Bad habits and biases, a newbie’s observations on design thinking in Japan (Pt 2): playfulness, balance and group dynamics
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 2: Playfulness, balance and managing group dynamics
Playfulness works really well with teams globally but the intention here has added nuance. Something like charades individually or in groups works well to create bonds and increase the trust I talked about in Part 1. At the beginning of a class, I noticed that people were so nervous introducing themselves to colleagues that they were visibly shaking. The ‘no speaking’ part of charades is the important element, it’s less intimidating and the playfulness helps to calm people.
Physical humour is a great way to engage participants — laughing together and rewarding people for this is typical and encouraged; after all, this is the home of the wild physical challenge game show! I also observed great success with the equivalent of drinking games (without the drinking!) as a great way to activate a group and continue to invigorate everyone throughout the day.
For this to be most effective you’ll need to act out how the game works and what you want each person to do. My favourite example was called ‘the human machine’ the instruction was to act out a how a machine works, it could be any machine and the group choose what they want to act out. The rule was that every person in a group must contribute to the machine and the goal is to represent the bigger picture. I loved this because each person was vital but the whole was more important – much like good collaboration. It also aligns into a Japanese belief that an individual is less important than the whole group.
Balance of independent work and group work
Much more time is spent on independent work than on group work in these learning sessions than in European and Antipodean environments. This ensures that all voices are heard, diversity of thought is explored and people don’t simply agree with each other because it’s a place of safety and comfort.
However, independent working for long periods is a challenge, as the most common complaint from people at work is loneliness; whether that is being alone on a project or feeling alone even when they are part of a team. Make sure to keep alternating learning styles to prevent this (this can be as simple as telling people when they will next be back in a group context).
Group dynamics
A study showed that Japanese trust and cooperation increased when participants experienced a greater sense of control over the situation. The same study also showed that when an individual’s action had been preceded by a cooperative action from the other person – and when they encountered a person with whom they had engaged before — trust and cooperation again increased.
Team dynamics can make or break a workshop. You want to foster an environment that is outside the norm of the current Japanese working culture. There are a few tips and tricks to fostering good dynamics (and avoiding ones that are less helpful in this situation) that I picked up:
Try not to rearrange teams ad-hoc; individuals quickly become very invested in their ‘team’ and teams that are rearranged unexpectedly don’t recover their mojo, significantly lagging behind the others. You can rearrange if you tell people in advance that it’s coming — they’ll appreciate the opportunity to build their network.
Give out awards to teams; even the smallest reward works well to incentivise a team (like getting to choose their lunch bento first), it’s not so much about a competitive nature of winning but more about collaborating to achieve a goal. Under no circumstances shame an individual or team for not ‘winning’, don’t draw attention to it, move on without acknowledgment — the team or individual will be well aware of any perceived failure.
Spend time thinking about how you flatten the group conversation to ensure everyone’s contribution is valued and heard. This means avoiding, if at all possible, anything that allows hierarchy (age, time at a company, level etc.) to be demonstrated between members of a team. Design thinking is built on the tenet that everyone and anyone can have a good idea. Unfortunately, revealing a hierarchy silences the voices of the junior members of the team and everyone will look to the most senior person to make the decisions, following their lead without question.
I recently attended a different type of cultural training and the metaphor they used to describe how group communication differs was really helpful, so I wanted to share it here: Communication can be thought of as being a scale represented by rugby at one end and golf at the other. Rugby is a team contact sport, people interrupt, speak over each other, linguistically passing the ball and tackling people. Golf is more individual – people wait for each other and silently pay attention while one person plays, listening attentively and taking turns to speak. This is a scale and you can move along it, but you have a point or range where you feel most comfortable and you perform at your best. If you’ve never played rugby or golf (or don’t play it often) playing it is quite challenging, unsettling and intimidating. It’s really helpful if someone explains the rules, but you won’t be at your best. Japanese communication style is often towards the golf end of the scale whereas Europe is more rugby oriented. (I should now make a joke about American Football or Aussie Rules but I’ve taken the sport metaphor as far as I can!)
I’ll be thinking about all of my meetings or workshops from now on in terms of having a balance of different styles so that I can be inclusive of everyone’s contribution and style of communication.
Part 1: Trust and the importance of clear structure and instruction
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
I hope you enjoy reading my newbie observations about Design Thinking teaching and workshops in Japan.
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
