Today, being the
18th of November, 2013, Japheth J Omojuwa the prolific “factivist”
in Nigeria actually inspired me to write this piece. For those who haven’t had
the opportunity of knowing him or haven’t read any of his numerous articles,
all I can say is; what a miss!! However, you can read a little bit about him on
his webpage; omojuwa.com or if you can, visit the Freie University in Germany
where he currently lectures, or you can simply follow him on twitter @omojuwa,
where I got to read, meditate, and expound on his tweet earlier today which set
the muse of this piece today. While tweeting facts about the current state of
the nation he wrote and I quote; “an average Nigerian calls a confident person
“proud.” It is the reason we work hard to prevent such people from rising at work
place.”
This statement
isn’t only true, but most people reading this have actually being a victim of
this or have been the predator, accuser or the one who is envious of the
“proud” chap. We all know such people or we are such, ourselves. Nothing seems
to be right in that envious person’s sight, and there’s nothing the proud guy
do or say that sits well with the average Nigerian as Omojuwa points out. We
all know them at work. They always find reason to object to anything that is
said by the confident fellow. No matter how inconsequential the matter they
can’t help but say, “but…” Here’s a typical script:
“Proud”
Nigerian: “I think my new process of getting to attend to customers quickly is really
good.”
Average Nigerian: “OK, but what do you mean by quickly and the term quickly is relative?”
“Proud” Nigerian: “The process just seems to be doing a good job so far.”
Average Nigerian: “But why shouldn’t it? Everybody seems to be committed to doing their job as before.”
“Proud” Nigerian: “Fine. I’m just saying this innovative process so far has been quite good.”
Average Nigerian: “Yeah, but what does ‘quite good’ mean exactly’?”
Talking to those kinds of people is painful. The conversation never seems to move — it’s always wedged. In meetings they’re the worse: they object to the most minor details in presentations, frustrating the presenter and everyone else. Their net impact on the meeting is generally negative, and they make such meetings stretch by 30 minutes or an hour longer than it needs to be. And I can bet that no right-minded person wants meetings to be longer than necessary. And as most focused decision makers would rightly agree that any meeting that stretches for over an hour or two becomes unproductive and in most cases retrogressive.
You might not know it but there’s a special term for those types of people, which we can roughly sum up as average Nigerians: they’re CAPTIOUS. To be captious is to raise petty, trivial, inconsequential, insignificant, paltry or irrelevant objections. For this piece, petty would be the most appropriate. However, what is difficult to do is to propound a theory of what constitutes “petty.” However, like madness, I think most of us know it when we see it. Without having really clear criteria for them, we can identify easily petty objections. And very often, petty objections have a clear causal impact on people in meetings: they roll their eyes, cringed their faces, and the occasional; what the f…., often escape hitherto sealed lips. Of course, sometimes people roll their eyes to what are in fact smart objections, but I think most of the time most people (not the average Nigerian) know which objections are trivial and which actually matter. Ultimately, we have to rely on our own (fallible) judgment to decide what’s relevant and what’s trivial, or when someone is being captious and when he’s not.
What’s the possible remedy from this? Introduce the word “captious” into your office’s lexicon or in your daily conversations or on twitter discussions. Having a sharper way of describing those people can help you more easily spot them, and also hopefully discourage them (because they usually know you know they’re captious). I will also prescribe some daring steps in curbing captiousness, by strategically placing large signs with “captious” printed on them in your meeting rooms, or you can actually go a step further by printing the word captious on caps, so that if anyone did behave captiously, it’s easier to cap the cat in question. Although the word is not to be abused: if any comment or objection is labeled as “captious,” then we might run the risk of silencing smart ideas. Use the word, but use it wisely.
In any case, please don’t be captious yourself. Don’t be an average Nigerian, and to those “proud” Nigerians, please continue to put us on the world map.
Average Nigerian: “OK, but what do you mean by quickly and the term quickly is relative?”
“Proud” Nigerian: “The process just seems to be doing a good job so far.”
Average Nigerian: “But why shouldn’t it? Everybody seems to be committed to doing their job as before.”
“Proud” Nigerian: “Fine. I’m just saying this innovative process so far has been quite good.”
Average Nigerian: “Yeah, but what does ‘quite good’ mean exactly’?”
Talking to those kinds of people is painful. The conversation never seems to move — it’s always wedged. In meetings they’re the worse: they object to the most minor details in presentations, frustrating the presenter and everyone else. Their net impact on the meeting is generally negative, and they make such meetings stretch by 30 minutes or an hour longer than it needs to be. And I can bet that no right-minded person wants meetings to be longer than necessary. And as most focused decision makers would rightly agree that any meeting that stretches for over an hour or two becomes unproductive and in most cases retrogressive.
You might not know it but there’s a special term for those types of people, which we can roughly sum up as average Nigerians: they’re CAPTIOUS. To be captious is to raise petty, trivial, inconsequential, insignificant, paltry or irrelevant objections. For this piece, petty would be the most appropriate. However, what is difficult to do is to propound a theory of what constitutes “petty.” However, like madness, I think most of us know it when we see it. Without having really clear criteria for them, we can identify easily petty objections. And very often, petty objections have a clear causal impact on people in meetings: they roll their eyes, cringed their faces, and the occasional; what the f…., often escape hitherto sealed lips. Of course, sometimes people roll their eyes to what are in fact smart objections, but I think most of the time most people (not the average Nigerian) know which objections are trivial and which actually matter. Ultimately, we have to rely on our own (fallible) judgment to decide what’s relevant and what’s trivial, or when someone is being captious and when he’s not.
What’s the possible remedy from this? Introduce the word “captious” into your office’s lexicon or in your daily conversations or on twitter discussions. Having a sharper way of describing those people can help you more easily spot them, and also hopefully discourage them (because they usually know you know they’re captious). I will also prescribe some daring steps in curbing captiousness, by strategically placing large signs with “captious” printed on them in your meeting rooms, or you can actually go a step further by printing the word captious on caps, so that if anyone did behave captiously, it’s easier to cap the cat in question. Although the word is not to be abused: if any comment or objection is labeled as “captious,” then we might run the risk of silencing smart ideas. Use the word, but use it wisely.
In any case, please don’t be captious yourself. Don’t be an average Nigerian, and to those “proud” Nigerians, please continue to put us on the world map.
Nice. Deep. True.
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