Intercultural contact is about being exposed to the unfamiliar and then having to decide to accommodate the new experience or to resist it. There are threats and opportunities both ways. The celebration of difference or diversity, without a prior process of engagement with the experience of strangeness, may lead to the appearance of bridge-building but restore by another name the divisions it was intended to overcome. There have been some particularly spectacular if painful intercultural confrontations that have occurred in different parts of the world. It is at the point of dissonance (which can be explosive) that leadership in multicultural societies where sensing, observing, reflecting and anticipating is at the same time both difficult but can be fundamentally creative.