This question was at the heart of the ELEVATE contributions presented at the 6th Annual Global Forum 2026 of the World Council on Intercultural and Global Competence. The online Forum brought together researchers, educators, and practitioners from different parts of the world to explore how people, teams, and organizations can collaborate more constructively across differences.
As one of the leading partners of the Erasmus+ ELEVATE project, intercultures España & LATAM was represented by Anna Zelno, who contributed to the official ELEVATE project poster and presented an additional individual contribution inspired by the project’s methodology and transfer design approach.
Across the Forum, ELEVATE was visible through three connected contributions: the official project poster on the ELEVATE Transcultural Self-Assessment Tool, Anna Zelno’s presentation on a holistic approach to transcultural competence development, and an experiential role-play developed by Sameh Toumine, a new member of the intercultures and ELEVATE project environment. Together, these contributions showed how the ELEVATE framework is developing across three levels: the organization, the individual practitioner or leader, and the team in action.
1. From Cultural Awareness to Organizational Practice: The ELEVATE Transcultural Assessment
The first contribution presented the Transcultural Competence Self-Assessment Tool, developed within the Erasmus+ ELEVATE project, co-funded by the European Union.
Presenters:
- Anna Zelno, intercultures España & LATAM
- Naiara Arnaez, Mondragon Unibertsitatea
- Siv Bermeosolo Salterain, Mondragon Unibertsitatea
The tool responds to a recurring gap in organizational practice: cultural diversity is often treated as a communication issue to be “fixed”, instead of being understood as a structural and relational dimension of how organizations work.
Many interventions still focus mainly on individual awareness or sensitivity training. The ELEVATE Self-Assessment Tool takes a different perspective. It looks at the organization itself and asks how cultural diversity is embedded — or overlooked — in strategies, systems, processes, and everyday ways of working.
The assessment is structured around three key areas:
- Purpose
Why does the organization engage with cultural diversity in the first place? This lens helps surface the assumptions, values, and strategic intentions behind an organization’s approach.
- Processes
How does the organization design, decide, and govern? This area explores whether diversity is integrated into decision-making and organizational processes, or treated as an additional topic outside the core business.
- Everyday Practices
What actually happens in daily collaboration? This lens focuses on informal habits, rituals, communication patterns, and relational dynamics that either support or undermine inclusive ways of working.
These three areas are connected to a developmental journey with three stages:
- Recognize
teams become aware of the different perspectives they bring into the room — and also of the perspectives that may be missing. - Connect
The focus shifts to relational dynamics: what brings us together beyond our differences, and how can we build bridges that hold under pressure? - Elevate
The team moves towards co-creation, identifying concrete and actionable steps that would not have been possible individually.
The tool is designed to create impact in three ways: by building collective awareness, identifying blind spots, and embedding inclusive ways of working into the operational DNA of teams and organizations.
The central message is clear: transcultural competence is not a one-off training outcome. It emerges continuously through interaction, structures, and everyday practice.
2. A Holistic Approach to Transcultural Competence Development
In her individual presentation, Anna Zelno, representing intercultures España & LATAM and the Academy for Diversity & Innovation, explored how transcultural competence can be developed in a more integrated and sustainable way.
The presentation extended ELEVATE’s organisational and team-level perspective to the development of individual practitioners, facilitators, and leaders. The key argument was that sustainable transcultural competence cannot be built through awareness alone. It requires a holistic development path that works with the whole person. Anna proposed a framework connecting three dimensions:
- Meaning
Purpose, values, and needs: what gives direction to our engagement with diversity and difference. - Mind
Thinking, reflection, and metacognition: the ability to observe our own assumptions, patterns, and interpretations in real time. - Body
Embodiment, presence, and awareness: how we physically experience difference, tension, uncertainty, and relational openness.
This approach reflects a view of the learner as both individual and relational: shaped by the systems they work in, but also actively shaping those systems through their behaviour, decisions, and presence.
The presentation also connected this individual path to the organisational path developed within ELEVATE. At organisational level, transcultural learning focuses on three core areas:
- Self-awareness
- Trust
- Resilience and growth
These areas are deeply interconnected. Trust enables deeper self-awareness. Self-awareness helps teams respond to tension and difference more constructively. Resilience and growth allow teams to learn from friction instead of being blocked by it. Anna also highlighted the importance of transfer design: learning must be connected to real work, real decisions, and real collaboration challenges. Otherwise, it remains an inspiring training experience with limited organisational effect.
The holistic approach creates impact at four levels:
- Teams – better collaboration and stronger belonging
- Organisations – better retention, wellbeing, and performance
- Stakeholders – stronger relationships, trust, and cooperation
- Society – more inclusive behaviours beyond the workplace
One of the core messages of the presentation was:
Only an integrated facilitator can design and deliver integrated transcultural learning; only an integrated leader can build an integrated organisation where purpose, people, and practices align – Anna Zelno
3. The Team Assemblage Role-Play: A Posthuman Approach to Transcultural Competence in Teams
The third contribution, The Team Assemblage Role-Play™, was presented by Sameh Toumine, a new member of the intercultures and ELEVATE project environment.
The role-play was inspired by the ELEVATE project and developed in dialogue with Anna Zelno’s work on transcultural competence, team dynamics, and transfer-oriented learning design.
This experiential methodology invites teams to look at themselves not as a collection of fixed cultural identities, but as dynamic systems. In this view, team behaviour is shaped not only by individual personalities or cultural backgrounds, but also by roles, patterns, conditions, timing, pressure, tools, and the relational field between people.
The methodology is informed by three theoretical perspectives:
- Assemblage theory
A team is understood as a relational system made up of people, behaviours, tools, rules, and conditions. Outcomes emerge from the relationships between these elements. - Posthuman thinking
Cognition and action are not located only inside the individual. They are distributed across bodies, environments, technologies, and interactions. - Transcultural competence
Culture is not treated as a fixed identity that explains behaviour. It is one element in a dynamic and evolving system, continuously negotiated through interaction.
In the role-play, participants secretly receive behavioural role cards, while the group is also influenced by a visible condition card. The team then works through three stages:
- Stage 1 — Interaction
Participants act within the group while their hidden behavioural patterns influence the interaction. Friction is intentionally allowed to emerge. - Stage 2 — Diagnosis
Roles are revealed. The group analyses which patterns created friction under which conditions, and how stabilising roles could help the team reconfigure itself. - Stage 3 — Debrief
Participants reflect on the system as a whole, recognise their own place within it, and explore how different configurations could support better collaboration.
The role-play reframes team dysfunction as system misalignment rather than individual failure. Disagreement is not treated as a sign that something has gone wrong, but as information about how the team is currently configured.
This is an important shift. Effective collaboration does not begin with blaming or correcting individuals. It begins with recognising and reassembling the relational systems we are all part of.
Live multilingual platform (EN, ES, FR, DE, AR)
“To normalise dialogue, we need to normalise friction. Conflict in teams is not final or catastrophic — it is a sign that we need to begin talking about something we have been avoiding.” – Sameh Toumine
One shared direction
Seen together, the three contributions show a coherent direction for the ELEVATE project and for the work of intercultures in the field of transcultural competence.
The first contribution focused on the organisation: how structures, processes, and practices can support or block transcultural collaboration.
The second focused on the individual practitioner and leader: how deeper development requires integration of meaning, mind, and body.
The third focused on the team in action: how collaboration patterns emerge, stabilise, create friction, and can be reconfigured.
What connects all three is a shared refusal of quick fixes. Transcultural competence cannot be reduced to cultural tips, awareness sessions, or communication techniques. It requires work at structural, relational, and personal levels.
For intercultures, this is also the deeper promise of the ELEVATE project: to move transcultural competence from an abstract value into concrete organisational practice — and to support teams and leaders in building ways of working that are more inclusive, resilient, and effective.
We are grateful to the World Council on Intercultural and Global Competence for creating this space of exchange, and especially to Darla K. Deardorff for her ongoing leadership in the field. We also thank Luciana Lallaizon for the excellent moderation, Andrea Martínez-Celis, PhD, for her support in the preparation, and the whole team behind the Forum.
We leave the Forum with valuable conversations, new questions, and a stronger commitment to continue developing the next chapters of ELEVATE together.