Many projects are initiated without sufficient communications with the locations that will undertake the work. The work then begins. People are assigned to the project by local management. Then they are pulled off of the project due to emergencies or other high-priority local work.

In one of most complex projects we have seen, there were four countries involved with five different languages. Almost all team members only spoke one language. Progress reports on the project were submitted in the native language. While interpreters were available to handle documents, translation took much time. A number of problems became much more pressing due to this time delay. This problem may arise because management lacks experience with a multilingual project. This problem extends to situations where people speak different dialects or forms of the same language.

Often, because people were trained in the same methods and tools, it is assumed that they have a certain common level of knowledge and capability. This is often not the case. The training could have been provided at different times. Perhaps, the training was not put to use so that the people lost knowledge and have no experience.

Most of the time people work alone or with people in their own offices. They communicate very little with other locations. The exception here is upper management and some staff positions. So people are not used to communicating with others in different locations. They may never have met or seen these people before—making communications more difficult in many cultures.

Going beyond the project leaders, problems arise among team members. You can have critical team members in one country who have traveled very little and are unaware of the cultures in other places. They may have been chosen for the team based on their technical or business knowledge. It is too bad that cultural and societal experience turned out to be more important.

We encountered one project leader in Singapore who was leading a project involving three countries. She received complete and accurate information from two of the locations and assumed that this was true overall. It was not. Team members would reassure her when she visited them. Then there were no results. She did not know what to do. We suggested that she visit their location without prior notification. This changed the attitude of the team members. She had found that they would hold a meeting prior to her visits generally. The project was turned around.

When an international project gets going, the tasks tend to take over the attention. There is much detailed work to do. Therefore, it is not surprising that with tight deadlines and management pressure, there is little time to consider the big picture and wider issues. This was certainly the case of two firms. One was a drug store chain. The other was an automobile manufacturer. In each case, they rebranded their store name and a model of a car, respectively. Everything was planned out. But no one looked at what the new names meant in one of the local languages. In both cases the names were derogatory. Customers who spoke this language did not patronize the store chain or buy the product.