Blogs and Articles from Third Way Forum Membrs

・ The manufacturing culture in Japan taught the Japanese people to make no mistake, be accurate and precise all the time. As a result, many Japanese tend to be risk averse to assure quality and also conflict averse to build consensus with colleagues.

・ This tendency of risk averseness and conflict averseness has made the Japanese people well prepare for everything in advance, and they often over-prepare as well.

・ The degree of preparation is determined by what is expected as perceived by the person preparing. Quite often perfection is expected in many Japanese business scenes. But depending on the definition of perfection, the degree of preparation will differ. As perfection is often defined as the top notch level of perfection by default in Japan, people tend to over-prepare.

・ Also, a lot of over-preparation is observed for meetings. It is understandable that people over-prepare for a board meeting in order to get approval smoothly by making all sorts of pre-negotiations and lobbying efforts before the official meeting. In many Japanese companies, however, even in a normal meeting a lot of over-preparation is happening. For instance, a copy of a thick slide deck stapled together in a fine paper with a cup of tea in front of every participant although the same slides are shown on the screen and nobody is taking the deck with them after the meeting.

・ This kind of over-preparation happens mostly because of the consideration culture of Japan to be inclusive and mindful of others who may not follow the discussion, or may not be able to see the screen well etc and may want to read the deck later.

・ Another reason is because many Japanese people do not want to get questions in the meeting in fear of not being able to answer properly. So they want to include all the possible questions and answers beforehand in the deck. Often the person who is presenting is not necessarily the same person as the person who has prepared the document. A junior person often prepares the deck for the boss. So the person prepared wants to make sure that all the answers are in the deck so that the boss will not be publicly embarrassed.

・ This kind of all pre-arranged and perfectly prepared meeting is ok just as a formal meeting, but it does not function as a real meeting for discussion. So it is very important to communicate the purpose of the meeting. If the purpose of the meeting is a formal approval ceremony, the well-prepared arrangement may be helpful. But if the purpose is to have real discussion, such a preparation should not be necessary. It kills the purpose.

・ The manufacturing based culture is no longer suitable for today’s fast-paced and uncertain business world. Also, digitalization, automation and remote working practice are drastically changing the way we work. Surely, paper-based physical over-preparation activities are much reduced by now. However, even if the physical over-preparation work may be reduced, the people’s mindset is still not changing fast enough. While the slide set are all digital, still people send the stapled hardcopy print out decks to the client office just in case someone may want it. It is a total waste of time and effort and also paper!

・ Younger people are welcoming the new trend fast and no longer over-preparing so much. But as the flip side of the coin, they sometimes under-prepare and accuracy is not as good as before.

・ Leaders need to clearly communicate the expectation and the purpose of each meeting and activity so that nobody will waste time and energy on unnecessary over-preparation any more while they understand when and how very good preparation should be done.