No questions please, we are in Finland

Afew years ago, I found myself in Helsinki. In November. For the uninitiated, Helsinki is a cold, damp, dark, cloudy and depressing city even in summer. In winter, it’s cold, damp, dark, cloudy and depressing two times over and it also rains like crazy. It also rains in summer but winter rain is more cruel. The sun rises like a hungover college graduate at 10 am in the morning and after a few lazy attempts at doing its work (providing nourishing sunshine), it gives up and goes back to sleep by 3.30 pm. And while it’s struggling to provide some light, the clouds decide to be all nasty and, in the words of an uncle of mine, demonstrate how nature attends its own call. So it was amidst all this gloominess that I found myself in the capital of Finland. Ten minutes in Helsinki is enough to explain why the Finns have a fondness for a particularly violent form of Metal music — quite unique to this region. It’s almost a plaintive cry of joy while marooned in an ocean of  depression.

I was there on business and I had to give a two-hour presentation on some arcane IT topics to a local company. The Finns arrived on the dot and promptly proceeded to put their phones on silent.

Having attended thousands of ‘cross-cultural nuances’ and ‘presentation skills’ training sessions back in India, I kept doing the “Do you have any questions? Stop and ask me any time” thing every 10 minutes or so, and after the third or fourth time I said it, I started noticing several folks in the audience fidgeting nervously.

I didn’t quite understand what was happening. I paused and again asked if they had any doubts or questions. The fidgeting became even more pronounced and there were some muted murmurs in the audience. And when I say muted, I mean, practically zero volume. Finns scream only in Death metal concerts. In regular life, they mumble at volumes that Labrador retrievers would have trouble hearing. Sometimes I imagine Viking hordes invaded places and mumbled in a low monotone.

Eventually the locals got so tired of not being able to hear that they simply gave up and let the Vikings pillage and loot. But we digress. Back to the nervous fidgeting in the conference room.
I looked around in confusion and eventually did the most logical thing a consultant does when in hot water. I called for a coffee break. As people went about relieving themselves with concentrated shots of caffeine, I asked the senior most chap in the room if there was a problem. He said yes, quite gravely. He explained that culturally, Finns don’t ask questions in the middle of a presentation. It is more appropriate, he advised, to publish a mobile phone number to which participants SMS questions during a session. The presenter usually answers them at the end in one shot. Apparently, they don’t like embarrassing themselves by speaking in broken English in a large audience. No cross cultural training session ever taught me that.