When Dutch directness meets Arabic relationship-building, the friction is rarely about language. It is about pace and trust. The Dutch side wants the decision; the other side wants to know who they are deciding with first.
Neither is wrong. But a deal — or a program, or a partnership — stalls when each side reads the other through its own defaults. 'Yes, interesting' means very different things in Amsterdam and in Damascus.
The work of a bridge is to make the implicit explicit: to tell the Dutch partner why the relationship has to come before the contract, and to tell the other side exactly what the Dutch system needs and by when.
Done well, this is not soft work. It is the difference between an agreement that signs and one that quietly dies in the gap between two reasonable people.
Tamim Kbarh
Fractional executive in Haarlem, helping ambitious SMEs with operations, tax, growth, and grants. More about me.