Episode #341: Presenting To Data Vampire Audiences In Japan

When I exchange business cards in Japan, I select from the one designed for a Western audience and another for a Japanese audience. Often, I will hand one over to a foreigner and then a different one to the Japanese person accompanying them. This will draw a remark, “Oh, the back of the cards are quite different”. I like to ask the Japanese person what do they think is the difference when they compare the two? Some see it and for others I have to explain to them that the English one has the five core course we teach for the English version and the Japanese version has ten things we teach. The reason being that Japanese are data vampires and they cannot get enough information. For a Western audience, five things are about the maximum complexity they want to handle. Actually three is probably better for them, but I push it a bit. When I make this point about the data preference for Japanese, they respond with a nervous little laugh which says the “jig is up” and underlines the truth about presenting to Western and Japanese audiences.

This throws up a dilemma when presenting in Japan. Who do we prepare the presentation for – ourselves as Westerners, who like simplicity, clarity, brevity or the massively data hungry Japanese audience? The danger part in Japan is that when they prepare their presentations, they suit themselves and go all out for massive troves of data. Just to really accentuate the cultural differences, they decide the smartest thing is to put as much data on each slide as physically possible. To make it even more exciting, they leaven things up a bit with six colours and five different fonts. It is a total mess.

When we present we always have to begin with two thoughts – who is my audience and what is my main message for them. If we have a Japanese only audience, then that is easy – we can go bananas on the amount of data we offer. If it is a Western audience, we can be very zen like and chilled. If it is a mixed audience that is a bit more complex. What should we do?

Whether it is a Japanese or Western audience, we should absolutely not make the mistake of going crazy and putting up too much information on the one slide. The Golden Rule is one idea per slide and the clearer the access to the key information the better. Slides cost nothing to make, so we can split information across five different slides, rather than the typical Japanese approach, of cramming all of the same information on to one slide.

For a Japanese audience, we need more data than we may think is necessary. They want the references also to where the data came from, so we cannot miss that point, as it is critical for the credibility of what we present. Often audience members will check on what we say on screen and do it in real time.

I make a joke that data hungry people of any persuasion are comfortable and happy with three decimal places for numbers. That would include many Japanese in the audience. The usual Japanese approach though is to put the whole spreadsheet up on screen, even when there is a very small possibility that anyone seated in the room can actually see the numbers in the cells because they are so tiny. We can put the spreadsheet up on screen, like screen wallpaper, to give the presentation some credibility. We should then use animation and create a pop up cloud with a key number in it, which is overlayed on top of the spreadsheet. Usually in a spreadsheet, there will only be a few numbers we want to highlight, so we select those out and place them in the animated pop up cloud, in large font, making it easy to see. We can then talk to the numbers and make our point.

One of the best ways to satisfy a Japanese data hungry audience is to take a two step approach. Either have some additional physical materials prepared for distribution after the event or give them a URL, where they can access the data. This makes the audience very happy to get the information. Never distribute the data before your talk though. If you do that, everyone will be focused on the data and not on you the speaker. Hold it until the end and then make it available, so there is no competition with your message delivery.

One of the issues with data in Japan is that most official statistics are out of date by the time they are made available. Usually they are three years old, so that is a big disadvantage when giving presentations, because as we all know a three year Covid period has completely turned everything upside down. The only compensating factor is everyone suffers from the same fate with official figures. The better approach is to look for recent industry sector surveys or more current private sector information releases, by research institutes etc. It is very credibility sapping to see the speaker pop up data which is clearly out of date and expect us to believe what they are saying. It happens all the time here, but let’s not be part of that crowd.

When presenting in Japan, always remember you cannot satisfy the need for more and more data, but you can present it in a way which maintains your professionalism and allows your key messages to break through all the clutter.