- In high-context cultures, yes may mean yes, yes may mean no, and yes may mean maybe depending on how the yes is messaged. So it's not just the words. It's actually the facial expression, the tonality of the voice, and the body language. 

Whereas in low-context cultures, yes means yes and no means no. I mean what I say, and I say what I mean-- direct. 

Think of some of the issues that comes up. I loved Dave Ulrich's definition of listening. Listening is not about, Have you heard me? but, have you understood what I meant? I love that definition. I thought, well, that's really good. 

And here's the issue. If you come primarily from a low-context culture, even when someone says no and they say no without using the word no, you don't actually hear it. You don't hear it. 

So then the issue becomes, why didn't they just say no? If they couldn't perform or couldn't get that done on time, why didn't they say no? Well, they probably did, but you just didn't hear it. 

As I was with a meeting with a client some time ago, we were with a Korean organization, and he came out of the presentation saying, I think that presentation went really well. I said, I don't think it went really well. He said, why not? Because they said they were really interested. They would give it good consideration. I said, no. That doesn't mean that they're going to think about it because when they kind of said that, they kind of [SIGH]. They took the deep breath in. So it's just paying attention to the cues. 

So when we listen to people who come from high-context cultures, they seem to be kind of beating around the bush, and we don't hear what they're saying. Whereas when we're coming from low-context cultures, how it comes across to high context is, in fact, sometimes we come across as being very rude and very direct. They say, don't you have any heart? Can you say it in a different way? So once again, different styles of communication. 

And think about that here. And once again, the thing to remember is that culture is very subjective. In Australia, we consider ourselves to be quite open and quite straight. We take pride in the fact that we call it as it is. 

I had a client recently who said to me, Tom, I thought we were direct. I had a project manager who came from the United States, and at our first meeting, she had my whole team in tears. She said, I now know what direct is because compared to her, we were really soft. 

However, we compared to the Indonesians, we are direct. They are very indirect. So culture is always subjective. It's relative to your point of reference.