Japan Business Self-Assessment | Find Where Your Project May Stall

The assessment

Twenty statements. Five areas.

Each statement gets one of four answers. The value sits in the low scores — a low score in one area tells you exactly which conversation to have next week.

0 Not true / not known 1 Mostly assumed 2 Partly evidenced 3 Clearly evidenced

01 · Stakeholder Clarity

I can name both the person who will formally approve this and the person whose opinion actually settles it.If they are the same name, are you sure?

I know who inside their organisation is actively arguing for our proposal when we are not present.A contact is not a sponsor. A sponsor spends internal credit on you.

I know which departments must be consulted before a decision is possible, and in what order.Legal, finance, quality, the operating division, the parent company.

I know who on their side would lose something if this went ahead — and what they would lose.Budget, headcount, an existing supplier relationship, a prior decision they defended.

02 · Decision Pathway Visibility

I know which stage of their internal approval process our proposal has reached.Not “with them” — which stage.

I know what specifically has to happen for it to move one stage further — and roughly how long that stage takes.A document, a meeting, a signature, a consultation.

I know their fiscal year, budget cycle and planning calendar — and we have timed our asks to it.Many “slow” decisions are simply waiting for a window you did not know existed.

When they say “we will check internally,” I can tell whether that means movement or a pause.The same sentence covers both. What distinguishes them in your case?

03 · Risk & Signal Reading

I can state the specific risk the Japanese side is managing by not deciding yet.“They are cautious” is not a risk. Name it.

When detailed or repeated questions arrive, I read them as evidence of what is being checked internally.Repetition can indicate that a new stakeholder or review layer has entered the process.

I can distinguish silence that means “still moving” from silence that means “stopped.”What would you look at to tell the difference this week?

I know what personal risk our proposal creates for whoever would have to sponsor it internally.Someone has to attach their name to this. What happens to them if it fails?

04 · Message Adoption

Our proposal exists in a form they can circulate internally without rewriting it first.If your contact has to rebuild it for internal use, that work is a tax on your deal.

Our proposal explains how it fits with what they have already committed to — not only why it is better.Continuity with past decisions protects the people who made them.

We have made the downside case ourselves — what could go wrong, and how it is mitigated.If you do not supply the risk section, someone internal will write it without you.

We have offered a first step small enough to approve, rather than the full commitment.A trial, a limited scope, a single site, a defined review point.

05 · Execution Follow-through

After each meeting we send a written record of what was agreed — and they confirm it.Unconfirmed agreement is not agreement. It is two different memories.

We know what to confirm in a meeting — and what is better settled before it.Asking for a decision in the room can force a “no” that would have been a “yes” later.

We brief key stakeholders before the meeting, not during it.Surprises in the room can be read as risk, regardless of their content.

Every open item has a named owner and a date — on both sides.“They will come back to us” is not an owner and not a date.

0 / 20 answered

Score all twenty statements to read your result. The stall-risk indicator is derived from how much of the decision pathway is currently visible and worked by your team.

The indicator and bands are practitioner heuristics drawn from Europe–Japan casework — a way of reading your own answers, not a benchmarked measurement. This assessment maps what is visible to you; it cannot see what your counterpart is discussing internally.

How Likely Is Your Japan Project to Stall?

Twenty statements. Five areas.

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