The Rashomon Effect 

The Rashomon Effect is a term used to describe how a single event can be described in a variety of ways due to the unreliability of multiple witnesses. The witnesses’ unreliability and subjectivity are a result of situational, social and cultural differences. The term “Rashomon Effect” was coined after iconic filmmaker Akira Kurosawa first utilized the storytelling technique in the film Rashomon (1950). The movie and the Rashomon Effect influenced countless films throughout history. The Rashomon Effect transcended cinema and is a term that is commonly used in both psychology and law. 

Rashomon Effect movies

• Hero (2002)
• Elephant (2003)
• Gone Girl (2014)
• Vantage Point (2008)
• The Usual Suspects (1995)

The origin of the Rashomon Effect

When Rashomon won first prize at the prestigious Venice film festival in 1951, the world was introduced to the unconventional and revolutionary storytelling of Akira Kurosawa. At the time, Kurosawa's use of non-linear storytelling, unreliable narrators, and dynamic cinemato/graphy was groundbreaking.

What is the Rashomon Effect? What was the story of Rashomon that influenced so many filmmakers and culture as a whole? 

It goes without saying that watching Rashomon is a prerequisite for any filmmaker or film buff. That being said, it’s important to understand the plot of Rashomon to understand the Rashomon Effect. 

The film opens with three men, a priest, a commoner and a woodcutter, taking shelter from a storm under the Rashōmon Gate in Kyoto. The woodcutter and the priest are discussing the story of how the woodcutter found the body of a slain Samurai in the forest three days prior. 

A bandit was accused of murdering the Samurai and raping the Samurai’s wife. The woodcutter, the priest, the Samurai’s wife, the bandit, and even the ghost of the Samurai were summoned at a trial. However, each account of the event is different and contradictory. The film ends rather ambiguously without a clear resolution of what actually occurred.

The film found success not only because of its engaging story, but its exploration of a common human experience — the quest for truth convoluted with deception, ego, and vanity. Some of cinema’s most prolific filmmakers have drawn on Kurosawa’s Rashomon style storytelling to tell their own stories. Let’s take a look at how the Rashomon Effect can impact story. 

 

 How to Prevent the Rashomon Effect

In this post, I'll walk you through some practical and effective countermeasures that you can embrace to consolidate people's perspectives, and prevent misalignments.

Ask follow-Up Questions

To fix something you first need to be aware of it yourself. In this regard, nothing is quite more powerful than asking the right set of questions.

Asking precise questions allows you to learn a lot about other people's perspectives, measure the extent to which they diverge from reality, and easily course-correct.

So here some practical examples:

• Meeting Outputs

Meetings are probably the clearest example where people just assume different things. Video calls, now that the entire world has been dragged into remote work, make things even harder.

After a meeting ends never assume that the conclusion is clear to everyone in the room.

Ask the end of the meeting if the output is clear to everyone? And if so, ask them what is it? Just listen carefully to their responses. Crapes and knowledge gaps will be easier to spot immediately and fix without even leaving the call.

• Company-Wide Internal Memos

It's a common practice for founders/CEOs or managers to share company-wide or team-wide internal memos.

These communications are often about the company or team strategies, tactics, or just endeavors that the team will be taking.

Don't just share them. Measure to what extent your company is aware of them and if people have doubts.

Use tools that give you the ability to see who’s seen or hasn’t seen messages. This is especially helpful when working asynchronously.

Always close the feedback loop by asking questions.

See Things Through Someone else's eyes

Disconnection and misalignments are perspective problems.

Sometimes it's easy to detect them: people feel more comfortable in bringing their doubts to meetings, or the disconnect is just obvious to see. Other times divergences are much more subtle to spot.

Learn how to run an occurred event (like an assigned task, an important decision, a meeting, or a specific performance review, etc) as you were the other person. Forcing yourself to experience stuff through someone else's eyes, or to use an engineering metaphor, run other's people thought processes in your virtual machine will help you spot subtle gaps and misunderstandings before it's too late.

So, when someone tells you an idea, you should instantly make connections:

• Why are they telling you this?
• Why now? Why you?
• What context do they have on this?
• Do they have all the data to make the right decisions?

Go through this exercise multiple times a day. There are no obvious shortcuts. The more you know your team and the work environment, the better your instinct becomes.

It's a learned skill that comes from empathy, recognition memory, and EQ.

Design Context

Most people think conflict arises when A thinks X and B thinks Y. In reality, conflict is more likely to arise when people don’t share the same amount of context or data, not when they don’t share the same ideas. Asymmetry of information inevitably leads to different evaluations of circumstances and different judgments calls.

Seamlessly, if you want to prevent people from having divergent perspectives on things, you should provide the same amount of data to everyone.

You build this shared context layer by:

• Overcommunicating
• Improving breadth of shared knowledge across your company
• Insisting of repetition for key messages
• Embracing transparency
• Limiting private chat conversations
• Communicating thoroughly at all speeds: storage, async and real-time
• Avoiding information silos and lack of visibility

If you're running a hybrid or fully distributed team, these aren't just tips, but quite mandatory operating principles. Your competition is likely operating this way, and you probably need to as well.

If you're building a colocated company this might still be more relevant than you think. Embracing some principles from remote work is likely to give the option to go hybrid and hire more international talent in the forthcoming future.

Repeat, repeat, repeat

Our mind is only wired to see things through a single point of view. This is one of the reasons, we feel awkward when we repeat things more than once. In reality, when you say something for the 5th time, there's someone in your company who's only hearing it for the first time.

Great leaders intuitively know how important is to repeat the same message, the same story, the same narrative, over and over again. They simply never get tired of repeating the same things over and over again. Not because they're dumb, but because they're aware of this effect.

Write Things Down

Leverage async memorialized communication.

Writing things doesn't just help your organization to create a shared context/information layer by making things easier to access, search and read.

It also helps you shape and consolidates what your team thinks at any time.

Make sure you take notes during the meeting and make sure people who attended the meeting read them. Meeting notes are a way for you to reinforce the conclusion of the meeting and, again, consolidate everyone's perspective toward a single direction.

Whoever sets the meeting controls the agenda, but it's whoever takes the meeting notes who controls the outcome.

Don't just limit to meetings, create the habit of leveraging async memorialized communications for just about anything that's relevant in your company or team. This will help you consolidate regularly the perspectives of all the people you interact with and make use that everyone has a shared understanding of what's going on.