2. Opal Profiles – assessment tools on information processing modes, communication styles, teamwork styles and roles in transformation, and cultural fluidity. Results are described as they relate with the Pyramid, so they are integrated with the main theory.
So – I was learning from a situation of apparently unhealthy leadership and ministry breakdown on the way to potentially becoming intercultural. Meanwhile, it occurred to me experiencing unsuccessful teamwork didn’t necessarily help in understanding who could actually best facilitate a healthy and successful intercultural teamwork environment. But since I come from a strongly multicultural background myself (both of my parents exhibited many characteristics of what Jesus called, “people of peace”), I started seeing Scripture in a different light. I concluded that a particular kind of intercultural people, whom I called interpolators, seemed to show up in the middle of drastic cultural change situations – like what we’re undergoing globally these days – and make a positive difference.
In the late 1990s, I’d noticed such a pattern among the many teens and twenty-somethings in the Bible whose historical accounts we have: Esther, Ruth, Mary the mother of Jesus, David, Daniel, Timothy, Titus, and others. Such young men and young women as these were all at least bicultural, and many were living in a crucial time of cultural upheaval. And, intriguingly, each seemed to have an older generation mentor. For instance, Esther was of Jewish descent, though living in exile in a gentile nation, and Mordecai mentors her to use her providential position as queen to help deliver the Jews from genocide. Timothy apparently is bicultural as well, with a Jewish mother and a gentile father. He emerges as a leader in the critical early years of the Church, and his mentor, Paul, is tricultural – a Jew and a Roman citizen, reared in a gentile nation.
So … how do we identify interpolators and other kinds of crosscultural workers in this day and age?
After I completed the Opal Pyramid, the next segment of the Opal Systems to emerge was the Opal Profiles. I did the initial development mostly in 2003-2004. These assessment tools help identify the kinds of roles individuals can best play on a team that attempts to composite multiple cultures into an intercultural Kingdom Culture church, ministry, or other spiritual entrepreneurship endeavor. All emerge from the assumptions of strength-based ministry, that God has created us different in our processing abilities and cultural fluidity, and that these differences mean all can participate and produce, not just consume. Weaknesses and missing abilities cannot always be overcome by more training; we are usually more successful when we just let people work in their providential areas of strength. Thus, each person can play a specific role in helping make a difference for the Kingdom. They also rely heavily on aspects of learning style theories, a fascinating topic which I’ve continued to study since 1997, when I was introduced to them by Dr. Kathy Koch of Celebrate Kids, Inc.
Opal Profiles also rely on an integrated or “fractal” approach: what is true for something at the most simple level of being an organism or in a system, is also true at each more complex/sophisticated level of interaction between that organism or system and any other part within it or anything outside it. So, what people who take the assessment tools find out about themselves as individuals theoretically “in isolation,” also helps them understand better how they function in ways consistent with that when they’re in such communal settings as:
- Their own primary information processing culture, and their main identity subculture(s) within the larger cluster of that particular approach to processing information. This is assessed in the Opal Integration Styles instrument.
- The Opal Discipleship Communication Styles instrument assesses everyday communications with others.
- The Opal Teamwork Styles and Cultural Roles instrument assesses roles in small groups and teams.
- The Opal Cultural Fluidity Potentials instrument assesses settings that could involve cultural conflict (e.g., businesses, social groups, international travel, etc.).
For instance, using this approach, someone who naturally focuses just on analyzing detail and making lists and flowcharts, will generally prefer debate as their dominant communication style. (Debate focuses on comparing and contrasting of details between systems, and assumes people are motivated to make decisions based on having clear and “convincing, logical” information about why their system is wrong and my system is right.) They will also tend to gravitate toward hierarchical authority structures on teams, churches, and political systems – as these likewise embody black-and-white thinking and step-by-step approaches to tasks, processes, and social change.
There are some cultures where this set of detail-debate-hierarchy traits would be viewed as completely positive and necessary, whereas other cultures would consider the exact same set as utterly toxic! If a detail-debate-hierarchy person does not become more “culturally fluid,” he or she will likely find any kind of crosscultural encounters very stressful; his/her primary culture holds such a high value on being clear and accurate and “right,” that there is no mental perception or passionate value on encountering or incorporating “otherness.” And many other individuals and cultures simply will not tolerate that. Thus, everyone in the encounter misses out on some clarity in thinking and in truth that they need, because they have let the perceived (or actual!) negativity in the style of the deliverer put them off from hearing the truths underneath.
In short, the ways we process life as individuals and cultures automatically sets us up for specific relationships of culture clash with those who process life differently from us. They also set us up for culture shock if our typical way of processing life conflict with social changes. However, the main point is that these styles and roles go together and are all “of a piece.” They create a seamless, coherent set that manifests compatible traits at all levels. This set includes: information processing modes, personal and social values, communications, teamwork, authority structures, and potential for crosscultural fluidity. These are the major dimensions assessed and described in the Opal Profile tools.
Next post, RD1-7, is on the training curriculum of Opal Connection Zone.