Applying Nudges to Nemawashi: Consensus-building Without Losing Diversity

Abstract: In Ringi system, which is a decision-making process followed by organizations in Japan, Nemawashi is often used in order to form a consensus. The term Nemawashi generally used in the sense of explaining the situation to the parties concerned in advance during an informal setting for obtaining their approval to a certain extent so that negotiations can go well. Nemawashi can create a consensus with a bias in advance, which may lead to a loss of diversity of ideas in decision-making. Therefore, we thought that if we could successfully apply Nudge to Nemawashi, we could reduce the loss of diversity, which can be a disadvantage of Nemawashi. In this paper, we conducted a questionnaire survey of people in organizations where Nemawashi practiced in order to find out whether the application of Nudge, which can be an important tool for documentation and facilitation, to Nemawashi has a positive, negative, or no effect on the advantages and disadvantages of Nemawashi. Therefore, Nudges can be used to support strengthening Nemawashi and reduce the loss of diversity that can be a weakness of Nemawashi in the following ways: (1) provide information at the appropriate time, (2) increase the appeal of Nemawashi by creating attention-grabbing devices, (3) ensure that people behave in accordance with social norms, (4) make sure that people react in some way to what they do or don't do, and (5) ensure people are satisfied with the results. (3) to make sure that people behave in accordance with social norms, (4) to check what kind of situation is expected to occur if a certain choice is taken or not taken, and whether the result is likely to be satisfactory, (5) to create a system that will immediately respond in some way to the doers of the words or actions, and (6) to prepare time to carefully review what has happened. We proposed a model for applying Nudge to Nemawashi in order to achieve consensus-building between decision-makers and Nemawashi practitioners without losing diversity in the process of decision-making.

Keywords: NEMAWASHI, Nudge, decision-making

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1002547

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