• Explains how people or groups tend to think and feel about cultural difference
  
  
• Is the basis for effective coaching and development to work more effectively with people from other cultural backgrounds

DMIS was created by Dr. Milton Bennett. It is based on years of direct observation and research. DMIS provides a structure for understanding how people experience cultural difference. Six stages of perspectives describe how a person sees, thinks about, and interprets events happening around them from an intercultural-difference perspective.

Since DMIS indicates what a person sees and thinks, it also suggests what they do not see or think. DMIS, therefore, highlights how a person’s cultural patterns both guide and limit their experience of cultural difference.

This guiding and limiting aspect is why DMIS is so relevant to how people work together in the workplace. Working with people involves communicating with them individually or in teams or groups. DMIS theory says that cultural sensitivity and cultural differences represent a potential obstacle or benefit in developing relationships and communicating effectively with other people. DMIS is central to productivity, innovation, and creativity!

The six stages of DMIS, illustrated below, represent a set of perspectives with successively greater ability to understand and have a more complete experience of cultural difference.

Briefly, some characteristics of each stage are:

• Denial. Being comfortable with the familiar. Not anxious to complicate life with “cultural differences”. Not noticing much cultural difference around you. Maintaining separation from others who are different.
  
  
• Defense. A strong commitment to one’s own thoughts and feelings about culture and cultural difference. Some distrust of cultural behavior or ideas that differ from one’s own. Aware of other cultures around you, but with a relatively incomplete understanding of them and probably fairly strong negative feelings or stereotypes about some of them.
  
  Reversal is the opposite of Defense. The person feels that some other culture is better and tends to exhibit distrust of their own culture.
  
  
• Minimization. People from other cultures are pretty much like you, under the surface. Awareness that other cultures exist all around you, with some knowledge about differences in customs and celebrations. Not putting down other cultures. Treating other people as you would like to be treated.
  
  
• Acceptance. Aware of your own culture(s). See your own culture as just one of many ways of experiencing the world. Understanding that people from other cultures are as complex as yourself. Their ideas, feelings, and behavior may seem unusual, but you realize that their experience is just as rich as your own. Being curious about other cultures. Seeking opportunities to learn more about them.
  
  
• Adaptation. Recognizing the value of having more than one cultural perspective available to you. Able to “take the perspective” of another culture to understand or evaluate situations in either your own or another culture. Able to intentionally change your culturally based behavior to act in culturally appropriate ways outside your own culture.
  
  
• Integration. To varying extents, have integrated more than one cultural perspective, mindset, and behavior into one’s identity and worldview. Able to move easily among cultures.