Time and Planning
We have a running joke with our teachers about making plans for far into the future. After we mention our plans for two years down the road, our teachers will joke that they don’t even have plans for tomorrow. Some of this may be due to personality, as I am someone who just loves planning and organization in general. But some of it is also cultural, because people from cold-climate cultures tend to value structure, efficiency, and getting things done in advance, whereas people from hot-climate cultures tend instead toward responding to life as it comes and value relationships over punctuality.
My husband and I planned a European vacation to see Christmas markets in December. I took great joy in meticulously laying out a two-week road trip that would allow us to visit five countries. I got so far as to even begin picking out the restaurants where we would eat and what I hoped to order from the menu. And then the Omicron variant appeared, and Morocco closed its borders and suspended commercial flights. (Facepalm.) Sometimes my love for planning ends up wasting time, because I cannot predict what will happen, and sometimes things come up in life that we cannot control and that change all of our plans. In that respect, I have a lot to learn from my friends who live with spontaneity and a responsive posture toward life.
Sarah Lanier, in her book Foreign to Familiar, talks about the tension of the positives and negatives to both ways of viewing time and planning. Although she gained much from experiencing the spontaneous, unplanned lifestyle of Chile, she says, “When spontaneous cultures become too easygoing and only react to life, they may miss great opportunities. Therein lies a tension between cultures, each with something to offer the other” (p. 109).
When we think of hot and cold-climate cultures, one way to describe their relationships to time is that hot-climate cultures are event-oriented and cold-climate cultures are time-oriented. My husband Michael and I met at a wedding in South America. A Peruvian couple was getting married, and there would be numerous North American expats in attendance. This couple, knowing what they knew about different concepts of time across cultures, decided to create two sets of invitations: one set that would go to Peruvians, with a stated start time of 10:00 AM, and the other set would go to the North Americans, with a stated start time of 12:00 noon. I attended the wedding, showing up around noon, as per the invitation I received. Unfortunately, Michael accidentally received the Peruvian invitation, and so showed up to the wedding at 10:00, when people were still setting up chairs and decorating for the reception. He was initially really confused by the clear lack of preparedness for the wedding. However, he later learned that the people in that country don’t show up at an event at the time written on the invitation, but instead, that time is the beginning of the event, including getting dressed and ready, decorating, and the travel time required. In a hot-climate culture, the moment you begin thinking about the event you will attend, that is when the event starts. We have been told that, as a Westerner, one hack for figuring out when you will actually meet someone is to calculate the time it takes to shower, get ready, and the time the person will spend in traffic. Once you have approximated that time, add it to the time you were supposed to meet, and that is the time that you should think of arriving.
In The Culture Map, Erin Meyer explains, “when people describe those from another culture using words like inflexible, chaotic, late, rigid, disorganized, and inadaptable, it's quite likely the scheduling dimension is the issue. And understanding the subtle, often unexpressed assumptions about time that control behaviors and expectations in various cultures can be quite challenging.”
In some cultures of the world, time is seen as tangible and concrete. In other parts of the world, time is flexible and may even not involve clocks, rather working with what can be described as “event-time,” such as scheduling “before lunch,” “in the evening,” or in Muslim-majority countries, based on the times of the call to prayer. The way people relate to scheduling has a lot to do with how they experience their day—whether it is fixed and reliable, or dynamic and unpredictable (The Culture Map, p. 226). The reality of change and unpredictability is especially true of the Majority world, where time tends to be more flexible (and less linear). As Erin Meyer says, “As political systems shift and financial systems alter, as traffic surges and wanes, as monsoons or water shortages raise unforeseeable challenges, the successful managers are those who have developed the ability to ride out the changes with ease and flexibility. Scheduling things in advance is fine—but only if the time horizon is 48 hours or less.”
“It’s only logical that if relationships are a priority, you will put them before the clock,”
-Erin Meyer, The Culture Map
One thing to remember is that the relationship-oriented cultures (hot-climate cultures) will tend to be more flexible when it comes to time, and task-oriented cultures (cold-climate cultures) prefer structure and a linear-time schedule. “It’s only logical that if relationships are a priority, you will put them before the clock,” explains Meyer. Recently, we traveled to a city where we used to live and had not traveled to in many months. We had numerous people to see, and so we made plans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of our visit. We tried to give people rough estimates of when we would meet. One day, we met friends for breakfast, and told other friends (Moroccans, who ordinarily have a flexible view of time) that we would see them around noon. Noon came around, and we were still chatting with our friends at breakfast, and so we kept talking and didn’t leave their house for another forty-five minutes. At around that time, the friend we were meeting at noon called, asking, “Are you okay? Did you get lost or did something happen?” We assured her we were alive, on our way, and would see her soon. When we were together at her house, we joked about what had happened, telling her, “Don’t worry, we’re alive!” Because she knows we are usually punctual and stick to the clock, being forty-five minutes late—which is acceptable in her culture—had her worrying for our safety because it is so far outside of our culture. But we can honestly say that we have learned from our Moroccan and other warm-cultured friends how to be present with the person in front of us, and just forget the clock.
When living or working cross-culturally, the issue of time, planning, and scheduling will come up often. We often get it wrong, like when Michael showed up two hours early for a wedding, or when we showed up late for lunch. We have to make mistakes, because those stories will be memorable and help us to learn. Nuance is key here, because simply saying, “People are always late!” will leave us frustrated and we will miss the specific ways that people view the clock. Flexibility in intercultural situations is important. Remaining curious about how things work in a culture that is not our own will help us remain open to connection, regardless of if our visit starts “on time."
Do you work in a multicultural team or context? Are you traveling to a country with a culture different than your passport country? Do you need an outside perspective to help you make sense of the cultural misunderstandings you face? We can help you learn to navigate the cultural differences you face in your context.
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Morocco is a very unique country for several reasons. The first is its strategic location in the northwest of the continent of Africa, just 14 kilometers south of Europe. This beautiful country is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea in the North, the Atlantic Ocean in the West, Algeria to the East, and Mauritania to the South. For this reason, Morocco is a crossroads where cultures, civilizations, and ethnicities meet.