IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

The Nemawashi Factor
Modern organizations need to learn quickly about changes in their core
technologies and also about shifts in their environments. Fast perception
—being quick on the uptake—is vital. But when it comes to action, different
tempos can apply. As my friend Kayoko Ota once told me, the Japanese
refer to the creation of trust through time as nemawashi. Originally a horticultural
word that means ‘‘to turn the roots’’ prior to replanting—or, by
implication, ‘‘laying the groundwork’’—nemawashi has come to mean the
process by which groups in Japan develop the shared understanding without
which nothing much gets done. 51 This matters to businesspeople in
Japan because if trust has been established between people, it takes less
effort to reach a consensus in regard to any issue. As I show in chapter 6,
on conviviality, dialogue and encounter are the inescapable basis of trust
in our relationships with one another, and technology-enabled disintermediation
can support but not supplant that time-based fact. I’m not sure
nemawashi is uniquely Japanese; many recent surveys report that stress
and unhappiness have increased among office workers in the West during
the same years that ‘‘disintermediation’’ and other forms of automation
have been on the increase. Time is a key issue for the information
society—but perpetual acceleration is not a given. The accelerated innovation
of new tools is of diminished importance if the quality of relationships
among the people who use them is where the real value resides. Trust
accrues through time and is built during encounter and interaction between
people; it cannot be digitized, and it cannot be rushed. ‘‘People
will only pay for what is scarce, personal, customized, tangible, nonreproducible,’’
says Esther Dyson, one of the wisest of the Internet gurus;
‘‘intellectual value is often simply the presence of other people, specific
ones, interacting casually or formally or both. The key success factors are
presence, time, attention . . . what you sell is interaction with your company.’’
52 Social capital takes time to grow. Local knowledge cannot be
imported from somewhere else in a Boeing 747.
From Velocity to Virtuosity: Design Principles for Speed
Speed 43
Acceleration weighs us down. Always on means seldom free. But the design
challenge now is not to design slow systems to replace fast ones. ‘‘Braking’’