Adaptive Readiness for Culture: The ARC Model of Cultural Competence

Adaptive Readiness for Culture or ARC is a model of cultural competence developed by Drs. Louise Rasmussen and Winston Sieck of Global Cognition, first published in 2015.

The 12 competencies described in ARC are readily applicable to helping people navigate cultural differences in a wide range of education and workplace settings, such as cross-cultural management, international human resource management, government diplomatic efforts, and study abroad. Nevertheless, research and development funding for Adaptive Readiness for Culture has primarily stemmed from the U. S. Department of Defense (DOD).

The DOD interest in understanding and promoting cultural competence has followed from the fact that the readiness requirements for military and civilian national security personnel have been changing for some time. As the United States endeavors to retain authority and influence in an increasingly globalized security environment, efforts to build strategic relationships with foreign nations via joint exercises and through resource, training, and security assistance transactions have been intensifying. The short- and long-term success of such efforts hinges on a multiplicity of human exchanges that take place at all levels of government and command.

The time when the task of developing and maintaining professional relationships across cultural divides fell solely to liaison officers and diplomats is no longer. It’s becoming increasingly important that all personnel regardless of service, rank, and job specialty have at least a basic ability to quickly develop understanding of and interact effectively with people in other cultures. Researchers in the DOD referred to the set of capabilities that ensure global readiness to work and form professional relationships with foreign populations and partners from any region or culture as Cross-Cultural Competence (3C).

In the early 2000s, the Defense Language and National Security Education Office (DLNSEO) commissioned a program to define a competency model that describes 3C for the whole of the DOD. A competency model is a human resource tool that describes the behaviors that lead to successful performance on a job. To effectively guide practice, competency models must describe behaviors job holders can meaningfully engage in to meet or exceed their organization’s goals.

Sieck and Rasmussen were awarded contracts from DLNSEO to develop a 3C model based on cognitive field studies involving DOD personnel who have successfully engaged across cultures as part of their jobs. Complimentary research efforts conducted by these cognitive scientists were sponsored by agencies such as AFRL, ARI, ARL, UK MoD, ONR, and OSD. Those research studies further informed and influenced ARC model development.

In the initial DLNSEO studies, Rasmussen and Sieck conducted cognitive task analysis interviews with personnel who had significant experience working and engaging with foreign populations or military partners across cultures. These personnel had served overseas in high contact roles more than twice in different regions in the world and had been nominated as effective by either peers or supervisors. The researchers elicited critical incidents from the practitioners about their experiences engaging with others across cultures, and analyzed them to identify the cultural competencies.

Rasmussen and Sieck first developed an initial model based on a sample of Army and Marine Corps personnel.They then tested its applicability across the Total Force using a larger, DOD representative sample. This sample included military personnel from all four services across the enlisted-officer spectrum, both general purpose as well as specialized personnel such as Foreign Area Officers, Special Forces, and Intelligence professionals, as well as civilians working in national security.

The resulting model of 3C, Adaptive Readiness for Culture (ARC), defines the core skills, knowledge, and behaviors that are significant contributors to success within all DOD jobs that require cross-cultural interaction. It has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, as well as service journals. Although the competencies are currently described with military adopters in mind, the underlying cognitive skills and knowledge apply to all manner of cross-cultural interactions.

Adaptive Readiness for Cultural (ARC) Competencies

Once the ARC competencies were defined, further empirical research was sponsored by DLNSEO to determine levels of mastery for each of the competencies. Carefully established mastery levels enable Adaptive Readiness for Culture to better support 3C instructional design, as well as 3C assessment.

To derive empirically-supported mastery levels, the Global Cognition research team conducted scenario-based interviews with personnel who had varying degrees of cross-cultural experience. Experience ranged from participants who had never been overseas, to those who had spent more than a decade working abroad in a variety of regions across the world. The scenarios, which were based on critical incidents elicited in previous interviews, described  culturally challenging engagements with local partners and populations set in locations all around the world. Sieck and Rasmussen identified the knowledge and skills that distinguish levels of mastery for each ARC competency by comparing responses to these challenging situations from personnel at different stages of 3C development.

Expanding Adaptive Readiness for Culture to include empirically defined levels of mastery provides trainers and instructional designers a basis for deciding which are the most important knowledge and skills to cover for their specific learner audiences in the time they have available. By linking specific knowledge and skills to levels of 3C mastery, ARC also provides a foundation for developing assessments to determine individual competence and training program effectiveness, helping organizations determine the most effective ways to advance 3C.

Beyond research investigations, ARC has been implemented for practical application at several organizations. DLNSEO used Adaptive Readiness for Culture to establish guidelines for 3C education, training and assessment strategies across the DOD in DODI 5160.70: Management of the Defense Language, Regional Expertise, and Culture (LREC) Program. ARSOF and DLI have also worked with Global Cognition to incorporate ARC into their LREC development programs.

If you’re interested in learning more about Adaptive Readiness for Culture and hearing some of the many stories we heard in our interviews, check out Save Your Ammo: Working Across Cultures for National Security.