We help communities and organizations:
At Intercultural Connections, our mission is to help organizations and communities thrive by providing comprehensive intercultural communication and intercultural competence solutions tailored to our client's unique needs.
Our team is committed to delivering results that exceed expectations.
Intercultural Connections offers various services, including training, engagement, strategy, and facilitation. Our team, led by Kelley Abercrombie, has the expertise to help organizations and communities address complex intercultural communication challenges and find unexpected pathways to shared understanding. Drawing from years of exper
Intercultural Connections offers various services, including training, engagement, strategy, and facilitation. Our team, led by Kelley Abercrombie, has the expertise to help organizations and communities address complex intercultural communication challenges and find unexpected pathways to shared understanding. Drawing from years of experience and degrees in Religious Studies and International and Intercultural Communication, she brings both depth and breadth based on theoretical and practical intercultural expertise.
At Intercultural Connections, we work closely with our clients to understand their needs and develop solutions tailored to their unique intercultural challenges. Our approaches are pragmatic, results-driven, and designed to help diverse organizations and communities achieve their shared goals.
Intercultural Connections will help you surf
At Intercultural Connections, we work closely with our clients to understand their needs and develop solutions tailored to their unique intercultural challenges. Our approaches are pragmatic, results-driven, and designed to help diverse organizations and communities achieve their shared goals.
Intercultural Connections will help you surface the invisible rules in your context and practice new, concrete ways of working together. Using your real meetings, emails, and conflicts, we build small, repeatable habits that make cross‑cultural relationships easier, safer, and more productive.
Intercultural Studies began in the mid‑20th century with Ruth Benedict, an anthropologist who helped popularize the idea that each culture has its own “pattern” or personality. In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, she described Japanese society in terms of honor, obligation, and shame, showing Western readers that what feels “normal” in one place can feel very different in another. Her work planted a key seed: culture shapes how people see the world, not just what they wear or eat.
Around the same time, Clyde Kluckhohn, Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn, and Fred Strodtbeck were asking a related question: do all societies wrestle with the same basic life problems, and just answer them differently? They suggested that every culture has preferred “value orientations”—for example, toward the past or future, toward doing or being, toward the individual or the group. This was an early move toward thinking of culture as a set of deep value choices.
Next, attention shifted from values “in the background” to communication “in the foreground.” Edward T. Hall, often called a founder of intercultural communication, showed how cultures differ in their use of context, space, and time. In some places, people rely on shared background and subtle hints; in others, they expect direct, explicit wording. Hall’s work made a simple but powerful point: misunderstandings often come from how we communicate, not just from language barriers.
Geert Hofstede then took the value‑orientation idea into the world of data and organizations. Studying employees across many countries, he identified recurring dimensions like individualism versus collectivism, equality versus hierarchy, and comfort versus discomfort with uncertainty. His work helped international companies realize that management practices that work in one country may backfire in another because the underlying values are different.
Deborah Tannen carried the story down to the level of conversation. She showed how gender and cultural background shape things like turn‑taking, directness, and how we show agreement or disagreement. What looks “aggressive” or “too emotional” to one person may simply be a different conversational style to another. Tannen helped everyday readers see that many conflicts are style clashes, not character flaws.
As migration and globalization increased, another question came to the forefront: what happens when people grow up, work, or raise families between cultures? Psychologist John Berry explored how individuals and communities respond when they move into a new cultural environment. He described several common acculturation paths: fully adopting the new culture, holding mainly to the original culture, trying to combine both, or feeling pushed to the margins of both. His work highlighted that there isn’t one “right” way to adapt, but some paths tend to support well‑being better than others.
At the same time, scholars like William Gudykunst and Stella Ting‑Toomey zoomed in on what intercultural encounters feel like from the inside. Gudykunst emphasized the anxiety and uncertainty people feel when they’re not sure how to behave or what others expect—and how managing those feelings is part of effective communication. Ting‑Toomey focused on “face” and conflict, showing how cultures differ in protecting dignity, handling disagreement, and saving relationships when tensions run high.
As organizations became more global and diverse, these ideas moved from the classroom into the workplace. Nancy Adler helped translate intercultural insights into global leadership and management. She argued that leaders need more than technical skills; they need the ability to work across cultures in a way that creates “cultural synergy”—solutions that are better because they draw on multiple perspectives, not in spite of them.
Lionel Laroche brought an especially practical lens through his work in Canada. He focused on everyday misunderstandings between internationally trained professionals and Canadian employers: how to show initiative, how to talk about accomplishments, how to interpret feedback. His books and training helped both sides see that many “performance” issues are really cultural expectations issues.
The story then turns from “what cultures are like” to “how people grow.” Milton Bennett proposed that people move through stages in how they experience cultural difference. Early on, they may deny or defend against difference (“our way is the only normal way”). Over time, they can move toward accepting, adapting to, and even integrating multiple cultural perspectives. This developmental view is encouraging: intercultural sensitivity is not something you either have or lack—it’s something you can build.
Darla Deardorff added a process‑oriented model of intercultural competence that has been widely used in education and training. She highlighted three key pieces: attitudes (like curiosity and openness), knowledge and skills (like listening and perspective‑taking), and internal and external outcomes (such as flexibility and effective, respectful behaviour across cultures). Her work underlines a core message for practice: intercultural competence is not about memorizing facts about “other cultures,” but about cultivating capacities that you can apply in any new situation.
In Everyday Life
When we move, change jobs, or work with new kinds of people, we hit invisible rules: how direct to be, who speaks first, what “respect” looks like. It’s easy to misread others as rude or weak when they’re just following a different playbook.
We help people notice patterns, ask better questions, and stay curious instead of shutting down.
In Community
Today’s communities hold very different views on family, faith, gender roles, and public space. If we don’t talk about those differences, they harden into mistrust and “parallel lives.”
We help communities name tensions safely, create spaces where more people feel they belong, and balance fairness, safety, and respect for different ways of life.
In Our Organizations
In organizations, culture clashes show up as “communication problems” or “performance issues.” People share a meeting but not a message; strong staff leave; good intentions backfire.
We help organizations turn diversity into better decisions, give feedback people can use, and build teams where different kinds of people can cooperate and succeed.
As our communities, workplaces, and classrooms become more diverse, intercultural competence is no longer just for diplomats or people in multinational corporations—it’s something we all need in everyday life.
In this introductory workshop, we explore intercultural competence as an ongoing process of learning to communicate and act more effectively and appropriately across differences.
Participants will come with many different starting points—curiosity, skepticism, fatigue, or enthusiasm—and all of these are welcome in the room. Together, we will name our own “starting place,” unpack what intercultural competence actually means in simple terms, and identify small, realistic next steps that fit each person’s context. This session focuses on understanding the process of cultivating intercultural competence—internally and externally—as an intentional and incremental journey that continues long after the workshop ends.
By the end of this 3‑hour workshop, participants will be able to:
Format: 3‑hour interactive workshop.
In‑person or online.
Bring Intercultural Competence for an Everyday Diverse World to your team:
In a diverse group where people may feel resistant, tired, unsure, or eager, we create space for honest conversation about those reactions and how they shape our capacity to engage across difference.
This extended workshop goes beyond awareness and takes a deeper, more intentional approach to Intercultural practice, reflection, and meaningful interaction. We revisit the core components of intercultural competence (attitudes, knowledge, skills, internal outcomes, external outcomes) and then spend more time applying them to real-life situations in which the participants found themselves feeling incompetent.
By the end of this 6‑hour workshop, participants will be able to:
Format: 6‑hour interactive workshop.
In‑person or online.
Bring Internal Shifts and External Practice to your team:
Learn to Notice, Name, and Navigate culturally based conflicts in ways that protect dignity, reduce harm, and build genuine connection.
Participants will learn to:
Format: 3‑hour interactive workshop.
In‑person or online.
Bring N‑N‑N to your team:
How can your own faith tradition become a resource—not a barrier—for meeting people across cultural, religious, and worldview differences?
This in‑person workshop invites participants to draw on the “roots” of their faith of origin to build “bridges” of understanding and cooperation in a diverse, contested world.
Explore how core teachings, stories, and practices from a range of traditions (including Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Indigenous, and other communities) can nurture the attitudes, skills, and behaviours associated with intercultural competence.
Participants are not asked to leave their convictions at the door; instead, they are invited to stand more deeply in their own traditions in ways that open up, rather than shut down, relationships with others in difficult intercultural encounters
Format: In‑person
Bring Faith as a Path to Intercultural Competence to your community:
In every culture, everyday sayings quietly tell us what is “normal.” This interactive 3‑hour workshop to uncover the deep assumptions that shape how we work, relate, and make decisions across differences.
Participants will explore and compare how different cultures talk about time, work, and community. The session builds cultural self‑awareness, deep cultural knowledge, and sociolinguistic awareness in an accessible, low‑risk way.
Ideal for teams, boards, and community groups who want a practical starting point for more thoughtful, effective communication in diverse settings.
This 3‑hour session is about awareness and vocabulary. It’s ideal as a public‑facing or broad internal offering, or as Session 1 of a series.
Format: 3‑hour interactive workshop.
In‑person or online.
Bring Uncovering Cultural Assumptions to your team:
This full‑day workshop takes a deeper dive into how language reveals and can create opportunities to co-create culture.
Participants begin to see how different cultural logics collide in very concrete organizational situations (deadlines, feedback, safety decisions, who speaks in meetings) and how to deliberately open non‑defensive conversations about those collisions.
The 6‑hour session focuses on application and organizational culture change. It pushes into specific organizational domains and commitments.
Format: 6‑hour interactive workshop.
In‑person or online.
Bring Unlocking Deep Culture to your team:
A multi-session, practice-based program that helps staff surface and examine deep cultural assumptions and apply those insights to co‑creating a more inclusive, effective organizational culture.
IIC3 is inherently experiential, participatory, and scalable to different audience sizes and organizational challenges.
Session 1 – Foundations
Session 2 – Time, Work, and Productivity
Session 3 – Leadership, Authority, and Voice
Session 4 – Community, Conflict, and Belonging
Session 5 – Co‑Creating Organizational Culture
By the end of the series, participants will:
Bring IIC3 to your organization:
Abercrombie, Kelley. “Rural and Urban Alberta Are Not As Far Apart As We Think, We Just Need to Communicate.” The Advocate Winter 2025-2026, January 8, 2026. https://www.pialberta.org/the_advocate_winter_2025_2026.
Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary‑General
We want to help your organization or community create intercultural harmony.
Flexible hours to accommodate North America, UK, Ireland, Australia, and NZ.
