If you’ve read Frontload to Offset Risk: What Learning to Skydive in Japan Taught me about Japanese Business and Smile! You're the Example: What Learning to Skydive in Japan Taught me about Japanese Business, you already know that my skydiving training in Japan focused on the process. That you would (and 2 out of 3 trainees would not) eventually make a skydive, seemed incidental.
Having ritualized procedures etched in your brain is a great advantage during a malfunction when you may need to respond instantly and perform emergency procedures quickly, smoothly, and without needing additional precious seconds to think about the next required step.
Of course, if you’re faced with an unpredictable type of crisis, having learned a ritualized process does you no good at all and can, in fact, create paralysis. But that’s another matter…
It’s fairly predictable that if you do enough jumps, at some point the parachute will malfunction--or let’s say the jumper will malfunction because that’s usually the source of the problem. Every jumper packs his or her own parachute and a licensed rigger packs the reserve every six months.
Most skydivers can only jump on weekends, so they try to make as many jumps as possible over those two days, repacking as fast as they can between jumps. For many Westerners, packing fast means, well, a bit sloppy if it’s the difference between making the next jump load or not. Some, in fact, would finish packing in the plane and lots of jumpers average one malfunction per 100 jumps.
But not in Japan. We packed with ritualistic, origami-folding care, as though the point was to make each fold perfect, beautiful. In the U.S. the point was to get it done to squeeze in one more jump!
Hence, my third lesson for Japanese business: In Japan, if you disregard the ritual, be prepared to pay the price.
At the heart of Japanese social and business philosophy is the conviction that by learning and practicing structured methods through endless repetition, you refine "A Way" of staying in perfect harmony and balance, able to perform with ritualistic concentration and consistency.
In business, it means that there are ritualized rules or procedures for almost everything. There’s a set protocol for dealing with customers (from what you say to how you handle and package their goods) that does not deviate from a high-class department store to a neighborhood shop. There are rules that govern when you go to lunch and when you return (many companies have a chime and announcement to make sure everyone conforms to the ritual). There are rituals for every kind of meeting and greeting. Being casual about these things is seen as being boorish and unforgivably unpredictable.
As I progressed in my skydiving training, it was time to put it into practice. No, not by going for a skydive, but by being strung up on a 20-foot metal A-frame in jumpsuit, boots, helmet, goggles, and gear. I swear the gear must have been US military issue because the GI-Joe-green pack on my back was bigger than my torso and the front-mount reserve took up most of my front, giving me the charming appearance of a pregnant turtle.
Normally in Japan, everyone moves and progresses at the same pace. But since some students could only make the training once a week or once a month, we progressed at a different pace. Since I lived over 300 miles away in Kyoto, I took the two-week training straight through. Thus it happened that I had never seen this part of the training and had no idea what to expect.
First I needed to practice my arches (like a big “大” because you are the most stable falling with your center of gravity–your belly button–thrust forward and all the rest of your body flung as far back as possible) decked out in the gear on the ground. This is not so easy with a rigid WWII pack on your back.
Furthermore, I was now also supposed to look at the ripcord and pull it without losing my arch. It was a dummy ripcord so I could practice over and over.
One cardinal rule my jumpmaster kept pounding in was, “Don’t drop the ripcord!” I don’t know if this was because ripcords weren’t cheap or because they thought it might fall on someone’s head, but it was part of the never-to-be-broken ritual. During a jump, once the parachute inspection substantiated that the canopy had inflated, the ripcord was to be placed safely inside the jumpsuit.
Over and over I did my convex turtle arches, yelled the count to four, pulled the ripcord, inspected the imaginary canopy while bellowing the checkpoints, determined my make-believe parachute had a malfunction and went through the emergency procedures shouting each detail of the ritual as I performed it.
Finally, it was time to practice suspended like a horizontal puppet 20 feet off the ground. No problem. I had repeated the ritual arch-count-ripcord-inspection-emergency routine 100 times a day for the past 14 days.
On command from the jumpmaster, I did a hard arch, loudly counted to four, pulled the ripcord and (gasp–nobody told me about this!) instantly dropped out of the air, finding myself vertically suspended two feet from the earth, the chest strap threatening to strangle me, and the ripcord flying from my hand.
In a state of shock, barely able to breathe from the chest strap trying to separate my head from my torso, I nevertheless, somehow, miraculously managed to go through emergency procedures without a flaw.
When I was done, the jumpmaster silently walked over and picked up the ripcord, slowly marched over to me, and shook it in front of my face. “YOU DROPPED THE RIPCORD! YOU DROPPED THE RIPCORD!” he thundered.
Fatal mistake. I dropped the dummy ripcord.
Clearly I had lost the Zen moment by my blatant disregard for the ritual.
Frontload to Offset Risk: What Learning to Skydive in Japan Taught me about Japanese Business
Smile! You're the Example: What Learning to Skydive in Japan Taught me about Japanese Business
My First Jump in Japan (Not a Business Lesson, but the next installment)
Don't Sit There! What Learning to Skydive in Japan Taught me about Japanese Business
Don't Stand Out, Stand In! What Learning to Skydive in Japan Taught me about Japanese Business
