There are more than 200 countries in the world and even more nations. The world is open now and at your work, during your business trips and studies or just through the Internet you can be involves in the multicultural communication. Someone thinks that for efficient conversation good communicational skills and language proficiency (usually, in English) are enough. However, it's not is easy. Knowing and minding the specificity of another culture is very important and in this case the Lewis model comes in handy.
According to the scientist, people from all over the world can be divided into 3 clear categories, based not on nationality or religion but on behaviour. He named this typologies as linear-active, multi-active and reactive. Here below I will show a picture, where features of every group are represented.
Linear-active. Usually it's representatives of English-speaking countries, including Scandinavia and Germanic countries.
Multi-active. The multi-actives are more scattered: Southern Europe, Mediterranean countries, South America, sub-Saharan Africa, Arab and other cultures in the Middle East, India and Pakistan and most of the Slavs.
Reactive. People who belong to this group usually live in all major countries in Asia, except the Indian sub-continent.
Now, when we are acquainted with all the groups, we can look at the triangle model.
Here we can see a scheme where most of the countries replaced according to their place in the certain group: linear-active, multi-active and reactive. As you can see, my country (Russia) is pretty far away from Finland. According to the table, Finns act more like people from linear active group and Russian people belong more to the multi-active. I don't need to see this model to understand that our nations are really different, but this scheme prove this fact as well. Finnish people are calmer and are used to doing everything taking their time, what sometimes make me crazy, because I am used to fast temp of life and it applies to every part of my life. For example, here in Finland the time of customer service is slow for me, but other people seem satisfied and don't mind waiting. In banks and fast food restaurants in my country customer services work much faster. In this way I really act like my group predicts, because in the table above you can read that one feature of multi-active cultures is impatience. Moreover, Finns are more reserved people while we, Russians, are more emotional. For example, it's not appropriate here for couples in love to kiss in the streets (at least, I have never seen this), and in Russia the demonstrations of romantic feeling while they don't cross the verges of reason :)
In addition, when I travelled to Finland, I saw some villages and small towns that looks dead even during the weekends - there are no people on the street, everything is closed. Here in Turku people don't hurry anywhere, their temp of life is haste-less and I can't understand it. Maybe it's because I'm living in a big city and used to large crowds of people who are always late for something or maybe it's because I am a typical representer of my cultural group and need things always whirl around :) Actually, I don't think it's bad to have so calm way of life, I even think that it's much better than feel nearly constant stress 😅, and maybe that is one of the reasons why Finland is the happiest country in the world :)
If you have problems with understanding someone from other culture, taking a look at this scheme will be a great help for you. It would help you to see clearer your differences, find something common and then define an intersection point, which, in its turn, would help you to build an efficient communication.
There is also a point to use this model in the multicultural setting. When at work or at studies in a team you have people from different countries, this scheme would help you to assign responsibilities according to what a person can do best - planning, organising, communication and so on. However, you should always remember, that if a person belongs to one of three cultural types, it doesn't mean s/he lacks some elements from other types. The question is which is the dominant.