The Indirect Ask
Proposing without pressuring
You need to make an aggressive ask without being aggressive. In this culture, directness is a weapon — and your job is to propose the same thing, three layers of indirection deep.
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Part of this story
The Negotiation Table
→A deal worth everything is on the table. The other party negotiates nothing like you do. Learn to find the deal that works in their framework.
Part of the quest
Cross-Cultural Intelligence
→From navigating silence in a Japanese boardroom to managing a team across four time zones — practice reading cultural signals that most professionals miss entirely. The skill that unlocks global relationships.
What you'll learn from The Indirect Ask
This scenario focuses on Proposing without pressuring — a critical skill inside the broader communication domain. You'll face a decision where the instinctive response is often the wrong one. After you make your choice, you'll see exactly what happened in the other person's head and why it mattered. The scenario is part of The Negotiation Table, a full interactive story inside the Cross-Cultural Intelligence quest.
Skills you'll build in Cross-Cultural Intelligence
More scenarios in this quest
You prepared your BATNA, your anchor price, your walkaway number. They prepared a gift, a meal, and three hours of conversation before mentioning business. Your entire playbook is irrelevant here.
In your world, you close deals with contracts. In theirs, the contract is a formality that comes after trust — and trust takes longer than your timeline allows. Unless you adjust.
The terms are agreed — but the handshake, the ceremony, the way the deal gets sealed matters as much as the terms themselves. Get the closing wrong and the deal unravels.
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