How to prepare your nemawashi for a ringi with AI

“Nemawashi” — the informal groundwork of getting stakeholders on board before formally circulating a ringi document — is a common practice in Japanese organizations. When nemawashi isn't done well, objections surface for the first time during the ringi itself, leading to repeated rejections. Here's a way to think about using AI to make that preparation more efficient.

Why nemawashi matters

A ringi document isn't just judged on whether it's technically correct — it also needs to make sense from the perspective of each stakeholder department. A CFO cares about cost and payback, a sales director cares about the impact on frontline staff, and IT cares about operational burden. Nemawashi is the work of anticipating these department-specific concerns and preparing responses in advance.

The limits of imagining every perspective alone

A proposal's author trying to imagine every stakeholder's concerns alone has real limits. It's easy to anticipate concerns close to your own area of expertise, but easy to miss the perspective of departments you don't interact with often.

The idea of having AI role-play stakeholders

This is where having AI play a specific role and raise concerns from that perspective becomes useful. With a mechanism like MLP Strategy Council, for example, specifying roles such as “CFO,” “sales director” or “IT” in your brief prompts AI roles for each role to raise their concerns, and a chairman model then drafts responses as an objection table.

Using this to improve your nemawashi

That objection table can be used directly as anticipated Q&A during your nemawashi rounds. Knowing roughly what questions each department is likely to ask, before you walk in to explain, makes those individual conversations go more smoothly. Using a setup where multiple AI models blind-review each other's drafts can also catch things the original author missed.

The final decision still belongs to people

That said, the concerns and draft responses an AI raises are only preparation material — it has no visibility into your organization's actual dynamics or individual relationships. How you ultimately run your nemawashi, and whether the ringi gets approved, are decisions people have to make. Using AI to prepare, while still valuing the real conversations, is the key to doing nemawashi well.