Two Japanese Engineers, Opposite Communication Styles

Across the teams I work with, the same pattern keeps showing up. Two engineers, same country and same city, often the same company, and a cross cultural training packet that says they communicate alike. The actual meeting goes another way.

Yui and Daiki are a composite of the people I keep meeting in different rooms. Both Japanese engineers, both raised in Osaka, both about eight years into their careers at the same kind of manufacturing firm. By minute twelve of a project review they’re talking past each other so badly the project lead calls an unscheduled break.

Yui wants the bad news on the table. The supplier slipped the schedule and she says it plain in front of the room. Daiki winces, then frames the same fact as ‘a few items we may want to revisit together,’ and you can feel the air in the room change.

If you handed both of them a standard cross cultural training packet beforehand, the packet would tell them they’re both ‘high context’ Japanese communicators who value harmony and indirect speech. That training would actively get in the way.

The country is not the unit

Most cross cultural training treats a country like a personality. Japan is indirect, Germany is direct, Brazil is relational, the US is task focused. The framing fits on a slide and most of the time it is wrong about the actual humans in your meeting.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall introduced the high context and low context idea decades ago, and he meant it as a cultural tendency rather than a fixed setting on every member of that culture. Adair, Buchan, Chen and Liu picked that thread up in their 2016 paper for Academy of Management Discoveries and asked an obvious question. Why do Japan and Brazil get filed under the same “high context” label when they behave nothing alike?

Their answer was to break “context” into four measurable dimensions you can score for a single person rather than a country. Once you can score an individual, you stop arguing about Japan and you start looking at the two Japanese people who are actually in the meeting. Within any country the spread looks like a bell curve, and Yui and Daiki sit on opposite ends of it on two of the four dimensions.

The four dimensions

The research instrument that grew out of that paper is now called Intrivity. It measures four things, abbreviated M, R, T, S.

Message. How much of what you mean lives in the actual words you say. On the literal end, the words carry the meaning so people say what they mean. On the indirect end, the words are a starting point and the tone, the pauses, and the things left unsaid carry the rest.

Relationship. How much you lean on the relationship itself to make meaning. On the transactional end, you can talk business with a stranger in five minutes. On the relational end, you build the personal connection first and the business flows out of it.

Time. Whether time is a commodity you spend or a current you move through. On the structured end, a deadline is a period at the end of a sentence. On the flexible end, the same deadline is closer to a comma, and being ten minutes late for a friend’s coffee reads as care for the relationship.

Space. How you share physical and verbal space. Reserved styles hold distance and tolerate silence. Engaging styles stand close, and they use interruption and volume to pull you in.

You score 1 to 5 on each, you get a profile like M4 R2 T5 S3, and the profile belongs to you rather than to your nationality.

The overlap zone

The 2024 follow up book from the same researchers introduces what they call the Interactive Model. Picture two people each carrying their own context field around the four dimensions, and picture those fields overlapping in the middle like a Venn diagram. The bigger the overlap, the closer the sender’s intent lands to the receiver’s interpretation, and the smaller the overlap, the more noise sits between them.

In Yui and Daiki’s case, their overlap on Message was almost nothing. Yui ran very literal, Daiki ran very indirect, and both were reading each other through a stereotype that said they should be the same. Once the project lead could see their two profiles laid out side by side, the fix took about twenty minutes of conversation.

Yui agreed to flag bad news to Daiki in writing first so he had time to plan the framing. Daiki agreed to give Yui a one sentence summary at the top of his updates so she didn’t have to hunt for the headline. Neither one had to change who they were and they both stopped reading the other as difficult.

Where to go from here

If your team keeps having the same fight in different rooms, stop asking “what culture are they from” and start asking “where exactly is the gap between these two people on Message, Relationship, Time and Space.”

Jay Vergara (that’s me!) and Matt Gates at Peak Potential Consulting are certified Intrivity practitioners. If you want to take the assessment or need help reading two profiles against each other for an actual team, that’s the conversation to have with us.