visualisation

Giving a presentation in Japan? Think about sending it in advance

In previous articles in this series I have given a couple of tips regarding making presentations and proposals to Japanese customers or colleagues. One was on the usefulness of “visualisation” – trying to capture what you are saying in graphics. The other point I made was that presenting or pitching proposals in a Japanese context is like a maths exam – you have to show your working out, not just the conclusion, to get full marks.

The third piece of advice I have about presentations and pitches, especially if you are going to do them in English, is to send the documents in advance. You may think this detracts from the appeal of a presentation, but if your audience includes people who are not comfortable with English, prefer group based decision making and don’t like taking risks, then you are likely to be greeted by deafening silence when you ask for their go-ahead or if there are any questions. I’m not saying all Japanese corporate people fit this description but I have heard enough stories to suggest that it is worth making the effort to send your presentation ahead, if you can.

It may also be a good idea to send more than the slides. One group of British research scientists told me how when they first had a joint meeting with their Japanese counterparts, they presented their results using all the slideware tricks to make it as stimulating as possible. But when they asked for questions, their Japanese colleagues simply sat there – nodding, but silent.

The next time they met, the British scientists sent their Japanese colleagues not just the slides but also all the data, two weeks in advance. This time, when they asked for questions, everybody’s hand shot up. The Japanese scientists had not only been able to translate any of the English they did not understand, but probably also crunched the data themselves and, I suspect, had a discussion, maybe even allocating questions to each other.

I told this story to a rueful European marketing director of a Japanese electronics company the other day. He had told me that on his appointment, he was invited to Japan to meet with the President of the company. Being a marketing director he of course put together a slide presentation on his strategy for Europe. When he arrived at the Tokyo headquarters for his meeting, he was asked to wait, as the President was with a customer. Finally, 45 minutes late, he went in to see the President. The President apologized profusely for keeping him waiting and then said unfortunately another customer was coming in 15 minutes. “We ended up drinking tea and talking about the weather and I never showed my presentation” the marketing director told me. If he had sent the presentation in advance, it probably would have been picked up by the President’s executive assistant, who would have translated it, summarised it and even suggested questions for the President to ask. At least then they could have talked about more than the weather.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.  This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.

Visualisation – I see what you mean

We’re just starting the process of selling our home and looking for a new house here in the UK, and I have been struck by how showing layouts of a house and listing its total floor space is still a relatively new trend in Britain. In Japan it would be unthinkable to give particulars of a house or flat without also providing a floor plan and an estimate of how many square meters or jo, number of tatami mats, the floor space is.

I don’t think this is just because land space is so precious in Japan. I think it is related to a general Japanese preference for visualisation over text. It’s well known that Toyota Motor Corp., for example, promotes problem visualisation in its factories. In other words, don’t just have an alarm that sounds or a printout that indicates a problem; make sure there is some visual control or graphic display of the problem.

Toyota also has a policy of using A3-size paper for its reports on problem solving or proposals, which have a visual storyline of interlinked boxes, that relieve people from having to read densely typed 20-page memos.

Visualisaton isn’t about oversimplifying problems; it is about condensing a problem and often conveying quite a lot of information or logic without spelling it all out in words. I think the ability to convey rich detail in a graphic form originates from the use of kanji, the Chinese ideograms that are sometimes obviously derived from the thing they are meant to represent – trees, mountains, rivers – or can be broken down into components which represent concepts from which a meaning can be deduced. For example “speech” plus “true” = “evidence”.

The preference for visualisation can lead to cross-cultural communication snafus. Japanese PowerPoint presentations have a tendency to be so densely packed with graphics full of tiny text that squinting Westerners start to yearn for white spaces and a maximum of five bullet points per slide. If you add an allergy to long paragraphs of English to a preference for visuals, it’s no wonder many lengthy English reports and emails are left unread by Japanese recipients.

It’s not just written communication where problems occur. Whilst Americans and the British may be happy to yak away in a teleconference, the chances are that Japanese person lost the thread way back, and is wondering what the canteen lunch special is.

So what to do? Obviously, when presenting an idea or showing a problem to Japanese people, try to use visuals – bar charts, pie charts and so on. Even trying to sketch your idea on a piece of paper or a whiteboard as you talk can be of help. I have heard that teleconferences that have a web based visual component – slides or a spreadsheet that can be pointed at – work much better when there are Japanese participants than pure voice or visuals of ‘talking heads’.

So, the next time you need to make a proposal to a Japanese person, see if you can draw it first.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.  This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.