Naming Minimization: commonality, universalism and a transitional mindset

This is the third course in the program's six-part series on the Intercultural Development Continuum, the model published by IDI, LLC that describes how people and groups make sense of cultural difference. The continuum moves from the more monocultural mindsets of Denial and Polarization, through the transitional orientation of Minimization, to the intercultural mindsets of Acceptance and Adaptation. The program's series adds a sixth course on Integration, a stage drawn from Milton Bennett's earlier Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, on which the continuum builds. The word "transitional" matters. Minimization is not a failure and not a destination. It is a place many thoughtful people and many public organizations stand, and it carries real strengths along with real blind spots.

The continuum describes Minimization as highlighting commonalities in two ways. The first is similarity: the conviction that underneath it all, people share the same basic needs for safety, food, belonging and respect. The second is universalism: the belief that certain values and principles, such as fairness, honesty or individual rights, apply everywhere and can be used to judge any situation. Both beliefs contain truth. The difficulty is that emphasizing them can mask a deeper understanding of how culture shapes what those needs and values look like in practice. Bennett describes this orientation as assuming that one's own experience is shared by others, so that visible differences are treated as surface variations on themes that everyone supposedly holds in the same way.

The continuum also names two different sources of Minimization. For people whose culture shapes the rules of an institution, it can reflect limited cultural self-understanding: my way of doing things feels like no culture at all, just common sense. For people from non-dominant groups, emphasizing commonality can be a deliberate strategy for navigating values and practices set largely by the dominant group, and the continuum notes that this strategy can have survival value. These two forms look similar from the outside but come from very different places, which is one reason never to assume why a colleague talks about sameness.

Finally, a boundary. The Intercultural Development Inventory is a fifty-item assessment that can only be administered, and its results only shared, by a licensed Qualified Administrator. This course uses the continuum's language as a shared vocabulary for patterns in practice. It does not measure anyone, and nobody in this program should guess, announce or record a colleague's orientation. If you want to take the inventory, ask your supervisor or the program team about working with a Qualified Administrator.

Fictional case: At a Disability Services Division planning meeting, Arne says the new person-centered planning guide needs no cultural review because "every family wants the same thing, a good life for their loved one." Keisha, who has worked with Hmong, Somali and Ojibwe families in her county partnerships, agrees with the goal but notices the guide assumes the person served will make decisions alone in a private meeting. In some families she has worked with, important decisions involve several relatives or elders. Nobody in the room disagrees that families want a good life. The question is whether the guide's process was built around one picture of how that happens.

Pick one document you use often, such as a form, template or meeting agenda. Write down two assumptions it makes about how people communicate, decide or show up, and note whether those assumptions were ever checked with the people it serves.

Think about a time you said or thought "people are people" at work. What was true in that statement, and what might it have left out about how people actually experience the same need?