Jeitinho

ops culturegovernance & risk

Brazilian Portuguese. The knack of getting something done by going around a rule rather than through it — usually with charm, usually without money changing hands, and usually at a small cost to somebody who is following the rule.

Where a gambiarra bends a material, a jeitinho bends a procedure. It lives in the gap between the impersonal law and the personal relationship: the queue skipped because you know the doorman, the form accepted after hours because somebody made a call, the deadline that moves because you asked well. Brazilians describe it with pride and with unease in the same breath, and the phrase that carries it — dar um jeitinho, to give it a little way — is a diminutive doing a lot of work: the -inho makes the manoeuvre sound small and forgivable.

For anyone working across Brazilian organisations the concept is operationally real. A change that goes in without a window, an access granted on a WhatsApp message, an exception that becomes the practice — each is a jeitinho, and each is the reason a control that exists on paper fails in an audit. That is the honest half. The other half is that it also names a genuine social competence in a system where formal channels are slow and unevenly applied, which is why the same person may condemn it in the abstract and rely on it on a Tuesday. Oxford's informality researchers catalogue it beside jugaad in India, blat in Russia and guanxi in China: different cultures, the same human answer to a rule that does not fit the case. Its technical cousin is gambiarra — the improvised fix in the physical or digital world — and the distinction worth keeping is that one bends a rule and the other bends a wire.

Disputed / commonly mistold A popular version of this story is inaccurate - see the note above.

Also known as: jeitinho brasileiro, dar um jeitinho, dar um jeito, jeito, malandragem, jugaad, blat, guanxi

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