Why Japan’s approach challenges the Western obsession with speed

How many times have you thought, “Japanese decision-making is maddeningly slow”? We are conditioned to think that spending 20% of our time and resources for achieving 80% of results is the way to operate efficiently. 

In mathematics, business, social and natural sciences, the 80:20 distribution is known as the Pareto Principle. Eighty percent of outcomes are usually attributable to 20% of the causes. It has become one of the most often cited concepts in business, encouraging organizations to focus their energy on the small number of activities that create the greatest impact. And yet, when it comes to decision-making and planning, Japanese companies don’t seem to follow this concept. 

The three-hour miracle that took 10 years to create

In the spring of 2013, thousands of people gathered around Shibuya Station to witness what seemed almost impossible. Between the last train late at night and the first train the following morning, the Tokyu Toyoko Line would move from its iconic above-ground terminal into a newly built underground station, where it would connect seamlessly with the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line. The visible transformation took just three hours and 25 minutes. The invisible preparation had taken nearly eight years of construction, and a couple of years more in planning and design.

On the night of March 16, more than 1,200 engineers and construction workers moved as one to disconnect rails, remove massive girders, switch overhead power lines, align tracks and complete thousands of inspections. They worked without any apparent improvisation, and probably close to zero wasted movement. 

This video looks like a record of three and a half hours of work. Yet, it tells us much more about Japanese decision-making and process-orientation than the actual undergrounding of the rails. The video shows years of preparation compressed into three and half hours of execution because every possible difficulty had been anticipated long before the first worker picked up a tool.

The decision is only the beginning

Decisions do take a long time because stakeholders are consulted, countless meetings are held where risks are examined from every imaginable angle. Consensus is built gradually both around the decision itself but also around the commitment to execute that decision afterwords. 

From the outside, this does look inefficient. But the objective goes far beyond just making a decision. It is to create a decision that the entire organization can execute with confidence.

So, after a couple of years of planning and design and eight years of preparatory construction work, the Toyoko Line tracks were moved from the fifth floor to the third floor underground – eight floors down overnight.

In the Toyoko Line case, the understanding was that due to time constraints and physical limitations there was no room for trial and error. Every minute was pre-planned and every team depended on every other team. The success of those three and a half hours was determined before the first rail was moved.

The planning phase absorbed and resolved uncertainty so that the execution phase could focus entirely on delivery. Once execution began, there was little room for debate because the debate had already happened.

If you work with Japanese organizations, you know: progress is not always visible. Sometimes, it neither looks nor feels like progress at all. Yet, most of the time, long discussions evaluate and remove risk so that everybody involved can execute with confidence.

The Japanese 80:20:100 principle

Perhaps Japanese organizations would rewrite the Pareto Principle as 80:20:100.

Eighty percent of the effort is invested before execution begins. The work includes problem anticipation, stakeholder alignment, uncertainty elimination and process refinment.

Twenty percent is the visible execution that everyone notices.

The final one hundred is not a measure of success on the day the project is completed. It is a measure of everything that happens afterward. This is the measure of years of reliable operation, predictable performance, and so few unexpected disruptions that the planning is almost forgotten.