Cultural background and departmental culture shape how people express disagreement, relate to hierarchy, and even what ordinary terms mean — assuming a shared definition or a shared communication norm across cultures or departments is a hidden source of misalignment. A stakeholder's silence, hedged phrasing, or deference to hierarchy may read as agreement when it is actually a culturally-shaped way of expressing disagreement indirectly.
This is a root cause underlying Mining for Conflict (Testing Apparent Consensus): shallow apparent consensus is often produced by exactly this kind of unstated cultural or departmental norm, not by genuine agreement. Distinct from Stakeholder Communication Style Taxonomy (Numbers / Business-Impact / Story-Context), which classifies individual communication preferences (numbers vs. story) rather than cultural/departmental norms around hierarchy and disagreement.
Erin Meyer's The Culture Map gives a rougher-grained version of this same idea at the national-culture level: average differences across cultures in directness of communication, respect for hierarchy, and decision-making style (Israelis and Dutch cited as very direct, Japanese as more indirect, for example). Useful as a rough lens for interpreting a stakeholder's cross-cultural communication style — but a generalization about a culture, not a guarantee about any individual in it.
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust