I want to begin with a memory that is not mine but has been told to me many times. An old man, dying, calls his children to his bedside. He does not give them money. He gives each of them a single stick, and asks them to break it. They break the sticks easily. Then he hands them a bundle of sticks tied together, and asks them to break the bundle. They cannot. Whether or not it ever happened, the memory teaches what Ubuntu is — better than any definition does. Ubuntu and Decision-Making? The story is the answer.
What Ubuntu Actually Means
Translators usually settle on something like: Ubuntu, in its most cited form, is captured in the Nguni phrase 'umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu' — a person is a person through other people. It names a worldview in which the self is not a fortress but a node in a network, and in which dignity, identity, and success are inherited from and accountable to community. It has shaped post-apartheid South Africa, modern leadership theory, and increasingly the way thoughtful organisations think about teams. It is a defensible translation. But translation is the surface. Ubuntu carries underneath it a set of assumptions — about what a person is, what owes what to whom, and what success even means — that the English sentence cannot deliver.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.African proverb
The Question This Post Is About
Decisions made through Ubuntu take longer — and last longer. Why. The question is worth taking seriously, because Ubuntu is one of those concepts that loses its shape when handled carelessly — and recovers it as soon as the reader is willing to slow down and listen.
If you take Ubuntu seriously at work, the first thing that has to change is the meeting. Not its agenda — its shape. Western meetings are optimised for speed and for the loudest contributor. Ubuntu is optimised for something else: for the quality of decisions that hold. Every retrospective begins with the question of what the team made possible together, not who failed individually. The trade-off is real. Meetings under Ubuntu take longer. The decisions also unstick less often.
A Second Angle
For the person living far from Southern Africa — in a city of strangers, in a flat of one, in a job that has nothing to do with the village they came from — Ubuntu can feel like it belongs to someone else's life. It does not. The diasporic reading of Ubuntu is not a watered-down version. It is a different test of the same idea. Every retrospective begins with the question of what the team made possible together, not who failed individually.
Where the Concept Resists
Ubuntu is sometimes presented as the answer to the diseases of Western individualism. It is not, exactly. It is a different answer to a different question. Pretending it is a drop-in replacement for the modern self-help bookshelf does Ubuntu a disservice — and the reader, too. The work of taking it seriously is harder than that.
What to Do With This
There is no certificate at the end of Ubuntu. There is only the slow accumulation of choices made differently — meetings shaped differently, relationships tended differently, decisions weighed differently. The reward is not visible. The cost is real. Over time the difference becomes a kind of life.
The full philosophy, as a book
The full philosophy of shared success — across leadership, conflict, accountability, and the digital age.
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