points and comparatively little implicit knowledge linking speaker and listener.

Under these circumstances, it’s highly likely that, while speaking with Sally, you will explicitly spell out your ideas, providing all the background knowledge and details necessary to understand your message. The United States is the lowest-context culture in the world, followed by Canada and Australia, the Netherlands and Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Though cultural norms are transmitted from one generation to the next through means that are generally indirect and subliminal, you may remember receiving some deliberate lessons concerning appropriate ways to communicate. I certainly received such lessons as a child growing up in the United States. My third-grade teacher, Mary Jane, a tall, thin woman with tightly curled hair, used to coach us during our Monday morning circle meetings using the motto, “Say what you mean and mean what you say.” When I was sixteen, I took an elective class at Minneapolis South High School on giving effective presentations. This is where I learned the traditional American rule for successfully transferring a powerful message to an audience: “Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” This is the philosophy of low-context communication in a nutshell. The communication technique is designed to help people quickly identify and correct misunderstandings, thereby reducing (if not eliminating) one common cause of needless, pointless debate.

Childhood lessons like these imbued me with the assumption that being explicit is simply good communication. But, as Takaki explained, good communication in a high context culture like Japan is very different. In Japan as in India, China, and many other countries, people learn a very different style of communication as children—one that depends on unconscious assumptions about common reference points and shared knowledge.

For example, let’s say that you and a business colleague named Maryam both come from a high-context culture like Iran. Imagine that Maryam has travelled to your home for a visit and arrived via a late-evening train at 10:00 p.m. If you ask Maryam whether she would like to eat something before going to bed, when Maryam responds with a polite “No, thank you,” your response will be to ask her two more times. Only if she responds “No, thank you” three times will you accept “No” as her real answer.

In a high-context culture like Iran, it’s not necessary—indeed, it’s often inappropriate —to spell out certain messages too explicitly. If Maryam replied to your first offer of food, “Yes, please serve me a big portion of whatever you have, because I am dying of hunger!” this response would be considered inelegant and perhaps quite rude. Fortunately, shared assumptions learned from childhood make such bluntness unnecessary. You and Maryam both know that “No, thank you” likely means, “Please ask me again because I am famished.”

If you’re from a low-context culture, you may perceive a high-context communicator as secretive, lacking transparency, or unable to communicate effectively. On the other hand, if you’re from a high-context culture, you might perceive a low-context communicator as inappropriately stating the obvious, or even as condescending and patronizing.

When I had first arrived at my hotel in New Delhi, I was hot and, more important, hungry. Although I would have spent that week conducting classes for a group of Indian executives at the swank five-star Oberoi hotel, the Indian business school hosting me put me up in a more modest and much smaller residence several miles away. Staying in a simple hotel just steps from the bustle of workaday New Delhi, I thought, would make it that much easier for me to get the flavour of the city.

Lunch was at the top of my agenda. The very friendly young man behind the concierge desk jumped to attention when he saw me approaching. I asked about a good place to eat. “There is a great restaurant just to the left of the hotel. I recommend it highly,” he told me. “It is called Swagat. You can’t miss it.”

It sounded perfect. I walked out to the road and looked to the left. The street was a whirlwind of colors, smells, and activities. I saw a grocery store, a cloth vendor, a family of five all piled onto one motor scooter, and a bunch of brown- speckled chickens pecking in the dust next to the sidewalk. No restaurant.

“You didn’t find it?” the kind concierge asked in a puzzled tone as I re-entered the hotel. This time the young man explained, “Just walk out of the hotel, cross the street, and the restaurant will be on your left. It’s next to the market. There is a sign. You can’t miss it,” he said again.

Remembering my confusing encounter with the concierge in New Delhi, if I had been an Indian from Delhi with the shared cultural understanding of how to interpret implicit messages, I would have been better able to interpret the concierge’s directions. Lacking those assumptions left me bewildered and unable to find my way to the restaurant.