When Western businesses adopted the Toyota Production System in the 1980s and 90s, transforming it into what we now call Agile and Lean management, something crucial was lost in translation. Among the overlooked practices was nemawashi—a powerful change management tool that could revolutionize how your organization handles innovation and transformation.

Read more about Nemawashi in my book on the topic: Meteoric: How to Achieve Success through Innovation, Influence, and Leadership

What Is Nemawashi?

Nemawashi (根回し) literally means "preparing the roots" in Japanese, referring to the process of preparing a tree for transplanting by carefully binding its roots. In business, it’s often inadequately translated as "laying the groundwork" or "building consensus." But the most accurate translation, I believe, is piecemeal consensus—in other words, developing a solution and building alignment quickly, one person at a time.

Nemawashi is the practice of conducting one-on-one meetings throughout your organization to build consensus piece by piece, person by person, before formally proposing a change. Instead of presenting a fully-formed idea to a committee or management team and hoping for approval, you cultivate support through individual conversations across your organization’s social network.

Why Nemawashi Was Lost in Translation

The Toyota Production System was revolutionary, introducing concepts like just-in-time manufacturing, continuous improvement (kaizen), and waste elimination (muda). When Western consultants and business leaders imported these ideas, they focused heavily on the visible, measurable processes—the assembly line optimizations, the kanban boards, the sprint cycles.

But nemawashi is inherently social and cultural. It requires patience, relationship-building, and a fundamentally different approach to hierarchy and decision-making. In the rush to quantify and systematize Toyota’s success, this more subtle practice was overlooked, dismissed as a Japanese cultural quirk rather than a transferable business tool.

How Nemawashi Works: A Real-World Example

Imagine you’re a product manager who wants to shift your company’s checkout process from a multi-page flow to a single-page design. Traditional change management might have you ask your manager for permission to make a change. Or if you are in a position to propose changes the steps might be something like this:

1. Create a proposal deck
2. Schedule a meeting with stakeholders
3. Present your case
4. Face immediate objections and turf battles
5. Watch your idea die in committee—or get watered down beyond recognition

With nemawashi, you’d take a different path:

Day 1: You have coffee with the UX designer who’ll need to implement it. You listen to their concerns about mobile responsiveness and share data about cart abandonment rates. Together, you refine the concept. You document this conversation and their conditional support.

Day 2: You meet with the engineering lead. Armed with the UX designer’s input, you address technical feasibility. The engineer suggests a phased rollout. You incorporate this feedback and note their buy-in.

Day 3: You speak with customer service, who shares pain points about the current checkout flow. They become enthusiastic advocates. You meet with analytics to discuss success metrics. You talk with the marketing manager about A/B testing.

Week 2: You circle back to earlier conversations, showing how subsequent discussions addressed their concerns. Consensus strengthens. People start talking to each other about the idea.

Week 3: When you finally bring the proposal to a formal decision-making meeting, it’s not a surprise. Key stakeholders have already bought in, refined the idea, and feel ownership over it. The "decision" is really a formalization of consensus already achieved.

The Power of the Social Network Over the Hierarchy

Nemawashi recognizes a fundamental truth about organizations: change doesn’t flow down from the top of a hierarchy as efficiently as it spreads through a social network. By working through trusted relationships and peer-to-peer conversations, ideas gain legitimacy and refinement that top-down mandates can never achieve.

Instead of escalating change like an issue through the management hierarchy—where it faces political resistance, competing priorities, and the inevitable "not invented here" syndrome—nemawashi lets you build a groundswell of support that makes change feel inevitable rather than imposed.

Document Your Piecemeal Consensus

The key to successful nemawashi is documentation. As you conduct these one-on-one conversations, you need to capture:

• Important background information
• Powerful language and key words that define the issue
• Problems, issues, gotchas, and roadblocks
• An evolving and nuanced picture of the issue
• All possible options for going forward

This is where a tool like Changebase becomes invaluable. By maintaining a clear change document that evolves with your nemawashi process, you create transparency and accountability. People can see how their input shaped the proposal. Leaders can track genuine consensus rather than just vocal opinions in meetings.

Go Try It Out

The next time you want to drive change in your organization, resist the urge to ask your manager’s position or schedule that big stakeholder meeting. Instead, start with individual conversations. Build your consensus piece by piece. Document the journey. Work through your organization’s social network, not around it or over it.

Nemawashi takes more time upfront, but it dramatically increases your chances of successful implementation. Changes that might have taken months of political battles and revision cycles can move smoothly from idea to execution—because by the time you need formal approval, you’ve already done the real work of change management.

The tool was never lost. It was just waiting to be rediscovered.