The Portuguese art of improvising solutions with limited resources—making do with ingenuity when proper tools aren’t available.
Improvisation Philosophy
Desenrascanço is Portuguese ability to “disentangle” oneself from problems through creative improvisation. It’s fixing your car with a paperclip, making dinner from random ingredients, or solving work crises with unconventional methods. The concept reflects Portuguese colonial history—sailors navigating unknown waters with limited supplies developed desenrascanço as survival skill.
Brazilian “Jeitinho”
Brazil’s variant is “jeitinho brasileiro”—finding a way around problems, often bending rules. While desenrascanço emphasizes resourcefulness, jeitinho includes social navigation. Both reflect cultures where formal systems don’t always work, requiring improvisation. The concepts are celebrated but also criticized as enabling corruption and rule-breaking.
Startup Culture Adoption
By 2018-2020, Portuguese startup culture embraced desenrascanço as entrepreneurial virtue. Tech blogs compared it to “hustle” or “scrappiness”—building companies with limited funding through creativity. The pandemic (2020) made desenrascanço universal necessity—everyone improvised solutions with limited resources.
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