Weather, Family and So On...

In 1986 I traveled to Italy for a week of business meetings, 2 or 3 major gatherings each day with time to chat in between with individual colleagues. My Spanish fluency, along with some Italian lessons had made my ability to communicate in the local language passable though certainly not impeccable.

Over the first few days I noticed that some of the meetings were held in English while other times the main discussion was in Italian. Different moderators were involved with the various meetings and it wasn’t at all obvious to me how it was decided to conduct the meeting in one language or the other. Eventually I took aside one of the Italian engineers and asked if he understood the system.

He chuckled and explained that prior to each formal meeting the moderator would engage the first people to arrive in casual conversation about the local weather and the weather back where any visitors resided. If time allowed, such discussion would expand to compare notes on family, trading comments about who had children of what ages and how they had recently demonstrated their precocious brilliance.

I had, of course, participated in these informal conversations but it seemed so natural and uncontrived that I hadn’t given it much thought. According to my local expert, however, the moderator was consciously switching the chatting back and forth from English to Italian. Meanwhile he was evaluating the Italian and English proficiency of the people sitting around the table.

He then decided which language should be the primary language and set the tone of the meeting by starting off the formal introductions using the language he chose based on the fluency of the participants. Sometimes I look back on those meetings and wish that all human communications problems could be solved in such a subtle, simple and effective manner.