In multi-national teams, English is usually indispensable as a common working language.
It is easy to assume that most misunderstandings could be avoided if the level of English was only good enough on all sides.
In my experience, however, a real risk remains, and it is less about wrong word choice than about the different interpretation of terms that everyone is using.
Words like "agility", "risk/reward", "innovation", "escalation", or even "compromise" are understood very differently across business cultures.
A case in point:
In one project, the word "compromise" was used by a US team to convince colleagues at HQ in Japan to accelerate the rollout of a new software solution.
"Surely, we can find a compromise to speed it up."
To the colleagues at HQ in Japan, however, this sounded like an implicit request to make a few compromises on their internal processes, which could ultimately affect product quality as well. For Japan, this was of course completely unacceptable.
One of JCO's core recommendations is that all parties have an early discussion to either agree on a shared definition of key terms, or at the very least acknowledge that interpretations may differ and require further clarification.
A final note: JCO facilitates many global workshops (e.g. across APAC, Americas or EMEA) where the same dynamic applies.
In short, good English skills are no guarantee for mutual understanding.
