Of all the Yoruba / Nigerian concepts that have crossed into English usage, Àṣà has had perhaps the strangest journey. Àṣà and Decision-Making? The journey itself is part of the answer. To understand Àṣà now, you have to understand both the original and the diasporic version, and the gap between them.
What Àṣà Actually Means
The most commonly cited definition: Àṣà is a Yoruba word for tradition, custom, or culture — but with a particular emphasis. Unlike a Western reading of 'tradition' as fixed inheritance, àṣà names tradition as practice — the continuous, adaptive doing of what has been found to work. It includes language, ritual, food, dress, courtesy, and the unspoken protocols of community life. It is the answer to the question: what do we keep doing, even as everything changes? That sentence is true, as far as it goes. It is also incomplete. Àṣà is held inside a wider Yoruba grammar — a set of related concepts, social practices, and proverbs — that the standalone definition cannot carry.
Àṣà ni iwà.Yoruba — Tradition is character.
The Question This Post Is About
Decisions made through Àṣà take longer — and last longer. Why. The question is worth taking seriously, because Àṣà 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.
The most concrete way Àṣà shows up in working life is in how a manager handles failure. The Western reflex is to find the responsible individual, document the failure, and move on. Àṣà insists on a slower, harder question first: what did the team make possible, and what did it fail to prevent? The shift sounds soft. It is not. Long-running traditions are audited every few years for whether they still serve their purpose.
A Second Angle
Outside the workplace, Àṣà reads differently — and harder. In a household, it is not a leadership philosophy; it is a daily, sometimes irritating, set of obligations. The phone call you owe. The message you have not answered. The relative whose problem is now your problem because no one else is closer. Long-running traditions are audited every few years for whether they still serve their purpose. Àṣà does not let you opt out of these.
Where the Concept Resists
There is also the question of authority. Who gets to speak for Àṣà? The traditions in which it lives are old, plural, sometimes in disagreement with each other. Anyone — including the writer of this essay — who claims a definitive reading is overreaching. The careful reader treats every restatement of Àṣà, including this one, as one voice among many.
What to Do With This
There is no certificate at the end of Àṣà. 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.