"Evolving the Question" Consulting: Philosophy Cloud's Seiya Kamidate on How to Use Philosophy in Business

Kamidate's position is clear. The world's problems are not simple, so the company does not try to solve them with easy-to-understand packages. Instead, it keeps asking, together with its clients, "What really matters?" Kamidate believes that evolving the question itself through that process is what it means to use philosophy in business.

Kamidate is from Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and ShiruBe is the second company they have founded. As a student, they launched an IT-focused student venture, and the product itself was growing steadily. Then one day, the co-founders clashed fiercely and the organization fell apart. Kamidate says this taught them a painful lesson: no matter how great a product or service you build, a company cannot survive unless it can nurture its people and organization.

So Kamidate set out to learn about building people and organizations, working on organizational development consulting at Link and Motivation and at Recruit. Through their experience at these two companies, however, they developed a different sense of unease—this time with the approach of quantifying the state of people and organizations, setting issues, and consulting on that basis. Kamidate says that everyone has probably had the experience of mindlessly clicking "4" on a five-point scale in a company survey that arrives once or twice a year. Is it really right to look only at the numbers? Aren't we missing what matters behind them? How can we capture what numbers alone let slip through? Kamidate began researching these questions on their own.

Where they ended up was the view that human worries have barely changed in some 2,500 years. Philosophers have a long history of thinking these worries through. But philosophers' ideas are extremely difficult and hard to use as they are. If philosophical thinking could be made accessible and practical, it might be possible to build better services and organizations. With that in mind, Kamidate founded the company three years ago and created Philosophy Cloud.

At its core, Philosophy Cloud provides support through consulting. On the organizational side, the company first collects comments from employees about the issues their company faces. ShiruBe analyzes these and, by cross-referencing them with its own philosophy database, extracts points such as "What this person is really worried about is this" or "Although it hasn't been fully put into words, a clash of values like this lies at the root of the problem."

According to Kamidate, typical engagement services tend to slot issues into fixed packages such as "There is no psychological safety" or "The company philosophy hasn't taken hold." As a result, they say, the response often becomes a patchwork that ends with something like a management training session, leaving the root cause untouched. ShiruBe focuses on analyzing that root cause.

What has been growing recently is support on the business side, mainly for Japanese manufacturers; Kamidate cited Yamaha among the companies they have supported. According to Kamidate, one of the problems manufacturing companies face today is that society has become "a society that doesn't need convenient things."

As an example, they mentioned their work with a major camera maker. Functionally, smartphone cameras are now good enough. If you are thinking about cameras for the next 100 years, the market will keep shrinking unless you redefine why people would go out of their way to carry a camera such as a DSLR to take pictures. Kamidate sees this as true of products in general. We have entered an era in which everything must shift from being "something necessary" to "something that fulfills a richer value." So what value will people seek next? Kamidate says it does not lie on the extension of technological convenience.

ShiruBe works with companies to build, starting from the concept, forecasts of what such a world will look like, and supports them in creating their next products. Using humanities databases, not limited to philosophy, the company identifies the fundamental issues an organization faces. Or, looking ahead to the changes in people that will be demanded by a future that does not yet exist, it draws up new product roadmaps. These are the two pillars of the service.

Kamidate says that if they had to sum up what sets Philosophy Cloud apart in a word, it would be the ability to use a philosophy database. How do you put into words worries that society doesn't yet understand well, or issues that haven't been fully articulated? As an example, they pointed to a conflict that frequently arises in sales organizations.

Top-performing salespeople, they say, often miss the deadline for submitting receipts. Their thinking is: as long as I'm delivering results, just handle the rest however you like—the purpose of business is to make a profit, isn't it? Accounting staff, on the other hand, think: a large company functions as an organization precisely because it runs according to rules, so follow the rules. Kamidate says these two will inevitably clash. If they just keep throwing their opinions at each other, the only solutions are for them to stay on bad terms forever, or for the salesperson to buy a Starbucks Caramel Frappuccino and they somehow become friendly.

But this conflict can be explained with concepts. The sales side's view that maximizing results is good is called "consequentialism," and the accounting side's view that puts everyone following common rules first is called "deontology." Much of what we feel in daily life as "unreasonable" or "we just can't understand each other" has already been worked out to a considerable degree in philosophy as universal human problems. Kamidate explains that Philosophy Cloud's strength is being able to connect this to conflicts on the ground and sort them out.

So when they meet a company with a problem, how do they design the service they provide? When Iijima asked this, Kamidate first laid out a premise. Packaging something means assuming that problems can be patterned fairly clearly and solved. ShiruBe does not accept that premise and deliberately avoids packaging. Whereas typical services sell themselves on being easy to understand and simple, Philosophy Cloud is hard to understand and complex. That is because it takes the position that the world's problems are not that simple.

Kamidate goes so far as to say that if someone claims they can come in and solve your problems in three months, they're either a wizard or a con artist. The large companies they support have complex problems, have already tried all sorts of services, and still haven't solved them. There's no way they could be solved just by being involved for three months. What is possible, however, is to persistently face what matters together and keep thinking about it. Kamidate says they often tell clients: if you want to face this without glossing over it, let's work toward a solution together, rolling up our sleeves side by side.

The philosophy database is built from real problems occurring in workplaces. ShiruBe goes deep into the field through interviews and dialogue, collecting people's raw words. Then, one by one, it organizes and accumulates what ideas those statements are based on, the underlying assumptions, and related theories.

As an example, Kamidate talked about a company troubled by employees not growing autonomously. When each employee was asked "What is growth?", the answers were all over the place. When the team actually spoke with people involved in growth and education, the idea that "growth involves pain" came to light. In other words, there was a kind of rigid "this is how it should be" thinking within the company that one shouldn't grow in comfortable situations. ShiruBe takes such conversational data and the ways of thinking that can be read from it, and defines them with academic grounding.

When a company comes to them for advice, they check it against this database and visualize the issues by comparing them with similar patterns. Consultants then provide support based on that.

Iijima noted that when people hear "business and philosophy," what many probably think of is news like "Google hired a philosopher." Kamidate replied that ShiruBe does something entirely different and unique. When philosophers get involved in business overseas, they often serve as advisors to management, act as trainers for employees, or play the role of checking whether things are ethically correct. Kamidate said that's fine too, but explained the difference: ShiruBe goes deep into the field and uses philosophy to organize the real, messy problems happening there into a form that can be solved.

Kamidate also spoke about a longer-term vision. As the database accumulates, it will also yield social insights into what kinds of ideological conflicts are occurring in Japanese society. Ultimately, they want to feed that back to academia and connect it to original philosophical research.

The skill of the consultants who interpret the database and deal with individual situations is crucial. So how do they ensure that training can be reproduced? Kamidate cited two main approaches. One is systems. The more the database grows, the more use cases accumulate, and to some extent quality can be ensured through systems.

The other is whether a person has a "boundary-crossing spirit," which they emphasize in both hiring and training. Philosophy specialists tend to adopt the attitude that "it's specialized, so ordinary people won't understand." People with consulting experience also join, but those who retreat into one camp to protect themselves—saying "this is how consulting works" or "academics don't get it"—are not a good fit. Without the mindset of using new data and trying new things, hiring is difficult. They hire people with that mindset and have them develop a philosophical perspective through the database and in-house training.

Kamidate added that their consultants don't go in with high-level skills to cut straight to a solution. Perhaps the most important thing, they said, is for consultants to develop the ability to struggle alongside clients, persistently ask "What really matters right now?", and engage in dialogue.

In what situations do clients sense something distinctly philosophical? In response to Iijima's question, Kamidate said "philosophy" needs to be thought of in two ways. One is philosophy as it is commonly imagined: using famous quotes, philosophers' concepts, and formula-like frameworks. The other is "doing philosophy"—that is, asking "Is this really so?", "What is happiness?", "What really matters right now?"

At ShiruBe, famous quotes and difficult terminology are used in final outputs and reports but almost never come up in sessions with clients. What they value is asking questions and engaging in dialogue. Even when a client describes a problem, Kamidate says they don't simply accept it with "So that's the problem," but ask, "What really matters?" They emphasize not techniques like "I think, therefore I am," but continuing to ask and face what matters together. Taking this in, Iijima summed up that people who want to engage in dialogue through the approach of doing philosophy may be a better fit as clients than those who come looking for famous quotes.

Are there steps in the process of doing philosophy? Kamidate prefaced their answer by saying it depends on how the service is delivered, but said the most important thing is "deciding on the question"—that this is nearly everything. Many people say "we're struggling" or "this is the problem," but when asked to turn that into a question, they surprisingly can't.

As an example, Kamidate took up a worry often voiced by presidents and managers: "My team members don't grow autonomously." Iijima admitted that they had tried to think about it while listening but couldn't turn it into a question at all. Kamidate broke it down like this. To grow autonomously, you probably need a purpose. So you turn it into the question: "Should growth have a purpose or not?" Sometimes you can grow because you have a purpose; other times you experience all sorts of things without a purpose and realize you've grown. The kind of growth you can achieve by setting a goal is the kind with a fixed framework that's easy to plan, like a TOEIC score. But in everyday work, is growth with a clearly defined shape like a score enough? It seems something important would be left out. Which kind of growth are you looking for?

By layering questions like this, the person who was talking about "autonomous growth" moves on to the next question: "What kind of growth am I really looking for from my subordinates?" Kamidate described this as "the question evolving," and said that the more the question keeps evolving, the more what matters gradually comes into view.

Iijima asked whether, unlike philosophers, businesses need to produce output over the short to medium term, and so at some point must cut off the questioning and move forward. Kamidate replied that this is the same as with other services. What you do in business is almost always one of two things: create some output or decide on some action. ShiruBe also produces reports to understand the current situation and sometimes works with clients to consider the direction of initiatives and projects.

What clients appreciate most, however, is "reducing waste." Kamidate says it is harder to stop doing something than to start something. When people are doing something, they are usually continuing it out of momentum or a vague sense that "it seems like a good idea to do it." Just as in the earlier discussion of growth, by working through questions together like "Does your company really need this?" or "Wouldn't it be better to stop?", clients can make the decision to "stop" with a sense of conviction and without causing friction. Clients often tell them that this had a major impact on management.

On the market size for philosophy-based business support, Kamidate said it isn't yet big enough to form its own category, but it is true that such services are sporadically emerging around the world. By country, most are in Europe and North America. As a well-known example, they cited a case several years ago in which a company called ReD Associates supported adidas. The question posed then was "What is walking?" Until then, many products were aimed at male athletes and used primary colors such as red, black, white, and blue. As a result of redefining "walking," pastel-colored products for women were created, and from there the company shifted toward unique marketing and product development.

Iijima, who works in marketing, asked whether the way you climb the mountain is similar to designing a brand's purpose. Kamidate acknowledged that the way you climb is basically the same—it's an approach of thinking about fundamentals. On top of that, they cited as one of the values of philosophers intervening the fact that philosophy has thought about what is universally important to human beings. You can get at the essence in light of human universality. Faced with a trend, you can say, "Because human beings are universally like this, this element will continue to matter. Aren't we being swept along by the trend right now?" If you're going to expect something from philosophers or a philosophy company, Kamidate says, that is probably what matters.

Iijima responded that, from the perspective of a company that lasts 100 years, even the changes of the AI era may look like a small wave, and that if you can grasp what is universal in human beings, you can build a business. Kamidate said trends matter too, but pointed out that the large companies they support are already working on trends. They have markets around the world, bring in outside consultants, have talented people, and are doing Web3, blockchain, and semiconductors. If they're still struggling, then a different perspective must be needed—and that is philosophy. This, they say, is how they get companies interested. Kamidate shared that internally, the company has adopted the mission of "realizing a society that faces what really matters."

Asked for tips on how executives can bring philosophy into their daily thinking, Kamidate first cautioned that philosophy is not something like an energy drink with immediate effects. It's closer to strength training: it doesn't build up right away, and if it did, your body would break down. They'd like people to think of it as "strength training for the mind and heart." They also said it's better not to see philosophy as something to cling to—as in, just read this book, or just carry this quote in your heart.

Kamidate themselves still struggles, even as an executive who practices philosophy. But being able to "struggle in a healthy way" makes a big difference, they say. An unhealthy way of struggling is going around and around the same question—in other words, a state in which the question isn't evolving. You endlessly ruminate on "Why don't my team members grow autonomously?" and stay irritated the whole time. Iijima admitted to having experienced this, and Kamidate said they have too.

So for any worry, Kamidate makes a point of asking themselves at least once, "But what really matters here?" Then the question comes into sharper focus. Saying "grow autonomously" actually says nothing. Am I, the one saying it, simply trying to lower management costs and make things easier for myself? What does autonomous growth actually mean? Have I ever really done it myself? Can human beings even grow autonomously in the first place? In this way, the question gets broken down, and it should break down to the point where it can be solved through action.

If you proceed without doing philosophy, however, it becomes a "should" statement—"people should grow autonomously"—and the question becomes something like a cult. That, Kamidate says, is little more than thinking having stopped. So in practice, when you're going around in circles worrying about the same question, simply asking "Is this really an important question?" moves you a step forward. That's because the question gets broken down, shifts sideways, or is reframed as a different question. Kamidate agreed with Iijima's remark that "if you don't leave a worry as just a worry, and face it while considering whether it's the right question, it might feel a little lighter."

Finally, asked what kinds of companies Philosophy Cloud suits, Kamidate answered clearly: "large Japanese manufacturers that have been around for more than 100 years." About 90% of their clients fit that description. Kamidate believes Japanese manufacturing is important and has worked since the company's founding with the conviction that philosophy lies behind the revival of Japanese manufacturing. Their sales strategy also leans toward manufacturing. Manufacturers have many people with scientific and engineering expertise and are good at adopting technology. But simply adopting technology is no longer enough to be chosen; convenient things are no longer being chosen. Kamidate sees great potential to support companies that struggle with how to create meaning that makes users choose them, in terms of the power of articulation and the formation of meaning.

Asked how they differ from major consulting firms and advertising agencies, Kamidate said the number one reason clients give is "because they keep facing what really matters together with us." Major consulting firms set up three- or six-month projects, so they have to say something impressive within that period, and the process inevitably funnels toward that. Kamidate says that in just three months, you can't come up with a magic-wand answer that addresses both the history a company has built up and a globally changing market. Still, finding what matters ends up becoming differentiation and an advantage. It's not that they don't try to solve problems. They just have no intention of offering fast solutions.

Kamidate went on to say that for companies that have never used outside consultants, they don't think ShiruBe is the right choice for now. If a problem can be solved by approaching it fairly logically, it's more reliable to work hard on it yourselves or to work with a vendor that has the people and databases. If you've done that but it ultimately didn't take hold, nothing worked, and you can't even tell what was left—in that situation, they say, they tell companies: let's go peer into the depths of the problem together. Not seeking simple, easy answers, but settling in to keep facing something complex yet truly important together. Thinking together about whether that is what really matters. Kamidate said that this is philosophy, and with that, the conversation came to a close.