I joined a partnership in Tokyo that is described in an earlier blog post. It was the world’s first social think tank. We solved business problems involving social structural matters.
What reminded me of this is a first rate book on language that I am reading. I learned there are many language communities, around the globe, where the inhabitants communicate in two languages.
That is how my partner and I communicated in our social think tank. Takekawa san spoke modest English and I speak modest Japanese. We were discussing very important business issues as we created new types of social research technologies. We had to be sure we understood each other correctly. Our business success depended on it.
I spoke to Takekawa in my poor Japanese and he told me what he thought I said back to me in his poor English. Since we were hearing the ideas in our native language we knew whether we were correctly understanding our partner. I thought our language relationship was unique over the 15 years we used it.
It wasn’t. We had started out many times using a translator but found using two languages we could understand each other better and more accurately.
In the earlier blog reference I mentioned several projects we worked on, but I forgot an important one. Our client was a recent Shinto-like new religion that was growing fast. Japan has many of these. They needed a funeral ceremony and an in-home altar. We used focus groups with their older members and surveys of the field and provided them with both the ceremony and the new altar.
Yes, Japanese people as a group have a higher IQ than most other cultures and they are social innovators. That is why they were the first to have a social think tank.