Netherlands Directness

The lowlands of Ransdorp, Netherlands.

“If you want a better planet, conduct your meetings in a naked Dutch spa.” This was the unlikely advice offered to me when I interned at the European Commission in my early twenties. When I later got the chance to visit one in Amsterdam, I understood what it meant. At first it’s a disconcerting experience to be in a room full of other naked people. But once you get over yourself and literally start to immerse yourself—from the piping hot water of the steam room to the freezing bath of the plunge pool—it becomes empowering. With your clothes off there is nothing to hide or hold back. It is the perfect environment for deal making.

The Dutch love for the nude spa tells you something about their culture, which is as free from doublespeak and circumlocution as the plunge pools are from bathing suits. Sorry, let me be a bit more Dutch about it. They’re incredibly direct. In every way, all of the time. They believe in bespreekbaarheid (literally, speakability): the idea that no topic or idea is out-of-bounds.

To explain the source of Dutch directness, we need to look both to Dutch geography and history. The culture partly reflects the land: the flat topography, with almost a quarter of the country at or below sea level, means you can see for miles around; making the land as transparent and unguarded as its people. It matters too that the modern Netherlands emerged not from aristocracy rule, but the mercantile power and trading prowess that defined its sixteenth-century Golden Age. The Netherlands retains its monarchy, but Dutch directness means they are in no way insulated from criticism. Willem-Alexander, now king and then prince of Orange, had to abandon plans to build a luxury villa in Mozambique in 2009 after a sustained public and political outcry.

The Dutch will never hold back on what they think out of concern about how others might react. They don’t dance around people’s feelings and war-game their likely reactions. They just dive straight in, make the point, and move on. They will have no qualms about saying their girlfriend just left them, they got fired, or that someone’s idea in a work meeting was a stupid one. You always know exactly what people think, and that means you are never second-guessing or watching your back. To the Dutch this isn’t brusque or rude. It’s just a sensible way of communicating, without ambiguity or double meaning. If someone says you’re doing a good job, you know they actually mean it. Dutch directness has no fear of hierarchy either. An intern will be asked for their opinion, and a subordinate can criticize their boss if they disagree with them, without fear of reprisal. That is unique and valuable.

For the same reason, a meeting in a Dutch company won’t go through endless circles of small talk. It gets straight to the point. Everything else is seen as a waste of time. It’s a more efficient, and curiously more relaxed, way of doing business.

Dutch directness is also an essential part of how the government shapes policy and tackles problems. Drug policy is one obvious example. While the Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, is famous for its pot-smoking coffeehouses, the country actually has one of the lowest drug abuse rates in Europe. That is often credited to Dutch policies that have been considered excessively permissive elsewhere, but which have directly attacked various root causes of what had been a major problem in the 1970s: the separation of legalized cannabis from prohibited harder drugs, minimizing the gateway effect prevalent elsewhere; the widespread provision of treatment services and needle exchanges; and a tolerant approach toward offenders.

As a result, the Netherlands sees far fewer people who use cannabis progressing to drugs such as heroin, and experiences negligible instances of HIV transmission through needles. A drug policy that was focused on preventing harm rather than criminalizing behavior has been decades ahead of the rest of the world: a testament to the power of Dutch directness in identifying problems as they really are, not as society might think them to be.

When you experience it for the first time, Dutch directness can be bracing, and even a little uncomfortable. If you are not used to people speaking their mind without much of a filter, it can catch you off guard. But once you have gathered your senses, you realize it is also a very refreshing approach—whether at work or simply among family and friends. Directness means less ambiguity, fewer frustrations at not being able to put forward your view, and ultimately more genuine dialogue.

We might not want to conduct all our meetings without clothes, but we could certainly benefit from casting off some of the restrictions that hold us back from speaking our minds. The Dutch example shows that directness does not have to mean rudeness: often, instead, it is simply the language of getting things done.