Professor Takafumi Nakamura Of Daito Bunka University On How to Go Beyond Your Comfort Zone to Grow Both Personally and Professionally

…challenge as much as you can, and share the lessons you learn from doing so. Making sure that you are not accepting ordinary processes will lead to new finds for innovative new strategies, maybe a few you’ve learned from others. And if you’re doing the first three, sharing these ideas with others will not only lead to your ideas strengthening but invite others to share their ideas with you too.

I had the pleasure of interviewing, Takafumi Nakamura. He is a Special Appoint Professor of Management at Daito Bunka University and renowned for his research in risk management. He has a doctoral degree in science from Tokyo Institute of Technology and a master’s in management from McGill University. He was a Principal IT architect with Fujitsu, member of their board and President of the System Support Promotion Unit in Fujitsu Fsas Inc. He has over thirty years’ experience in ICT infrastructure architecture in Japanese, Australian as well as EMEA market.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I was always very introverted as a child; I was very much lost in books and studies and actually loved science.

I spent the majority of my childhood in Hiroshima, where I went to school also. A lot of my free time was spent playing baseball with other children from the nearby Korean community, but because of a US military base that was local to us there was also a few Americans in the city.

In junior high school, I practiced Kendo, a Martial Art from Japan. This is actually something took back up, about 10 years ago, because it helps me reset my mind which is very important for both my work and my health.

I went to university at Kyoto University, where I studied physics in the Faculty of Science, mainly theoretical physics, and was fascinated by the way quantum mechanics helped me understand the world.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Anything to do with Philosophy in Action; to not only understand the world, but drive for positive change. Henry Mintzberg, who founded the IMPM programme is a great advocate of this — in the world of management, we often create hypotheses and model them to look at society, seeking to change it into a desirable form.

It is very similar to living between what we know as Paralysis by Analysis and Extinction by Instinct. The former is to be so in-depth on theory, that we forget to act. The later, to act with no philosophical backing.

The way we operate between theory and practice defines everything we do. I think In Japan, we are very good at taking action, fixing problems when necessary, but we often challenge the philosophy on which our actions are based. And yet, we are all defined by it! If we don’t change our mindsets, and how we look at the world, then it is no doubt that problems continuously reoccur.

This was actually one of the bases for my book, entitled A Meta-system Approach to Overcome System Failures. It’s about examining how we analyse and fix engineering problems (the methods, and approach we take is just as important as the solution) as well as the problems that arise from our own, human activity.

Is there an event that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

As part of my previous role at Fujitsu, I undertook the International Master’s Program for Managers (IMPM), to bring back lessons to the company. The IMPM is a program set across business schools in Japan, India, Canada, the UK and France (although now the French module is held in Brazil), aimed at providing a new perspective on business management beyond traditional management studies. An important part of this is managerial exchange. They teach the course in 5 different mindsets — reflective, analytical, collaborative, worldly and action.

Through these mindsets, I met and shadowed a director at British Telecoms for two weeks. I was amazed at how she managed a team of 500 people, many of who were older than her.

The age structure was different from that of my team, and indeed most teams in Japan.

What also struck me was the way the team was organized in a networked management style, rather than a command-and-control style. It was really impressive, and different to what I was used to.

By watching her management style, I began to look at my own through her eyes, through her lens, and this led me to then being an advocate for taking a birds-eye, or meta, view to management and processes.

It really changed my life — four years later, I decided to pursue a PhD researching exactly this. And now, I’m a specially appointed professor at Daito Bunka University of project management and management engineering.

It’s interesting to reflect on how my time as a participant of the IMPM now impacts the responsibility I feel for my students. I get to interact with many diverse and interesting participants — business leaders of today, and of the future.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Let’s start with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. What does “getting outside of your comfort zone” mean?

In my line of work, from my research to my own professional background, getting out of your comfort zone means one thing — changing normal processes. It means creating hypotheses and models to change the activities we focus on into their best forms, and analysing them not only from our own viewpoint but through the lens of others. This can only be done through collaboration.

This is a nice answer, but not an easy process — it strenuous and difficult. It can most definitely be uncomfortable.

Can you help articulate a few reasons why it is important to get out of your comfort zone?

Very simply, there can be no development or improvement without challenging the norm, or what we are comfortable with. Being comfortable is not the environment for progress.

What I learnt on the IMPM is that all of our solutions come from a cumulation of our own background. In Lancaster, UK, they teach the Reflective Mindset and we really dived deep into how we think about the problems we face in business — the roots of our leadership. Understanding from others their roots and the solutions they lead highlights ways to challenge our own reality and our own norms.

We have many problems in Japan, many not unique to us: an ageing society, widening wealth inequality, securing sustainable energy to name just three. To understand how others not only solve but think about solving these problems can challenge our own solutions, what we are comfortable with, and lead to much greater innovation.

Is it possible to grow without leaving your comfort zone? Can you explain what you mean?

I don’t think so — no. Leaving your comfort, challenging yourself and undertaking something that is uncomfortable inevitably forces growth, whether professional, personal or both.

When we learn from others, we are learning from different worlds, different experiences. Just attaining this knowledge is a form of growth — you become exposed to ideas and solutions you would not have done before.

Can you share some anecdotes from your personal experience? Can you share a story about a time when you stepped out of your comfort zone and how it helped you grow? How does it feel to take those first difficult steps?

When I went back to working at Fujitsu, as a software manager, after my time on the IMPM, I sought to change the method of measuring our KPIs so that we were really focusing on the most essential and important targets. I wanted to do this so that we were not being blinded by the non-essential, but instead focused on what was most important to our work.

This was not an easy task, and it took courage to continuously highlight to others why more KPIs and more targets were not going to lead us to better business. Sometimes in business, targets (no matter how reachable) can become comfortable to be around — ‘the paralysis by analysis’ that was highlighted in the Analytical mindset at McGill University. The module pushes us to really include people management and our organizational behavior when making decisions; using data to form analysis that goes above and beyond just simple techniques.

We go beyond simply teaching techniques for analysis, to making data-driven decisions, and to consider people management and organisational behaviour when making these decisions.

Only focusing on the essentially, and conveying others to this methodology, took a lot of courage.

Here is the central question of our discussion. What are your “five ways to push past your comfort zone, to grow both personally and professionally”? ( If you can, please share a story or an example for each.)

First, look through the eyes of others. Seek to understand how different experiences would come to a different conclusion to yours, and this can and will lead to more varied and often more successful solutions.

In business, this is especially important when thinking of ‘pain points’ for employees. -you have to take their perspective to understand why an aspect of the business is causing disruption for them.

Secondly, be passionate about learning and development. You have to be open and ready to develop your own understandings, or the opportunity will not come.

Third, stay connected with others. With as many people as you can, from as many different backgrounds as possible. Let these connection root you in different ideas, different worlds and new ideas.

With the pandemic forcing a lot of my students to work from home, it has since become important for me to take the first 10 minutes of a lecture to reflect on their problems and the questions others in their class have. Doing so has tremendous benefit to their understanding of the work, and their problem-solving skills also.

Fourth, challenge as much as you can, and share the lessons you learn from doing so. Making sure that you are not accepting ordinary processes will lead to new finds for innovative new strategies, maybe a few you’ve learnt from others. And if you’re doing the first three, sharing these ideas with others will not only lead to your ideas strengthening, but invite others to share their ideas with you too.

Finally, follow your gut. You can spend forever collecting and analyzing data, but sometimes you have to follow your gut. This final point is really a synthesis of the four others, as your instinct will be formed by not only your own experience, but that of your network also.

These 5 lessons fit nicely into the 5 mindsets of the IMPM — they are all interconnected, and their individual success comes from them working and informing one another.

From your experience or perspective, what are some of the common barriers that keep someone from pushing out of their comfort zone?

It has to be our own personal and common beliefs and assumptions. We all have them, we all grow up in our homes believing that life or business is done a certain way, and invertedly our culture ends up shaping our entrepreneurship and business also. These beliefs and assumptions are comfortable for us, more often than not we don’t recognize how we just accept the mold.

The Action Mindset forces us to challenge the assumptions we bring into business, often without realising. These barriers are professional, but also personal too and can be rooted deep in our society. It is these assumptions, these comforts, that stop us from challenging ourself beyond what we are used to.

There is a well-known quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt that says, “Do something that scares you every day”. What exactly does this mean to you?

It’s in all of our personalities, including my own, to avoid risk and danger. When we went to Bangalore, India, for the Worldly Mindset, we were exposed to so many passionate people undertaking problems that are, at heart, really scary such poverty and health crises.

But the people there are so varied. Traveling for a short couple of hours will expose you to different cultures, languages and worlds — so intense is the multiculturalism there that people I noticed have developed a non-verbal common understanding of how to communicate beyond their own language. And so, when they aim to tackle these immense problems their society faces, they do it across cultural lines.

For me, the quote from Roosevelt means to push past our natural instincts, and take that leap of faith into a challenging task. Not letting nothing, not language or culture to stop us from shaping the world to be a better place — “leap before you look”. That’s a quote from the Japanese novelist and Nobel prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, and mantra I set myself for changing the status quo. This is risky and, without a doubt, also uncomfortable.

If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

If anything, I would love to inspire people to look beyond their own culture, country and boarders.

It so typical in business especially to become hyper-focused on what is working for one country, in our own experience. But the IMPM taught me that we have a lot to learn, including solutions to our own problems here in Japan, by looking to practices abroad — as others can learn from looking at Japan.

The IMPM’s collaboration mindset is hosted in Japan because we are very good at putting the collective first — In Japan, many companies conduct a 10–20-minute morning meeting every morning. At my workplace, I made it a rule to have everyone take a turn in the meeting and talk about what they have noticed and felt on a day-to-day basis. Through this process, I felt that I was able to think about my own goals, the goals of the department, the goals of the company, and my contribution to society from my own standpoint. I can realize that I can solve more essential problems by helping my neighbors and collegues with their problems, issues, and concerns, rather than just short-sightedly pursuing my own goals. Originally, there is a Japanese proverb that says, “Harmony is the best way to live,” and we find value in living in harmony with each other.

How can our readers follow you online?

They can reach me on LinkedIn, Facebook or by email — nakamura-t@ic.daito.ac.jp

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!