Comments on: Japanese vs. Western models of decision making

By: Rob Galanakis

Rob Galanakis — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:30:19 +0000

Hi AE, unfortunately not. The actual image is from wikimedia commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Japanese_Decisions.jpg Unfortunately I do not recall which book explained this concept so clearly and contained this diagram.

By: AE

AE — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 13:50:37 +0000

Thanks for this great summary! that diagram also made a big impression on me, and I’ve been trying to find the source again for a while – do you know where it’s from?

By: Rob Galanakis

Rob Galanakis — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 03:53:06 +0000

In reply to JJJ.

Thanks Jean! Thanks for the interesting info. Your description of Japanese reminds me of a study (http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html) in which researchers found that some languages (like Japanese) are low-information-per-syllable, but are generally spoken faster, resulting in about the same information-per-minute. I’m not sure if this translates into technical domains as well, and I know nothing about oriental languages. From living in Iceland, though, which has a strange process of adopting new words into the language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language#Linguistic_purism), I know it can be tricky to describe certain things. But I would describe their model of decision making as distinctly Western, however :)

By: JJJ

JJJ — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 01:51:32 +0000

I had some discussion with my father about that difference, because they had been talking about it with my parent’s best friends who happen to be Japanese.
Apparently this is totally true and your doodle nailed it quite well.
But I think there’s some very important info missing. From what those japanese friend told my parents, it seems that this longer preparation time is mostly caused the japanese language which is very complicated and quite abstract, so they have to talk a enormous lot to be sure that they understand each other.
It is sometime really difficult to reflect on the japanese way of doing things as we almost always underestimate the surrealistic cultural rift.
I’m not saying that about the conclusions you drew here, honestly I don’t have the experience to judge them but I trust you and just find them very interesting, I just wanted to share with you that info I got from that discussion.

Cheers from belgium (and pardon my awful english).

By: Kenny

Kenny — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 12:22:16 +0000

I think this is pretty key in a lot of areas of work (not just software).
A big big barrier though, is the perception of “wasted work” (which as you rightly say isn’t actually wasted), especially from professionals/experts.
From my rather limited experience and reading, it seems that many people who are perceived as experts or professionals in their field don’t want to be see as not knowing something – and the act of trying things out and throwing things away is often seen as “not knowing”.

This might be a cultural thing, but I get the feeling that if you cant somehow deal with this “self inflicted status of competence”, then you will often fall more in the left side of that diagram.