The Decision Was Made Before the Meeting

At Sony, we were raising concerns about using untested and unstable technology in a new product.

We followed the process. We were told we could bring the issue to the next status meeting with leadership.

So we brought our concerns to that meeting. That's where we found out the decision to move ahead had already been made, by a different group of execs in Japan. The status meeting was not where the decision would happen. It was where we would be told.

I had run into shades of this at several companies before. Sony was where I felt the full impact of it.

Here's what I took from that room. The meeting where a decision is announced is almost never the meeting where it was made. The review is theater for the real process, which happened earlier, in smaller rooms, with fewer people.

In Japan, that process has a name: Nemawashi. You pre-socialize a decision up through the entire command chain well before any meeting "requiring a decision" takes place, so objections and disagreements can happen out of public view.

Nemawashi literally means turning the roots. Before you transplant a tree, you dig around it and trim the roots ahead of time, so the tree is ready to survive the move.

It's easy to hear that and call it political. It's more honest than what most companies do, because Nemawashi happens everywhere anyway. Most companies just have no name for it, so nobody teaches it to you. You find out the way I did: by preparing for a meeting that was never a decision meeting.

The skill is learning to read where a decision actually lives. Before you walk into a review, look at who is not in the room. If you're seeing the decision for the first time in that meeting, you were never the decider. Map who was in the room 48 hours earlier, and you'll find the meeting that mattered.

Now, when I have a position to sell, I don't save it for the big room. I start walking it up the chain before the meeting ever exists.

Where in your organization do decisions actually get made, and which meetings are just the announcement?