Tachikawa Model of Communication

On 2018-11-07, Tomoya Tachikawa gave a lecture on “Entrepreneurship and Omnidirectional Communication” at Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Tamachi campus. The mental model of communication introduced in the lecture was interesting, so I wrote it down.

Mr. Tachikawa’s Yosuga Co. runs a marriage agency. I have never used a marriage agency, so I had no idea what it was like, but it seems that a person in the role of coordinator communicates with clients and helps them to make things go in the right direction. As the president of a coordinator himself, Mr. Tachikawa has a business need to verbalize and teach other employees how to promote good communication.

On the other hand, I have the feeling that communication is not good. What is the difference between our mental models?

Tachikawa-san suggested that “communication” should be broken down into its various components, rather than being considered as a single, vague entity, and drew a diagram of event, representation, verbalizing, and interpretation. At first glance, this model seemed to be the same as Nishio’s original model that “fact and interpretation should be distinguished,” but upon closer listening, there was a big difference.

In Mr. Tachikawa’s model, there is an event in the mind of the other party, that event is verbalized and becomes an expression, and then I interpret that expression. In my “Distinction between fact and interpretation” model, on the other hand, the other party’s verbalized expression is the fact, which I interpret. I ignore the other party’s inner world because it is unobservable.

For example, one person may want to “start some conversation” and ask, “Did you change your glasses?” I might say, “When was the last time we met? To which I reply, “When was the last time we met? (true story) “Did you change your glasses? (true story) I took “Did you change your glasses?” literally as a question, “Did you change your glasses between the last time we met? I took “Did you change your glasses between the time we met before and now? Did you change your glasses?” I don’t think there is a different intention behind the expression “Did you change your glasses?

In other words, there were two points of distinction in “distinguishing between events and expressions,” and I was distinguishing the latter point. I called it “the distinction between fact and interpretation. On the other hand, I did not distinguish the first half at all. This may be the reason for my difficulty.

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According to Mr. Tachikawa on this page

• This story about the glasses as an example, it’s not a normal problem for communication, or as a result, you get what they are trying to do lol.

• I don’t think you’re responding to the other person’s intent if you cut off the conversation with “Yes, I changed my glasses.

• So I unearthed the actual statement.
  • Facebook 2015-01-03
  • In fact, “Did you change your glasses?” to which he replied, “I don’t know,” and after returning home he looked them up and reported that he had changed them on March 2 of last year.

  • www, it’s pretty hard for them to answer “I don’t know”.

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This page is auto-translated from /nishio/コミュニケーションの立川モデル using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.