Diversity icebreaker in cross-cultural training

Dimensions of culture and the dimensions in Diversity Icebreaker have something in common. Diversity Icebreaker categories are partly unconscious, they are created by language, they are used to constitute groups that leads to intergroup dynamics and prejudices, people have emotions related to these categories and at the end they often are tightly intertwined with identity. And so are cultural descriptions and dimensions, too. For this reason the Diversity Icebreaker seminar has huge similarities to cultural dimensions. Both types of diversity have good communication as important part of overcoming the challenges. Sometimes there are requests to facilitate intercultural interaction when problems have emerged and created conflicts. Our experience is that the Diversity Icebreaker seminar in such situations can lead to an affective event characterized by positive emotions, overcoming fault lines, creates reciprocity through shared experience, establish a shared language of egalitarian and complementary qualities, promote individual and collective reflection, highlight individual acknowledgement and leads to better ideas of which interactional categories should be used and how diversity should be managed