There is a word in Japanese business that gets translated as consensus-building, which makes it sound like a meeting. It is not a meeting. It is the thing that happens before the meeting, and it comes from gardening.
Nemawashi means going around the roots. When a large tree is to be moved, the gardener does not dig it up on the day. Months before, they cut a circle around the root ball, trim the outer roots, and let the tree grow new fine roots inside the circle. By the time it is moved, it is ready to be moved, and the moving is almost nothing.
What it looks like at work
In a Japanese office, a proposal that will be decided in a meeting has usually been decided before it. Not in secret. In a series of short, individual conversations, each with one person who will be in the room, in which the idea is described, objections are heard, and the idea is adjusted. By the time the meeting happens, everyone has already said what they think, and the meeting is where the decision is recorded.
Western observers often find this frustrating, because the meeting looks like theatre. It is. The work was the nemawashi, and the nemawashi was where the tree grew the roots it would need.
Why it works
The reason is not politeness. It is that objections raised in a room, in front of others, are objections a person has to defend. Objections raised alone, to one person, are objections a person can change their mind about. Nemawashi gives everyone a place to be wrong in private, and so almost nobody has to be wrong in public.
The other reason is the adjustment. A proposal that has been through six conversations is a different proposal from the one that started. It has absorbed six sets of concerns. It is, by the time it reaches the meeting, the proposal that six people would have written together if they had been able to.
The practice, at any scale
The next time something needs deciding with more than two people, do not raise it in the group first.
Talk to each person alone, briefly, before. Describe the idea in a sentence. Ask what they would worry about. Do not defend. Write down what they said.
Adjust the idea with what was said. Then bring it to the group, already adjusted, and say who raised what.
The meeting will be short, and it will feel like a formality, because it is. The decision was made one root at a time.
What people notice
The first is that it takes more time before and less time after. The six conversations are twenty minutes each. The meeting that would have been an hour is ten. And the decision that would have been revisited three times is not revisited.
The second is that the objections are better alone. People say the real thing when there is nobody to perform for.
The third is that the word applies at home. Moving house, changing a plan, anything with more than one person in it. Go around the roots first.
Where this fits
Kaizen is small improvement, repeated. Muda is the seven wastes. Nemawashi is the practice that comes before both, in any decision involving other people: prepare the ground, and the moving is almost nothing.
A free seven-day log. The Kaizen Friction Log is a seven-day log for the friction that shows up most. Nemawashi is the same noticing, applied before a decision instead of after. You get it by email, free. → Get the free log
Continue Reading
This article is part of a series exploring Japanese philosophy and intentional living: