 I feel very privileged to be invited and also to be here with you because I know many of you and I know your deep understanding of things Irish and things international, things Chinese and your dedication to doing something more or something better for this country. So I hope that what I offer you will justify your losing your lunch, coming out from here for this purpose, but let's see how it goes. Plenty of time for questions hopefully. Excuse me while I turn back to see what was on that slide. Basically, nomology is the thing that I do and so nomos is objective as in economics andology, subjective as in psychology and from a decision-making or decision-structuring point of view people in the West tend to just live in these subjective structures and ignore the objective and people in the East tend to live in the objective ones and ignore the subjective. When you've got something as complicated as intercultural relationships, you need both especially when you want to do business which in a way as a very objective content you need both the objective and the subjective and the idea is that there is a common structure to both together that it makes it easier to make sense of what you're trying to do or in this case trying to understand how we could do business with time. So towards the end I may begin the questions I've referred to some of the successes and failures and we see we've got Jerry Bean here who as mayor of Dublin was part of one of our great successes to build a twinning relationship. We've got Lee-Wan Kanpe here, he's in China at the moment, he's a co-author of this book and for years we worked on the idea of Ireland China Task Force and it came to nothing. We have Leo Corcoran at the back, the idea of a farmer bridge, we can talk about that later. Shanghai Expo, again we'll leave to later and Lee-Marc Shen and China Business Foundation we spent two or three years trying to build that and it got blocked as well. In other words we'll talk about later and Shannon become a deep-sea transshipment port, Joe Gorman is here you can talk about that as well and the most recent project which is just last week where we had a vice governor of Shang-Chi province here on my invitation, 37 million a vice governor, that's like a tonnage to him. Now a sign that they want to build friendships with us that they would actually come this far you know because of my invitation as part of something else but it's the strength of their desire to build relationships with us. The nemology thing and I've discussed it often with people in China and I work every week with a Professor Rong Du, it's the idea of bones flesh and skin, the bones are the decision structures, they're the same whether it's China, Africa, English, language, whatever, same bones but different skin so we look very different but underneath if you can get to the common bones then you can see that the similarities and most of my research over the last few years has been about nemology and one of the things that it has discovered is that there are three forms of research or knowledge that I could science and humanities are the two that are established in the universities but practice is not. What I do is essentially practice now it has to be good scientifically and good in the humanities but if it doesn't work in practice I don't care and I'm not interested but it is actually it's rooted in that area. The interesting thing is that what I've been working on these structures isn't new actually Aristotle wrote two books about analytics it's a long time ago he's the one who first came up with the idea that there are regularities in how people think and you define the subjective ones and the objective ones as being different any roadbooks and economics and psychology and stuff like that and he was a scientist. Kant more recently continued it in philosophy which is essentially the humanities so it's very much into the cultural area and he discovered that this subjective ones divided into two I commit myself to something or I am convinced are not convinced that this it makes sense these two and so that was as far as it went from my point of view I got lucky because there are now thousands of management cases tens of thousands of people using systems and they're all accessible over the internet so you can fill out the jigsaw so I got the easy piece to actually fill out the jigsaw and what you're going to see today is the jigsaw and trying to use it as a base for the relationship building with China. So tested in China since the late 90s the idea that you can have a generic structure the bones of decision-making well it's a scientific sort of hypothesis good science you don't test using the data that you develop the model you have to use different data so what's different data because we're using every management system you could get in the West you have to go to a place that is not derived from the West so China seems like a good idea so I've been going there since then now what came out of that which is very nice is things like this that when you have a template which is generic you can look at the Chinese version of it and the Western version of it and the little differences between them suddenly pop out and they don't matter unless you want to do business if you want to do business you're right up and you confuse what's happening here because I know I could get the deal or I know I could lose the deal but I don't know what's going on here if the little nuances make a huge difference when you're upfront and I can see Frank Hartley who was on business very successfully in China he's there at the back and you will talk later I hope so it's templates for understanding from that you can build models and I would build this model in 1999 I think it was and having discovered three main areas from our Scotland can't the committing I'm committed myself so Western religions very much following a leader you know whether it is Islam or Jewish or Christianity you follow somebody you're committed to that person and then on the left the Chinese one it's a village society you marry into the village and they've been in that village for two three four thousand years and so on and you adjust to whatever it is required of you in that village because you've moved you know a hundred miles or ten thousand miles and then you haven't seen very different versions of the classic Oriental constantly adjusting the classic Occidental I'm committed to whatever I want and I don't care what you're going to do and do what I want that's one version another version just trying to show it some symbolically so the depth of it the depth of your commitment to something if you've no commitment to something it doesn't really matter but if you've a huge commitment maybe that's important but then the convincing one so the model of a person and okay so you've got yourself you got all those you've got world or as in theory science humanities practice and then you got the adjusting we just like your relationship it's like a bicycle you know how do you know that you're going to get from here to there if the bicycle keeps falling over you have to find your balance all the time so it's all about balancing and yin and yang many different versions basically I'll show you three structures today first two on the left you're going to spend some time on them and the one on the right is a combination and what you see here is based on just to yin and yang's two dimensions subjective objective which is the top and bottom and self and others left and right now the idea is that these are generic structures so therefore they can be usable as templates to look at anything in this case it is to look at the differences between people's generally throughout the world and so here we see United States more into committing themselves you know what do I want for the United States and you know the flag and some port and so on you're much more does this make sense or extrovert it this is a good sensible solution China much more adjusting but relating to others the family the group and so on society Japan adjusting self am I behaving in a correct way so these differences are not great but they're very big when you're up close and you're trying to understand what's going on now recently China has been trying to westernize which is a bit difficult because all the Western systems are not really very good so they're trying to copy Western systems so China would have started off with what they would call wooly systems and then the time of Mao was in decline and Tang Xiaoping came out with a new idea he said I'm not entirely convinced by what the chairman said everybody said that's the most dangerous thing you could say how long is he going to last that was the idea of convincing he's the one who brought in TV the idea of convincing that you have open discussion subsequently the idea that you you have to be committed to a project and to the people involved in a project that's that's more recent and so that's a recent system which I've been working with to an extent since the late 90s others have looked at this template without actually knowing the structure where it comes from and they would say the US more folks on the interior Japan war and the exterior you're more qualitative issues China more quantitative issues and if any of you are doing business with China and you're doing presentations with them you're going to find your head racked by the number of numbers that the Chinese delegation will present with this big we've got that many people and so on whereas the qualitative the Europeans will say well we're thinking of changing and going from this focus to this focus and so on and it's a template difference but you must appreciate where they're coming from and another and there are many theories out there cultural theory a grid and group theory which as I said are they're there without it's being the structure that they come from group weak are strong on group US and Japan very individualistic Europe and China very much group very much into others and we would have the view the general view from childhood east west that's the big difference and really I can understand those people whatever actually if you come down to the next one how many people here really understand the mentality of the United States actually there's a similar difference in it's very hard for Chinese people to understand Japanese people am I right it's a difficulty and whereas there is a possibility of a bonding between Europe and China because we're both into all the people into relationships and so the grid idea up here is very much into you're committing some to something you're convinced about something so it's weak on grid strong on grid is it's all this highly interactive stuff and that's really what you have to understand if we're going to move from the more Western approach and then we can strong on group all the versions of this that have come out of the same thing the US much more pined here individualist Europe more egalitarian China more bureaucratic and Japan more faithless so to understand that if you're going to do business in China you have to understand that there's a lot of bureaucracy there is a lot of hierarchy that's the way they work from a subjective point of view which is what we're more comfortable with you can use the subjective structure for comparing us with China you're China US and it's sometimes easier to start with the convincing one because we're more more attuned to that in Europe self others world if you get a hold on mainly Irish people in the room here so what have we got we've got a whole lot of individuals have a discussion I have a few beers are my preference or something better than that but and we would end up with a big discussion with many different views but a lot of Chinese people in the room they would find who's who and who's what groups are there what subgroups who are higher than others and so on is a hierarchy of groups and they're all relation to each person's position and so on when you're working with people in China you're working with groups and you're working with groups in a hierarchy the US quite different it's all about success and somebody's more successful and moving somewhere else to on to another place it's if you're going to try and work in relationship with these you really have to understand where they're coming from so China much more into the need for political stability that is absolutely paramount in China then after that cultural after that religious it seems for a communist country they're actually in my experience extremely religious more religious than us who are sort of post-religious we're kind of religious structures but they so much about their ancestors and the people who died and so on we're much more interself physical emotional artistic you know very artistic but we're more artistic than they wouldn't be in China we're not as obsessed with our needs China's needs are huge they 1.2 1.3 billion people the last 20 years they've taken 400 billion out of poverty you know they are relating to those needs and you have to see it not in terms of oh threatening America has been the biggest in the world look at it at the success divided by 1.2 billion people you know it's just a they're making significant improvements but starting per individual from a low base there this is what they want to do and they need political security for this and we can come back to that again later because they're all these issues about human rights and all that sort of thing that the people like to talk about so we're more into the the feelings area and so being more individualistic our issue is emotional so I feel I like these people can I trust these people they're actually saying do they recognize us to recognize our right to exist to trade whatever it is the point that I see the coming together of these two is in the area of friendship recently with a delegation just last week the vice governor of Chinese problems and his people and the key issue was can we have friendship and that was agreed by the end of the thing yes friendship is the thing we agree on so it's a bridge and what I'm suggesting is that this is the bridge that we can use so the third model you've seen the combination of the two you've seen the subjective one this is the objective one and it's the one that is in in in the east planning versus putting what are you doing are you uncertain so the question is are you in harmony maybe you're you're you're pretty certain about things there is a disagreement place versus people I'm going to be suggesting two things today one is that we should be more concerned with this objective model and the other is that within that there is this issue about place versus people and that in China they're more concerned with people and people relationships and we in our own institutions are too concerned with place and with structures and this body and that department and all that sort of thing but there is an interesting background to all of this which and we've been studying it and as we're going to work on it in the second book which is the Irish culture and the Chinese culture didn't go through the industrial revolution and the banking revolution so they went straight from a rural economy to a high-tech service economy so what is the difference banking revolution industrial revolution was all about property and ownership we don't mediate those we go straight so therefore we're much more people orientated both in the Irish culture and the Chinese culture the traditional Irish culture so the words that don't translate well into English guanxi indirect action personal relationships through people it's any kind of say that yeah a very uncountable in our it's conjure guanxi is a huge word is a word that would fill this room so it's kind of because the question you want to know about what kind of culture visit economic is it political is a sexual is a friendship what is it it's a huge word the other one is and that's really and how is it why is guanxi important they're very hierarchical but if you want to if you're if you're and needs an operation and the queue in the hospital is six months eight months the next thing you say is there anybody around oh yeah my cousin actually works as a nurse in the hospital on to the cousin any chance that you could get my aunt in oh well I'm not sorry because I know Sony was a doctor back now this is very Irish but it's very Chinese it is relationships to compensate for the fact that you don't have control now the other one is this about the relationship but the other one is the answer which it is translated by Chinese people who are good at English into face so and I wonder what does mean what not to lose face in a relationship doesn't mean a huge amount we try to evolve an Irish you know if you say I but it's not like we try to evolve which is your image but actually there is another word which is deeper than that which is enough which is an old Irish word which it only appears in modern Irish as Lachanok half page it's a half face in other words your story your it's your image who you are your character your personality I mean there are a lot of controversies about China and Chinese people and they say maybe they're on ethical what's the first thing that Chinese people do when they go into group of other Chinese people to find out who are the unethical people here that we can't trust and they work with the people who are ethical so actually ethics are really important in China it is knowing so how do you find that out you find out by me and say now when you're dealing with an issue to implement it if they have problems with payment and stuff like that okay then you don't you don't lose face but when you're building a relationship you actually in a Chinese culture you would show what your strength is what your wealth is you know what your achievements are you want to build image so now let's compare typical Western approach to building a business typical especially the United States one is we propose something and then we develop the perception have I got the capacity to build a new factory can I collaborate have they the capability work with me can I cooperate that's your typical Western approach the typical Chinese approach is the opposite and do I want to cooperate with these people and what's the perception of it could I cooperate with them maybe I'm not sure maybe we go out for another meal tonight maybe we'll see after a few sessions of out-tie and a few sessions in karaoke and so on what's really what are they really like you know can I relate to them and then maybe build questions of capability have I got the capability to work with them and they would with me and then go on that way so very opposite after that both sides to an extent implement you know there is an issue though because China is much more into hierarchy and into harmony they really want things to be very secure up here but everything is balanced they don't like being down here they don't like confrontation so there's an issue there could be a problem but they're not going to confront because a lot of the face and then they'll go into conflict and you have to be able to manage conflict in a in a relationship with China because there will be conflict their conflict is not unlike our political conflict which is basically okay guns out this is at the end of it no you have conflict and then you deal with it and you move on part of the study was to see well does this make sense in Chinese culture and so I've looked at various different documents and this one is from and Buddha and he talked about right understanding and after that right speech and a right thought then right speech then right action it's using the same structure right livelihood right effort right mindfulness right concentration but notice in here the little structures which are used in China is called the it's a yin yang two by two by two so these three open sticks they reflect being open in terms of planning open in terms of people and open in terms of taking a more personal approach actually it's policymaking policymaking comes first so I moved from practice of politics into policymaking I was making a bigger move than I than I realized and they work from here onwards that doesn't mean it's the only way they work here is another one from Confucius and actually it looks like the Western approach of going this way except it's doing it in a sort of an adapting way to manifest your bright virtue you should first govern your own states well how can you look after your own place then before that you should harmonize your clan before that you should quantify cultivate yourselves before that correct your minds before that make your will sincere for that extend knowledge before that investigate things so these are teachings that are in the Chinese culture and back to this one and this is the complicated part and the way because the two systems are embedded in each other quitting self to a project should involve convincing others that the product is going to work and if you're building the project there is a sense of adjusting others is saying we may have to make some changes here and then to complete the project there's a sense you may have to make adjustments yourself work harder and trim your sales whatever it is so how does this work the first stage of this the subjective you know this oh yeah okay in the first phase of this you it's very subjective we survey study and define what we need commit yourself convince others develop your project in the world and we all do that the next stage is about designing what we want what we think will be preferred and it's about managing the project in the world adjusting others and adjusting self we tend not to do that and I'm going to the end of the presentation going to be focusing on that and the third one is when we want to implement the whole thing it's an adapting so you have the project designed but to actually get it to work you have to be prepared to adapt the project otherwise it's not going to work things have changed and so on maybe you don't know as much money or whatever it is so let's look at that in the context of the subjective model that we already have seen and what's our what's our problem we've inherited a public service system and it's not that you blame anybody for it it's about maybe the immaturity of the people in the past but in essence we we essentially just look at these first three and we don't do much more so the individual proposes what is needed they tell the politicians and they hand it to the public service or the civil service so the sequence in which it goes those three what we do but then the next thing is we should select a good solution design what might work acquire the solution and then construct deliver and maintain what's the problem we don't do the bottom six if it doesn't work we go back and we give it to the politicians and say I think there's a problem here come up with a new manifesto or come up with a new solution or a revised thing maybe set up another body another semi-state body or something like that in terms of a structure that we tend to do the loop tends to go between the politicians the civil service is not being done give back to politicians they give a new instruction and it goes around what's the thing that is really missing okay the part that's really missing is moving from three to four to selecting a feasible solution whether it is with citizens whether whatever it is about or whether it is with China it's about going into managing the world in an objective sense maybe a bit of a parody but one is the problem hundreds of politicians handing authority to hundreds of civil servants who then hand the authority to hundreds of semi-state bodies would then hand it to hundreds of consulting companies would then hand it to hundreds of so-called experts is it administering a system without direct relationships with people is not management no so bit hard to say but let's get into this in the adjusting system to see what am I particularly talking about using the terms of public sector management this is the sort of thing that we have and officials mainly see responsibility and accountability when they're in trouble and they see things as state business whereas they should be seeing public service or at least it should be balanced it's a yin and yang but this is the part that's missing the yang in terms of the public and the people that are involved and that's what is being avoided so failure to connect with citizens but also failure to connect with the people who could be our relationship in China Chinese leaders who really do want relationships with us so handing it on to the IDA and then enter Ireland and then SFI and then that does not work when we're doing design the second phase this is what we should be doing who's responsible are they empowered is their transparency is their policymaking can you encourage them and when you're implementing who is accountable was it enforced have the authority to actually implement something where it's an engagement and so on looking at this in more detail and this is what the jigsaw is filled out but it's a little bit bigger now each of these sections actually corresponds to committing self convincing others which is what we tend to do your Europeans and adjusting others is what the Chinese came to do and adjusting self Japan so we're going to ignore mainly the US approach and the Japanese approach but just compare also the Europeans versus the Chinese and so what do we tend to do we're ten we are too focused on our responsibilities who's responsible for that okay they're they're responsible they have to do it but maybe there is a need for a form okay but then you'll need to empower people so what kind of empowerment is done set up another same as their body and another one and another one but what is missing as I said too much emphasis on this what's missing is down here which is the whole area of authority if you for any decision you're involving seven semi-state bodies and government departments and individuals the authority gets lost who was and their people making decisions about things because they've been told you have to deal with it and they're actually blocking ideas and reforms they shouldn't be blocking but they've been given we've been told to do it so it's a it's a missing bit and so to get from there to here it was a matter of perception how do we get a proper perception and where's the the flaw the flaw that has come is why is it that things are out so outsourced so much there is a theory which you can Google npm new public management which says we don't really know how to do it there should be a high trust in the market and private business methods that sounds like a good idea we should run our hospitals more efficiently using those but it has been researched and it doesn't work bringing accountants in to run hospitals does not work you actually need good doctors who are empowered to run hospitals and npm has become an excuse not to talk to people say I will hand it over to you know they're the consultants they know they know what to do and now let's look at the same from the Chinese point of view the sort of language that they talk they're much more into people so they're keen to cooperate to form agreements they want to do that and they have a history of invasions by Western colonizers from 1900 and onwards they want to avoid more violence against China and against Chinese people they want to be shown respect so respect is important they're open to persuasion they want engagement and they want reconciliation as global citizens they want to be part of a global world and the issue is if we're living up here and they're living down there there's something wrong and so the challenge and solution approaches convincing others and convincing ourselves is only good for analyzing there it doesn't provide you with the design or the implementation and we need to use the Chinese adjusting others lens so to learn about China by Chinese people and from Chinese culture learn how they see us and how we see them and this is the prerequisite for building our entire projects so the next just to show that this is possible that this structure of this nomology actually works here is a case of nomology done for decision-making in Swahili in Tanzania so non English speaking they did in Tanzania in Swahili and converted those words into a decision structure for five villages which had a water project and these are people who wouldn't have had education and they elected five people from each village to be the leaders and and then this is them building it if you were to focus in on the thing at the back it's in Swahili and this is them working on the project it is possible to do transparent decision-making anywhere it's not you're not confined to English language and this is them doing scoring don't have to use Western scoring methods they're actually working at the weights of importance of things using beads think no I think that's more important we would not be there here is a case of using the decision-making method for strategy which uses the Bagua structure the Yin Yang structure where you ask questions what's necessary to achieve this what's holding us back and the answers fall into these areas and and this is a case of where I was last in Xi'an actually it was done in Xi'an and you can see over here the the answers and you can see the Yin Yang there and we're actually analyzing answers they're being translated into English and we're allocating it into this for basically a Department of Finance for Shanxi problems and these are the translated main constructs and you can see that it was about bringing in good computer systems within Shanxi problems and you can see that the things that are logical these are the generic terms procedure price policy these are summary in terms of the project and these are statements we've done many of those projects as part of analytics in UCD and here are the answers very simple method and what you do as you look and see well what does this mean you're taking individual answers and it turns out that 30 of them said we need better procedures for running our MIS systems and also we need to do it better in practice and also there needs to be better leadership this was for don't for five counties the five counties in Shanxi problems this was the one for Xi'an the other five of the other four being done at the moment and some of them are more basic that they're saying we just need better computers here is one that I did when from which I developed ideas which is 1974 and it was to help solve the total and traffic problem now one is interesting in all of this is the Yin and Yang all you're looking for is the imbalance and the biggest imbalance actually is in here nine people said we need to restructure the departments because you're three or four government departments all had something to do with transport local government or environment and transport and authority and justice and so on and only one person said yes but we know there's nobody there that can actually do the restructuring so what are you going to do that and actually out of that came the idea of reform of government departments and the Department of Economic Planning and Development because you needed an overview department to help do such a restructuring so the problem there was that department was set up and then the Department of Finance said we couldn't trust a department like that there isn't answerable to us and they basically spent two years wrecking it and then Charlie Howie got in 79 he wanted to do both himself you know run the finance and thesis so he was very happy to get rid of it and that's as far as it went and it would it be nice if Martin had been here because he would give his own view on that and this is one I did on the Irish economy which was well received by the Taoiseach at the time and by others and it's essentially when you look at the content of the answers 45 of them said we need leadership to develop a consensus and those was the next biggest was we need a consensus and that was what was needed at the time simple solutions and so the difficulties we were running a bit short of time so maybe we could lead those to some of the questions and doing persons missing here that would have liked to have been here is Jim Long because we were trying to do this with Limerick and Shannon because China has an obsession with Shannon because they think this is where the gold at the end of the rainbow was you know this is where the magic is and they want a piece of magic the only things they don't realize that Shannon is one person and a secretary where is it in China you're talking about industry parks with 10,000 people in Australia so anyway but it was blocked by just one official and so coming to the end of this we're things at the moment the new president well you he's over a year there now his father is from Shanxi province so that's his family that's his plan he has to do something for there and the capital Xi'an you can see that in there capital Changxi province was actually for for four or five tenancies was the capital of China and it was the source of the Silk Road so what are they doing now the new policy is developed by new economic belt Silk Road from China to Europe starting from there and this is it originally the travels of Jin Zhang he went to India and then came back home and this is what they're keen on this is the current situation so we've had the good fortune this is the lady that I work with on the right wrong do and the guy in the middle is he would be deputy minister for Department of Science and Technology in Shanxi government and we now have set up a project to help them with three parties that offering the three parties we got a visit to the IDA and you can see that the people that are in there particularly relevant is the person I mentioned is there on the right then vice president of the IDA and a vice governor of Shanxi province quite it quite significant to have someone at that level here a presentation by people who are involved in research and production of chickens in Ireland to the delegation received very well and here is the meeting leading to the signing of the agreement in UCD this is the current state of play I would be delighted if there was interest in building on this and helping this because they are open to anything and so conclusions and way forward there are a lot of problems we need change the IDA model is American model into our American money into our is great are the enterprise Ireland Irish companies trying to export but if we're going to do what China wants which is that Ireland would become the commercialization hub for the West you actually need to mix these two agencies together a little bit of IDA a little bit of enterprise are working together and building with a policy that we could become I mean we are so big in the US into Ireland we could be so big for China into the rest of the world both are our issues to do with visas can't wait for the next program of government you must be doing something now and new public management is a problem not just it's not just a problem with Ireland it's Europe it's the Western world it has destroyed public service values in in Canada is being introduced currently in India and handing things on like that as created a government vacuum which is let's say we do the baby when we're talking about the questions so my point would be and why I'm delighted to be here is that I think there is a role for think tanks such as the Institute for international and European affairs to have maybe fill the vacuum the policy vacuum and that's it for a moment