Bad habits and biases, a newbie’s observations on design thinking in Japan (Pt 1): Building trust
What working in a completely different culture made me realise about my own behaviour.
Introduction
I moved to Japan six months ago and it’s been a continuous education that has grown and changed me and my world views. During the first few months I was invited to observe training sessions that focused on teaching design thinking to beginners — these were adults in a large company with little or no design experience. It was a brilliant experience. I implicitly understood the content because I have taught this topic to multiple students, colleagues and clients, but because I couldn’t understand the spoken words, I had to focus on the physical behaviours and interactions of the students and teachers. This led to new insights, some familiar to me, some from a fresh point of view, and some completely new to me. All of them will help me become a better teacher.
I decided to share these observations and insights with others, but please no hate mail; this is my opinion and only based on observations of a small sample — not to be taken as a sweeping generalisation of a country and its people. I also expect to change and develop these ideas and my viewpoint the longer I spend here and the more I learn, but there is a usefulness to observation made with the naivety of a newcomer that I wanted to capture and share.
Thank you for reading, I am not sure who will find this useful or even interesting but the audience I had in mind when writing was the person who wants to start working in design in Japan or to work with Japanese clients for the first time. I will state again that these workshops were with people who had no design experience, were complete beginners and not clients.
I began writing this and realised it’s a bit long to read in one go (TL/DR), So I am serving it up in more manageable bites.
Part 1: Trust and the importance of clear structure and instruction
In Western society, we often don’t spend enough time setting expectations and clearly explaining what will happen in workshops. The outcome is that those of us who are on the more introverted or anxious end of the spectrum can feel uncomfortable and automatically yield the floor to more dominant personalities. Expectation-setting is carefully considered in Japan and this ends up being far more inclusive to the shyest members of a group.
For example, by asking for volunteers to speak or saying “who’s next?” when sharing with each other, can create unnecessary discomfort and stress (this is when the session is in Japanese, if the session is in English people may be additionally stressed by shame around imperfect English). Instead, I found giving specific instruction works better: “We will stand in a circle, I will go first and then pass the mic to the person on my left who will speak next, then they will pass the mic to the person on their left to speak next”. It’s also important to demonstrate what will happen, as people take in the instruction in different ways. Stricter rules and well-set expectations help all participants to predict when they will need to speak and prepare themselves – this starts to reduce the disparity between introverts and extroverts.
I noticed that when giving instructions around an activity or exercise, clearly telling people when they should begin the exercise and when to stop working was important, saying to participants that they had five minutes to do a task was not explicit enough. When I discussed this point with a colleague he laughed and said he observes this in most workshops globally — I’ll be paying extra attention to this going forward! Often, my work requires me to dwell in ambiguity for a considerable amount of time and this has bled into places where it’s less helpful. Theneed for clarity here is helping me focus on being less vague again.
A study into trust in the UK versus Japan has shown that Japanese people appear generally less trusting than Westerners towards strangers (and I am fairly strange in most situations – not just in Japan). This means building trust with participants is more difficult and gives facilitators a significant challenge in creating an environment where trust is key to learning.
This discovery was found to be strengthened if the Japanese doubted that they shared any interpersonal links with the strangers in question. So, a great way to begin sessions is to find common ground and build those all-important interpersonal links though activities. The most important way to ensure you don’t destroy what little trust you have managed to build is not to spring surprises on your participants early on. Surprising people includes things like unexpectedly asking them to do something publicly. I found doing this meant that participant (and everyone else who witnessed it) would stop trusting me.
Learning in any country means being somewhat uncomfortable – you need to push people out of their comfort zone, but not so hard you break their trust. I am becoming more aware that what reduces trust here can be different from that in Western cultures. For example, asking someone to tap another person on the shoulder during a game forces a physical interaction that many Japanese people find inappropriate. This has given me pause to consider that as our teams across the globe become more culturally diverse, perhaps we should all be much more aware of individuals’ comfort levels with physical intimacy and consent? I don’t know the answer, but we need to find a way to work to maintain informed consent and still effectively interact with each other.
Precise instruction and structure also applies to all details of a workshop or learning session, including details like what stationery is used for what activity. The complexity of meanings behind the every detail in Japanese culture is multifaceted and it also ensures that if you use random colours, materials, shapes or other representations, people will question the meaning behind your choice (you should have a reason or you look unprepared — and this certainly won’t increase trust!).
If you see somebody using the ‘wrong’ piece of stationery do not say anything directly to them but rather remind the whole group “Please remember to use the felt tip pens to write on sticky notes – this makes documentation easier.” This works because it’s an instruction plus reasoning that is generalised and does not draw attention to the person making the ‘mistake’. It’s best to focus on reminding, reinforcing and rewarding great behaviour and not drawing attention to behaviour you want to discourage. This is true of all workshops globally, however, in Western workshops, I use this much more to discourage participants from derailing the tasks at hand with individual agendas or attention-seeking behaviour.
Trust can also be gained by breaking activities into much smaller steps than I might previously have used for an Australian or European audience. Smaller steps increase the likelihood that participants will be willing to take them and this naturally increases their confidence in my ability to lead a workshop. Simplifying things can reduce the nuance, but what you lose is more than compensated by the increased confidence and participation. Each step should be clearly explained and demonstrated with examples to further boost participaction. Reflecting on this adjustment, I realised I should use this approach to activities in all workshops globally. I believe that there is a significant benefit to making learning and workshops more accessible to a wider community – this approach is more inclusive to participants for a variety of reasons (e.g. neurodivergence, participation in a second language etc.) and I will be incorporating it from now on.
All this talk about trust has left me wondering, in our post-truth world where the Secretary General of the UN talks about a global “Trust Deficit Disorder”: how aware are you of the signals you’re giving to others that you’re trustworthy — and are you living up to them?
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I hope you have enjoyed reading my newbie observations about Design Thinking teaching and workshops in Japan. This series will be published weekly.
Thank you to the teachers and participants who generously allowed me to join their learning. I apologise if I have misrepresented you in any way in this article, and for inflicting my terrible Japanese on you. Also to my patient colleagues from many places who have read, critiqued and corrected my writing over a far too long period; thank you. All the mistakes are certainly mine.
ありがとうございました
