Work culture

The VSO strapline is Sharing Skills, Changing Lives; we volunteers enjoy creating alternatives to fit our own experiences. One of my fellow volunteers is frustrated that all she feels she can share with her colleagues is how to perform certain computer functions without using the mouse; or Sharing Shortcuts, Changing Lives. Another of my favourites is Sharing lunch, Changing Waistlines. My own variation of the moment is Getting Angry, Changing Nothing. It’s been a frustrating week.

I think it’s fair to say that, in general, Nigerian timekeeping is very different from our own. Of course it’s a generalization to say that people here always arrive much later than the time agreed, but it’s one that Nigerians recognize. I think this trait fits with the happier, more relaxed view of the world, in which people can be without the staples of a Western lifestyle (power, water, wealth) and yet laugh all the time.

Planning, too, is far less evident, far less formalized, far less systematic than I am used to. Again, I can rationalize it. If your life expectancy is 45, why would you constantly think of tomorrow? We’re a long way from the pension debates of the UK: provision for life after retirement just isn’t an issue for most people here. There’s little foresight, little thought given to long-term implications. It’s seen as strange that we should want to book one of the office drivers to take us for a three-day work trip any more than 2 days in advance. There are whiteboards in the offices with dates on, but activities seem mainly to be entered retrospectively. I haven’t seen anyone in one of the organizations we work in with a diary (and they don’t have computers either); it simply isn’t done to arrange a specific time and date for a meeting – instead, you wander round the site, hoping to find them in their office and with fewer than 5 people in the queue to see them. (Incidentally, though there are no diaries, most people’s offices contain at least 3 calendars; they’re almost always for past years.)

And yet, as another volunteer put it, everything seems to work; things seem to come together in a “haphazard, happy and effective way” in the end. Which, I have to admit, is infuriating to me. It does not help to convince people that planning is essential, when things seem to work out with or without it. Am I, paradoxically, here to learn that planning is, after all, not essential? That all of that stuff I’ve learnt on training courses about ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail’ and ‘Prior planning and preparation prevents poor performance’ is nonsense? I’d like to think I’m open to this possibility (although it’s not in my nature to do anything other than plan and make spreadsheets), and I can certainly see that it’s true – things do seem to work out here, and without the, seemingly unnecessary, stress and panic which a serial planner would go through. But I can’t help thinking that things would be so much better if the planning were there. If Nigerian people can achieve so much with this haphazard approach, think how much they could achieve with some planning and structure! And – is it too simplistic to say it? – if it worked so well, would Nigeria still be a developing country?

Clearly, imposing my UK-based idea of planning, project management, systems etc onto Nigerian culture wouldn’t work. But I’m struggling to know where the line should come between cultural acceptance and holding onto what you believe to be the best way forward. To what extent should I accept that the Nigerian way is to be flexible about what time a workshop starts, to invite people to meetings with less than 24 hours’ notice, to assume that things will work out and that a driver will be free if you need one? And to what extent should I hold onto my standards from home, where I wouldn’t accept anything less than a three month workplan in Excel, where meetings are chaired to within a minute of the agenda timings, and where people have synced electronic calendars I can have access to? My fear is that I will either end up trying to impose a structured system in my work here, which simply won’t work with this culture, or that I will go home with significantly lower standards in my professional life. At the moment, I’m just Getting Angry and Changing Nothing, which isn’t very satisfying; but when did anything change without someone getting angry about it?