Rationality is an illusion

Not everyone sees the same things but we think we do. It’s a shared illusion, and only one of the psychological biases that disturb our daily communication. Working with conflicts (at best reducing and resolving them) I regularly witness illusions lead to so called rational behaviour that is in reality pretty irrational. At a workshop in Amsterdam […]

It’s your best quality that leads to conflicts

I’m sure you know the type of person who, at a job interview, says their only flaw is ‘perfectionism’. It’s not that far off really. Our worst traits are always an overdose of our best qualities.  Daniel Ofman, a Dutch engineer, was the first author to describe this. And judging from my own conflicts and the conflicts […]

A cultural conflict at work

A Belgian friend of mine works as a researcher at one of the academic hospitals in Amsterdam. She loves what she does. The other night we talked about work over a home made dish of pasta. Surprisingly she was highly irritated and dissapointed with her superiors. Listening to her rant I realised that she is going through a […]

Dutch honesty leading to a cross-cultural conflict

My husband and I were on our way to South-Africa to attend my sisters wedding. On the first flight to Frankfurt I am seated next to a Dutch guy who is flying home to his German wife and children. When he learns that I have moved from Brussels to Amsterdam we chat away about what living […]

Conflicts over personal space

Bodylanguage and the use of personal space define your comfortzone just as much as language does. It seems that when it comes to personal space I still miss living in Brussels. I’m interviewing a list of people for a side project of mine, a documentary on intercultural conflicts. That’s why I had a long conversation with […]

Immigrating: a natural way for Conflicts to Unfold

Immigrating is painful. Intrigued by cultures that collide with my Western mentality I have a very international network of friends, and for several years love had me commuting between Malta and Brussels. But it wasn’t until I met my Dutch husband that I decided to actually jump ship. And that hurt. For the first time […]