De Baak on Curacao
The challenge of learning from each other
By Petra Baars
Promoting entrepreneurship
Over to De Baak program maker Nynke Sikkema: “Twice a year we organize three-day sessions with a variety of workshops for people working in Curacao. We also organize round tables attended by key local personalities. That package allows us to offer a knowledge-sharing platform. During a recent meeting like that on Curacao we decided to organize a competition for business people. New Venture is a proven concept in the Netherlands: entrepreneurs can enter the competition by submitting a good business plan and they get help in the process. The purpose is to stimulate entrepreneurship in the Netherlands. Participants also thought it was more than time to run it in Curacao. De Baak, in co-operation with the NRC quality daily newspaper, finally ran a program in March with ten Dutch participants: Balance in Work that matched reflection with recharging."
Where the market for learning is different
Nynke Sikkema explains that Curacao's learning market is different from the Netherlands. “It's an island. In your face feedback to your colleagues will get you into difficulties. You'll bump into him or her again within the hour or that person is married to a family member. So you take good care to avoid confrontation. I see that participants like talking to a coach, somebody who's neutral and whom they can tell what they really think and what they want to learn."
More decision-making
"The culture at work is another point of difference: Curacao is more hierarchical than the Netherlands. That means that people are slower to take initiatives. One participant at a training session once put that beautifully: ‘what’s needed is more people who take part in solving problems and taking decisions.' You see that Dutch entrepreneurs coming to Curacao rack up major successes right from the start. They don't bother with the structures in place. Sometimes it hurts to see how history seems to repeat itself time and time again. There is also quite an outflow of fairly ambitious local people leaving for the US, that's kind of round the corner, and to the Netherlands. That leaves an effect on the island.”
Communication remains the challenge
“Local people on Curacao are far more intuitive than the Dutch,” says Ms. Sikkema. “They're attuned to how you express yourself, to your mood. We Dutch are much more cerebral. But there’s also a macho culture. People can get wound up pretty quickly. It's fairly subtle, and you need to keep a careful eye on it. It's precisely that difference in culture that makes it interesting for us to do business on Curacao. It is a way of getting involved in the intercultural experience and jointly drawing lessons from that. There's a great variety of ethnic groups living on the island, and the island itself is a cooperative arrangement bridging many different cultures. What's the right way to respond? The most striking example is that everybody speaks Dutch there, but they're far from always understanding each other as things fall through the gaps between the cultures. And that's something you have to cope with. It's an excellent laboratory for how to do that as a group, communicating."
Ms. Sikkema is satisfied with de Baak's successes on Curacao. “More and more companies on the island are showing an interest in our workshops. That fits into our efforts to be part of a multicultural society at the international level and to promote this amongst others. We're also arranging a similar 3-day workshop session in Istanbul and trip abroad modules are built into various other programs.”
www.debaak.nl/curacao