Q 742. In the context of business excellence, how can the Japanese practice of 'Nemawashi' be used to align stakeholders and ensure the successful deployment of strategic initiatives? Provide some relevant examples

 

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Nemawashi involves engagement of stakeholders very early, where informally ideas are discussed, and input and support are seeked before presenting a formal proposal or decision. This process is important for aligning business stake holders and strategic initiatives can be successfully deployed, as it builds trust, reduced backlash and helps collective ownership of decisions.

In context of BEX Nemawashi can be applied in early engagement of key stakeholders at conceptual stage of project, as it will help identify potential challenges and set expectations. This step makes stakeholders feel that their opinions are valued and are more willing to support the idea.

For eg. a HR company palling to apply new LSS initiative can use Nemawashi by initially informally discussing the project goals with line managers, TLs and process owners and then leadership can refine the approach ensuring better acceptance and smoother execution.

Nemawashi tests ideas in a low stake environment before finalizing or formalizing the idea. This helps in outright rejection in formal setting where idea is presented. For eg. when pitching the new performance management system HR can have one on one conversation with dept heads to gauge

their concerns and gather feedback. Discussions will help with specific operational challenges which can be addressed before final rollout increasing the success rate.

Resistance to change is a common barrier in change initiatives. Nemawashi reduces this resistance by transparency and co creation. For eg. a new CRM is introduced to have technology benefits and gather insights on potential integrations issue and by addressing concerns early trust is built

and reduces the opposition.

Also, through Nemawashi leaders can have informally secured agreement before official meeting ensuring fewer objections are met in the decision. Nemawashi bridges silos by encouraging cross functional inputs as it is essential for large scale initiatives requiring alignment across all depts. \

As in digital transformation leaders can consult marketing, operations, and finance teams informally to understand needs and priorities.

Nemawashi is proactive approach, and it includes all aligned stakeholders which fosters organizational buy in. by early engagement open communication and collaborative approach business can make supportive environment for strategic change initiatives or improvements initiatives.

However, Namawashi is time intensive, but its long-term benefits of low resistance and enhanced alignment outweigh the upfront investment.

The Japanese term "Nemawashi" refers to the creating a foundation for a decision or project by having informal discussions with stakeholders before formal meetings or announcements. It involves building consensus to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that potential hurdles or concerns are addressed in advance.

The term literally translates to "root binding," which metaphorically suggests that the way the roots are prepared before planting a tree, relationships and understandings should be nurtured before formal actions are taken. it is a common practise in Japanese business culture and accentuates the importance of collaboration and consensus-building.

In English, Nemawashi can be referred to as “lobbying”, “greasing the skids”, “testing the waters”, “obtaining buy-in”, “getting people on the bandwagon”, “sending up a trial balloon”, “offline persuasion”, “getting everyone on the same page” and “building consensus”. However, none of them truly captures the essence of Nemawashi being an ongoing organizational process rather than a one-time event

Nemawashi’ is widely used in Japanese companies, particularly in Toyota. In Toyota, Nemawashi is considered as the first step in decision making where the managers share information about the proposed change with their employees to create the foundation for upcoming changes in the organization and getting buy-in on specific business decisions that may impact them. By doing so, changes are met with little to no resistance as everyone provides their approval.

Have encapsulated below some of the examples on how Nemawashi can be used to align stakeholders to ensure successful deployment of strategic initiatives

1.Unilever marketing team having focused group discussion with customers on new product concept before finalizing the design

2.A Vice President, operations having chat with different AVPs and officers over informal coffee session to ascertain their reaction to overall department level restructuring before making a formal announcement

3.A project manager of a leading IT company having informal chat during a team dinner session  to understand showstoppers before presenting a detailed project plan to senior leadership

 

 

Wikipedia definition of Nemawashi :

It is a Japanese business informal process of laying the foundation for some proposed change or project by talking to the people concerned and gathering support and feedback before a formal announcement. While the literal meaning stands as "turning the roots", it essentially points to "laying the groundwork"

 

Please read the origin of Nemawashi here (https://kanbanzone.com/resources/lean/toyota-production-system/nemawashi/) - a must to understand. Interesting

How Nemawashi be used to align Stakeholders and ensure successful deployment of Strategic initiatives:

 

Let us see, how by doing Nemawashi, one can make the stakeholders aligned on the Strategic initiatives.

IMHO, there are various factors to this: 

 

1. Respect for the individual 
2. Sharing Information
3. Seeking Feedback  
4. Minimizing Resistance   
5. Gaining Consensus
6. Decision Making 

 

Let us explore each one in detail

 

1. Respect for the individual:

When a strategic initiative is considered for implementation, in general, the employees in the organization need to be reached out to state the purpose of the change, so as to make the change(implementation of the change) effective, within the organization. If, for whatsoever reasons if that cannot be stated to the whole organization, then the important stakeholders have to be reached out - first to respect them and their position (hierarchical) in the organization and second to avoid resistance (which could come due to perceived disrespect, ego and feeling of not belonging ...)

 

2. Sharing Information: Whenever there is a newer strategic initiative/change that happens, sharing that to the stakeholders make them to get know more as what the initiative is all about. The stakeholders may even appreciate you for sharing the information on the initiative and could even ask/provide you insightful questions/pointers which can provide you a new perspective.

 

3. Seeking Feedback: As part of sharing the information with the stakeholders, you can request for Feedback about the initiative that you have shared. The feedback obtained can be very useful in the form of opinions, ideas, exposing flaws, appreciations... Whichever is the outcome, it will benefit as it will be an opportunity to improve upon the current reality

 

4. Minimizing Resistance: As you disclose the purpose of a strategic initiative, people get good clarity, which can alleviate their genuine fear (for instance, how the new initiative might impact them) and any perceived concerns. Therefore, they become least resistant to the initiatives

 

5. Gaining Consensus: Get the buy-in from the stakeholders for the strategic initiative 

 

6. Decision Making:  Once the consensus is arrived at, decision making becomes easier 

 

By sharing the progress on the initiative. seeking constant feedback, by more communication and collaboration, by gathering metrics at every stage of the initiative and taking actions accordingly (if metrics are not OK) and measuring it again, one can ensure successful deployment of the initiative
 
Example 1:
Let us see an example that supports these factors

 

Quoting a real scenario in IT. 

 

There was a strategic initiative : to have a modernization program (which the customer wanted) that was to convert legacy based systems to a robust niche skilled technology based systems.  Customers felt the need for improved end-customer satisfaction and they decided to implement this strategic initiative, keeping in mind their current challenges (not related to just legacy applications alone which was a primary one, but other challenges contextual to their own ecosystem as well).  Just to give a little background, the legacy based applications were built by component based teams(specialized teams which did specific functionalities).

 

These teams were working in silos, and there were lot of dependencies amongst these teams. So for this initiative, the objective was to form multiple cross-functional lean-sized teams which can have necessary skills to work on any functionality.   

 

As an agile coach i was entrusted with the responsibility of doing this for a fewer teams : which was to ensure conversion of existing component based teams (3 teams) to Cross-functional agile teams. So i needed to convince my idea with several stakeholders including customer managers, team members, Product Owner.

 

I reached out separately to the managers, Product owner and team members. Reached out to each of the team members and conveyed the purpose. Few had concerns while conversing with them and that was discussed in detail..

 

Got a positive response from the three teams. Similarly spoke to the customer managers and Product Owner and arrived at a consensus with them. Then launched an official meet to announce the initiative. That is how, it was decided that we would go with the cross-functional team. We formed one pilot team (taking few members from each team) and delivered incremental value for few Sprints with quick incremental value delivered. 

 

During the exercise i used several techniques like Empathy map, VOC to understand how the stakeholders view/perceive the initiative and also the ways to achieve it

 

Example 2:

In one of the IT companies that am aware with, one of its Insurance customers, wanted to incorporate AI into its IT delivery to expedite the product development. This was a big strategic initiative. The Technology COO leadership team  realized that this can speeden up their whole IT delivery process and can achieve quicker Time-to-market, realize Profit quickly and achieve good
results overall.  

 

An Enterprise Solution Architect was requested to take this strategic initiative to make that implemented with an identified pilot team. Now the architect used the Nemawashi technique to ensure that this exercise was done successfully.

 

First she reached out to the team members of the pilot team (from the service providing company) . She shared the purpose - embracing AI. The team members were sceptical on few points - for instance, a). with respect to the data security and b). how their existing codebase be integrated with AI. She patiently addressed on those concerns which were acknowledged by the team. The team also suggested where could be the areas(to mean what areas here refer to -  requirements gathering, coding, testing....), where there is more scope of improving AI involvement which was agreed by the architect(underlining the fact that collective intelligence is powerful).

 

After getting their concerns addressed and getting good feedbacks, the architect ensured that the AI integration with the existing ecosystem happened smoothly and the customer organization started reaping the benefits of the strategic initiative

 

Other Examples:

a). I understand that Toyota uses this technique for its (new) vehicle development by having discussion with its dealers, engineers, suppliers, designers.. to know about their pain points/concerns, suggestion, opinions which can enhance the product much better

 

b). Google seems to use a weekly meet(used as a forum) called Thank God Its Friday(TGIF) for discussing initiatives and seeking feedback, from its employees

 

 

Conclusion:

Here we can see how Nemawashi helps to address change management in a seamless manner.The Strategic initiatives  (as shown in the examples) were disruptive for the respective customers  . More often than not, in any change management process, people play a key role. 
Effectiveness of a solution is a product of the Quality of the solution and the acceptance of the solution. It is the acceptance part that is always problematic. With Nemawashi technique, you ensure that the identified stakeholders are prior appraised of what the strategic initiative(s) is/are about and also get their feedback and consensus which can help the initiative to be deployed successfully as we can see from the example shown above.
 

Nemawashi is a Japanese practice that involves informal consensus building with all the stakeholders before making formal decisions to ensure all stakeholders are on same page, which is crucial for successful deployment of strategic initiatives. By engaging stakeholders early in the process, address concerns and gather feedback before formalizing decisions. This helps in building trust and ensuring that everyone feels heard and valued. This can prevent conflicts and resistance, through informal discussions you can identify potential issues and obstacles that might not surface in formal discussions. It is a vital means of obtaining the buy-in of everyone involved in a decision-making process before a final decision is reached regarding a proposal or idea that requires scrutiny or review in order to uncover potential problems or blockers. For example Nemawashi is one of the practice utilized before implementing Lean production system in Toyota by managers engaging in Nemawashi to ensure that all team members understand and support the changes. This has been key to Toyota's success in maintaining high efficiency and quality. In Pharma industry, Nemawashi is used before launching a new drug, to discuss the potential impact, gather feedback from key opinion leaders, and ensure regulatory compliance. This helps in identifying potential issues early and building support for the new product.

Nemawashi is a consensus-building approach which involves discussing strategic initiatives with key stakeholders using various stakeholder engagement tools so that their interest levels and understanding is gauged well in advance and appropriate steps are taken to obtain their buy-in. This way it is guaranteed that by the time the initiative reaches the final stage, it already has the required support and least resistance increasing the likelihood of approval.

 

In the context of business excellence, for any improvement initiative, be it Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, Automation, AI enablement etc. if only a top-down approach is adopted, it loses its rigor and sheen once it reaches the employees at the lower levels mainly due to their lack of awareness of such initiatives and their inability to establish a synergy between such improvement methodologies and their day-to-day operational activities.  

 

On the other hand, if only bottom-up approach is adopted, then the employees at the lower levels, despite being sensitized and trained on lean and six sigma initiatives, use lean practices and six-sigma tools on a piecemeal basis with a focus on local optimum than global optimum.  This limits the potential organizational-wide impact of six sigma and lean as the top management's commitment to such efforts is usually limited to delegating activities surrounding these initiatives to others.

 

Nemawashi to an extent establishes a balance between both, enabling top-down direction along with bottom-up engagement in a simultaneous manner. It encourages each and everyone to contribute by being transparent.   

 

An example could be where an organization when deciding to increase AI Penetration across verticals, first needs to have a considerable amount of buy-in from the key stakeholders for such an initiative.  Once all reach a consensus and are in agreement, they need to first familiarize themselves with the AI technology that is being discussed.  There should not be any disconnect between what they expect AI to do and what actually AI can do.  Only after they have an absolute clarity on the time, effort and cost on such an initiative, and the benefits they could expect, a decision on whether to hire an external consultant or a full-time resource to train employees at various levels it to be taken. The employees thus trained in advanced AI tools can now drive improvement efforts in their respective business units.

 

Conclusion:  For any improvement initiative to deliver results, the commitment, engagement and consensus of key stakeholders is paramount and Nemawashi to a large extent addresses the proverbial "What's In It For Me" by ensuring effective and conflict-free execution.

Originally Nemawashi refers "Turning the Roots". Ne implies Root and Mawashu implies to turn something, to put something around something else (Wikipedia).

 

The whole idea of Nemawashi is that if someone wants to transplant a tree to a new location, then, before transplanting the tree, one has to dig the ground carefully sometime before transplanting the tree. This would help to establish the tree to its new location and the soil of the new location accept the tree with minimal resistance and give the opportunity to grow the roots of the tree. This all because of the groundwork is done prior to transplantation of the tree.

 

Nemawashi is Japanese term that refers to the process of "laying the groundwork" for a project or decision like transplanting a tree by gathering support and consensus among stakeholders before formal discussions or meetings take place. It involves informal consultations, discussions and relationship-building to ensure alignment and reduce resistance when the proposal is officially presented on the table.

 

This practice is tied closely to the Japanese business culture that emphasize collaboration, respect and harmony in decision-making. It helps to gauge the reaction of the high-ranking people and give the opportunity to win the heart of them before the proposal puts on the table.

 

The Japanese use Nemawashi to foster collaboration, efficiency, and consensus-driven decision-making.

• It builds consensus early by ensuring that all stakeholders are consulted and aligned before formal decisions are made to reduce conflicts, delays, and resistance during implementation, leading to smoother execution.
• It encourages inclusivity by involving employees at all levels in informal discussions, promotes a sense of ownership and engagement. This leads to better ideas, innovation, and commitment to the organization's goals. 
• It emphasizes open and respectful communication, which strengthens relationships and trust among team members. This creates a harmonious work environment and improves teamwork.
• It reduces risks by addressing concerns and gathering feedback beforehand, Nemawashi practice helps identify potential issues early, allowing for adjustments before formal decisions are made. This minimizes risks and costly mistakes.
• It promotes long-term thinking using thoughtful, deliberate decision-making rather than rushed or top-down directives. This aligns with the Japanese focus on long-term sustainability and quality.
• It facilitates change management through easy transitions by ensuring everyone is on board and understands the rationale behind the decisions. This reduces resistance and fosters adaptability. 
• It aligns with Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) by encouraging ongoing feedback and iterative improvement. It ensures that decisions are refined and optimized through collective input.

For Example:

Quality department wants to install automatic inspection machines, but HOD feels that this proposal will definitely be challenged by the production department, create fear of job loss among the quality personnel, and due to the heavy cost involved this will not be supported by the finance department.

 

Quality department starts doing the groundwork by continuously discussing the benefits of Automatic Inspection Machines with the production head, chief financial officer and quality personnel.

• Automatic inspection machines help to improve the quality of production by rejecting only those parts which can't be able to be detected through 100% inspection by quality personnel. 
• Many critical defects are passed during 100% inspection can't be traced on conveyer by the quality personnel.
• This leads reduced customer complaints, eliminate rework and resorting, and so extra manpower for rework and resorting.
• Automatic machines will be used to detect only for those defects which can't be able to see by naked eyes, but they are potentially dangerous for the customer.
• The cost of automatic inspection machines installation will be recovered within a year and at the same time they will make our organization more competitive in the market.

Quality department continuously organizes the meeting with production, finance along with quality personnel and discuss the pros and cons of installation of automatic inspection machines try to win the heart collaboratively, to build consensus and to reduce resistance before formally put the proposal on table in front of top management.

 

Finally, inconclusion, the department becomes more efficient, and the employee morale remains high because the changes were introduced collaboratively. The company achieves its goals without the disruptions that often accompany top-down decisions.

 

This example demonstrates how Nemawashi ensures smooth decision making, fosters trust, and drive business excellence by involving stakeholders early and valuing their input.

Nemawashi, a Japanese term meaning "laying the groundwork" or "building consensus," originates from traditional gardening, where a tree’s roots are carefully prepared before transplanting. In business, it refers to engaging key stakeholders through informal discussions before making formal decisions. This approach ensures smoother transitions, reduces resistance, and fosters collaboration.

How can the Japanese practice of 'Nemawashi' be used to align stakeholders and ensure the successful deployment of strategic initiatives

1. Early Engagement: Bringing stakeholders into the conversation early allows their concerns and ideas to be acknowledged and addressed before formal decision-making.
2. Building Consensus: By involving people beforehand, decisions become more widely accepted, minimizing pushback.
3. Inclusive Decision-Making: When stakeholders feel heard and valued, they develop a sense of ownership, increasing their commitment to the initiative.

Real-World Example

Suppose a company is introducing a new software system. Instead of announcing it in a formal meeting, the leadership team first consults key stakeholders—developers, IT staff, and end-users. Through informal discussions, they gather feedback, address concerns, and refine the plan based on this input. By the time the formal rollout happens, there’s already widespread support, making the implementation process smoother and more successful.

 

Nemawashi is a mindset that encourages collaboration, ensuring changes are well-received and effectively executed.

 

Narender Sharma has provided the best answer to this question. His response correctly captures the essence of 'Nemawashi'.

 

Other answers are also a must read to get a view of how different organizations are implementing it.