A Logical Architecture for Negotiation Styles in 23 Countries
Richard Lewis’s diagrams
When the leadership-style chart for a country tells you how the room is organised, the negotiation-style chart tells you what happens once people start talking. They are not the same thing. A German leader is autocratic-systematic in the org chart but methodical-evidence-heavy at the table. An Italian leader sits on top of a family hierarchy in one chart and conducts a verbose, flexible, expressive negotiation in the other. For anyone running a global IT delivery function, leadership-style and negotiation-style together form a much more useful predictive pair than either alone.
In August 2015, Business Insider published a follow-up to the 50-country leadership post we covered earlier on bub.im — this time twenty-three diagrams from Richard D. Lewis, drawn from When Cultures Collide, mapping negotiation patterns rather than authority structures. The original article and the World Economic Forum’s 2016 republication both carry the same diagrams; the captions below come from those sources verbatim.
Below: a three-layer logical architecture that decomposes the 23 styles into a smaller set of archetypes, a summary table mapping each country to its archetype, and the full country-by-country gallery with PPM-lens commentary.
1. The logical architecture
Negotiation styles can be decomposed onto three orthogonal dimensions. Combine them and the 23 country styles collapse into seven archetypes.
| Layer | Dimension | Spectrum | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 — Stance | Directness | Cards-on-the-table ↔ Coded / indirect | How explicit the other side will be about what they want |
| L2 — Tempo | Pace | Quick close ↔ Patient build ↔ Discursive | How long it will take, and what the “wasted” time is doing |
| L3 — Register | Expression | Restrained ↔ Evidence-heavy ↔ Expressive ↔ Coded | What kind of input actually moves the needle |
Combined, these dimensions produce seven negotiation archetypes:
| ID | Archetype | Stance | Tempo | Register | Representative countries |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N1 | Direct & Decisive | Cards on the table | Quick close | Restrained | Americans, Canadians, Hong Kong, Koreans, Australians |
| N2 | Logical & Methodical | Direct | Patient build (evidence first) | Evidence-heavy | Germans, French, Dutch, Swiss |
| N3 | Concise & Reserved | Direct but minimal | Slow but final | Restrained | Finns, Norwegians |
| N4 | Expressive & Eloquent | Direct, emotive | Variable | Expressive / rhetorical | Italians, Spaniards, Hungarians |
| N5 | Coded & Understated | Indirect | Slow build, post-meeting close | Coded | UK, Indian English, Indonesians, Bulgarians |
| N6 | Patient & Relational | Indirect | Long build; decisions elsewhere | Restrained | Chinese, Singaporeans |
| N7 | Hybrid / Polar | Variable | Variable | Switches register mid-negotiation | Swedes, Poles, Israelis |
A practical reading of the table — what each archetype is actually doing to you when you sit across from it:
| If they’re… | Expect… | Practical move |
|---|---|---|
| N1 Direct & Decisive | A clear “yes” or “no” within the meeting; pressure to commit | Have your concession band pre-agreed internally — they will push for closure |
| N2 Logical & Methodical | Long evidence accumulation before any movement | Bring data, bring more data, expect the case to be relitigated regardless |
| N3 Concise & Reserved | Long silences that are not disagreement | Stop talking. Silence is a negotiation tactic, not a vacuum to fill |
| N4 Expressive & Eloquent | Verbose, emotive arguments that range widely | Don’t mistake volume for position. The actual decision often emerges late |
| N5 Coded & Understated | Polite, ambiguous responses; closure happens after the meeting | Decode the coded speech, plan a follow-up, and don’t push for a live close |
| N6 Patient & Relational | Meetings that gather information rather than decide; the real decision is made offline by people not in the room | Identify the offline decision-makers; invest in the relationship before the deal |
| N7 Hybrid / Polar | Register-switching that can read as inconsistency | Read the mode shift as a signal, not a contradiction. Match the register |
2. Country-by-country
All 23 of Lewis’s negotiation diagrams, with the original captions and a PPM-lens note. <!– TODO: mirror images to /static/img/negotiation-23/<country>.jpg and rewrite src= –>
United States — N1 Direct & Decisive
Americans lay their cards on the table and resolve disagreements quickly with one or both sides making concessions.
The American style fits any North-American-owned project that wants to call a steering committee, present three options, and close on one before lunch. The pathology is the speed — Americans will read your hedging as a stall, and your need to consult your team as weakness.
Canada — N1 Direct & Decisive (harmony-seeking)
Canadians are inclined to seek harmony but are similar to Americans in their directness.
Direct, but with the abrasive edges sanded off. Treat as N1 in tempo, N3-adjacent in tone.
United Kingdom — N5 Coded & Understated
People in the UK tend to avoid confrontation in an understated, mannered, and humorous style that can be either powerful or inefficient.
If a British colleague says “I’m not entirely sure that’s quite the direction we’d want to go in”, that is not a hedge. That is a no. The mannered style and the coded speech are the same instrument. Negotiations almost always close after the meeting, not in it — a UK “let me come back to you” is not procrastination, it is the actual decision-making step.
Germany — N2 Logical & Methodical
Germans rely on logic but “tend to amass more evidence and labor their points more than either the British or the French.”
A German negotiation is almost a research review with budgets attached. Bring the source documents, the assumptions, and the dependency map. They will find the gap in your reasoning, and they expect you to thank them for it.
France — N2 Logical & Methodical (Adversarial)
When meeting with the French, be prepared for a vigorous, logical debate.
Logic, but adversarial. The French style treats negotiation as a public test of the argument, not the relationship. Don’t take the heat personally; you have not lost the room, you are in the room.
Italy — N4 Expressive & Eloquent
Italians “regard their languages as instruments of eloquence” and take a verbose, flexible approach to negotiations.
Verbose, expressive, and flexible — that last word is the operative one. Positions taken with great force at 10:00 may be softened with equal force at 11:30. Stay engaged; do not pin the room to its first statement.
Spain — N4 Expressive & Eloquent
Like Italians, Spaniards will “pull out every stop if need be to achieve greater expressiveness.”
Treat as a sibling of the Italian style. The expressive register is the signal, not noise around the signal.
Sweden — N7 Hybrid / Discursive
Among the Nordic countries, Swedes often have the most wide-ranging discussions.
A wide-ranging discussion that arrives at a durable consensus. Slow upstream, fast downstream. Pair this with the Swedish leadership style (egalitarian-decentralised) and you understand why Swedish vendors take longer to commit but rarely walk back on what they have signed.
Finland — N3 Concise & Reserved
Finns tend to value concision.
Few words, long silences, decisive close. Do not fill the pauses. A Finnish “yes” carries more weight than an American “absolutely” — and they know it.
Norway — N3 Concise & Reserved
Most Norwegians fall somewhere in between Swedes and Finns.
The Nordic middle ground. More discursive than Finns, less wide-ranging than Swedes.
Switzerland — N2 Logical & Methodical (Quiet)
The Swiss tend to be straightforward, nonaggressive negotiators. They obtain concessions by expressing confidence in the quality and value of their goods and services.
The Swiss don’t push, they anchor. Concessions are extracted by the calm, repeated assertion of value — not by counter-pressure. The least theatrical of the N2 archetypes, and worth understanding in detail given dormakaba’s HQ context.
Hungary — N4 Expressive & Eloquent
Hungarians value eloquence over logic and are unafraid to talk over each other.
Pure expressive register. Talking over each other is engagement, not rudeness. The Hungarian leadership archetype (cynical) tells you what the underlying attitude is; the negotiation style is what that attitude sounds like out loud.
Bulgaria — N5 Coded & Understated (Bureaucratic)
Bulgarians may take a circuitous approach to negotiations before seeking a mutually beneficial resolution, which will often get screwed up by bureaucracy.
Lewis’s caption is uncharitable but not wrong, and Bulgarians will recognise the pattern faster than anyone else reading this post. The “circuitous approach” is the връзки protocol showing up in negotiation form: the real positioning happens around the table, not at it. Coffee, an aside in the corridor, a shared acquaintance from a previous job — these are not preliminaries, they are the negotiation. “Will often get screwed up by bureaucracy” describes the legacy circuit I wrote about in the leadership post — formal channels that fail to deliver what informal ones already settled. The Sofia IT and multinational circuit operates closer to N3 (concise, decisive, post-meeting follow-up) and is poorly described by this caption. As with the leadership chart, the single most useful Bulgaria-specific advice for foreigners is: find out which circuit you are in before you sit down.
Poland — N7 Hybrid / Polar
Poles often have a communication style that is “enigmatic, ranging from a matter-of-fact pragmatic style to a wordy, sentimental, romantic approach to any given subject.”
The polar style: pragmatist in one breath, romantic in the next. Mode shifts carry information — track which register the room is in, and match it.
Netherlands — N2 Logical & Methodical (Discursive)
The Dutch are focused on facts and figures but “are also great talkers and rarely make final decisions without a long ‘Dutch’ debate, sometimes approaching the danger zone of over-analysis.”
The polder model applied to negotiation. Logical and evidence-based, but also fundamentally consensual — you do not close a Dutch negotiation, you reach the moment at which the table runs out of objections.
China — N6 Patient & Relational
The Chinese tend to be more direct than the Japanese and some other East Asians. However, meetings are principally for information gathering, with the real decisions made elsewhere.
The negotiation in the room is not the negotiation. Identify the offline decision-makers, calibrate to the relationship horizon, and do not mistake meeting cadence for progress.
Hong Kong — N1 Direct & Decisive (Brisk)
People in Hong Kong negotiate much more briskly to achieve quick results.
The N1 of East Asia. Pace is comparable to American or Hong-Kong-British financial-services norms; the relational depth of the China pattern is intentionally compressed.
India — N5 Coded & Understated (Ambiguous)
The Indian English “excel in ambiguity, and such things as truth and appearances are often subject to negotiation.”
Highly relevant for HCL and Wipro engagements. Lewis’s caption sounds harsh in English; the underlying behaviour is that positions, dates and constraints are themselves negotiable in a way that linear-active cultures treat as fixed. A status report from an Indian PM is more often a negotiation opener than a state report. Read it as such, and the partnership works.
Australia — N1 Direct & Decisive (Loose)
Australians tend to have a loose and frank conversational style.
Direct without the American intensity. Frank but not aggressive. Pair with the Australian leadership archetype (egalitarian, “sit in the ring with the mates”) and the pattern is consistent.
Singapore — N6 Patient & Relational
Singaporeans generally take time to build a relationship, after which they can be shrewd negotiators.
The relationship-build is a gate, not a phase. Once you are on the trusted side of the gate, the substantive negotiation that follows is fast and sharp. Foreigners regularly mistake the trust-building period for the whole engagement and never reach the second mode.
South Korea — N1 Direct & Decisive (Energetic)
Koreans tend to be energetic conversationalists who seek to close deals quickly, occasionally stretching the truth.
Combine the leadership-chart family-conglomerate (chaebol) context with this negotiation pattern and you have a counterparty who closes hard inside the room and has a wider family-circle to refer back to outside it. The “stretching the truth” line is Lewis’s blunt phrasing; safer to read it as “positions presented with confidence may have a softer foundation than the delivery implies”.
Indonesia — N5 Coded & Understated (Deferential)
Indonesians tend to be very deferential conversationalists, sometimes to the point of ambiguity.
Deference can read as agreement when it isn’t. As with the UK, real positions emerge after the meeting — but for different reasons: not coded politeness but genuine hierarchical caution.
Israel — N7 Hybrid / Polar
Israelis tend to proceed logically on most issues but emotionally on some.
Two registers, switched deliberately. When a logical-mode Israeli negotiator suddenly shifts to emotional register, that is not a loss of control — it is information. Whatever provoked the shift is the actual point of leverage in the negotiation.
3. Cross-reading with the leadership chart
The negotiation chart and the leadership chart describe two different layers of the same culture. Reading them together produces a sharper signal than either alone.
| Country | Leadership archetype (50-country post) | Negotiation archetype | Cross-read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | A5 Meritocratic / systematic | N2 Logical & Methodical | Same instinct — evidence-heavy at every level |
| UK | A6 Charismatic / diplomatic | N5 Coded & Understated | Smooth politics in the org chart, coded speech at the table |
| USA | A6 Charismatic / career-driven | N1 Direct & Decisive | Personality drives the company, speed drives the deal |
| Bulgaria | A8 Hybrid / Personal-Network | N5 Coded & Bureaucratic | Same dual-circuit pattern in both charts |
| India | A2 Family / Nepotistic | N5 Coded & Ambiguous | Relationship-routed governance + relationship-routed negotiation |
| China | A3 Consensus (state overlay) | N6 Patient & Relational | Decisions made elsewhere in both charts — the visible meeting is not the decision |
| Italy | A2 Family / Aristocratic | N4 Expressive & Eloquent | Hierarchy decides, eloquence persuades |
| Sweden | A4 Egalitarian (decentralised) | N7 Hybrid / Discursive | Slow upstream, durable downstream — at every layer |
Two cross-cultural pathologies worth naming explicitly, because they are invisible if you only read one chart:
| Pathology | Where it appears | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Coded-speech blindness | Foreigners working with N5 cultures (UK, India, Indonesia, Bulgaria) routinely take ambiguity as agreement, miss the post-meeting close, and conclude they got a deal when they got a deferral | Build a follow-up cadence into every project plan involving N5 counterparties. Treat the second meeting, not the first, as the decision point |
| Velocity-mismatch | N1 cultures (US, HK, Korea, Australia) working with N6 cultures (China, Singapore) | Stop measuring “speed to first response” as a virtue. The N6 pace is doing relationship-build work that you cannot skip without paying for it later |
4. Takeaways for global IT and PPM
A short, opinionated list — bub.im is not a textbook.
| Pattern | Where it bites | Practical move |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting close ≠ decision close | UK, India, Indonesia, Bulgaria, China, Singapore, Japan | Plan the post-meeting mechanism as carefully as the meeting itself |
| Evidence accumulation never stops | Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, France | Bring the source documents to every conversation, not just the kickoff |
| Silence is content | Finland, Norway, parts of East Asia | When the room goes quiet, wait. The next sentence is more important than the last one |
| Register-switching is signal | Israel, Poland, sometimes Russia | A sudden mode change identifies the issue that actually matters to the counterparty |
| Build the relationship before the deal | China, Singapore, Korea (second mode), India | Allocate calendar time for trust-building. It is not optional; it is the deal’s longest pole |
The framework is a heuristic, not a verdict. Every Italian negotiator is not a verbose extrovert; every British one does not communicate exclusively in coded speech. But knowing the default the culture leans on tells you which behaviour is signal and which is just noise — and that, in a programme that crosses six time zones, is the difference between a clean steering committee and a recurring escalation.
Sources & attribution
- Diagrams: Richard D. Lewis, When Cultures Collide (3rd ed.), Richard Lewis Communications. All images © their respective copyright holders.
- Original article: Gus Lubin (with reporting by Jenna Goudreau), “23 fascinating diagrams reveal how people negotiate around the world”, Business Insider, August 2015.
- Republication: “Negotiation tactics differ around the world. These charts will show you how to adapt your style”, World Economic Forum (in collaboration with Business Insider), September 2016. Captions in this post are taken verbatim from the WEF/BI source.
- Lewis’s consultancy: crossculture.com.
- Companion post on bub.im: “A Logical Architecture for Leadership Styles in 50 Countries (+ Bulgaria)”.
Republished here for commentary and analysis; if any rights-holder wishes a diagram removed, contact me and it will be taken down promptly.