The Four Workarounds: How the World's Scrappiest Organizations Tackle Complex Problems

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Even people who became very famous for dropping out like Bill Gates , for example, actually did it with a safety net. His business had shown some success and was already doing relatively well when he left Harvard. This whole myth of entrepreneurs being heroes who do not have fear, who do not have a safety net, who challenge all the odds to pursue their dream is very inaccurate and leads to undesirable behaviors. In Leading Change, James O’Toole suggests that the strongest opposition to change initiatives tends to be cultural in nature, the result of what he so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” I was again reminded of that insight as I began to read Paulo Savaget’s Introduction. People need to change their thinking about how they think about change. This is especially true when resolving major crises by solving serious problems. All the change-making efforts involve deviance. What I tried to show in my book is that deviance, first, is different from disobedience. You can be disobedient and still conform to the rules.

The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) - Todd Henry The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) - Todd Henry

To give an example, I’m from Brazil. When I go to Brazil, I sometimes cross the street when the light is red for pedestrians. I wouldn’t do that necessarily in Germany because when I’m in Germany, no one crosses. Helps us live happier, successful, and more fulfilling lives’ Jenn Lim, CEO and co-founder of Delivering Happiness and bestselling author of Beyond Happiness Workarounds are very powerful mechanisms for deviating from norms, from these rules that constrain us. I had the desire to communicate with many different audiences, not only restrict [myself] to abstract concepts that normally stay in academia. I wanted to make sure that this knowledge could be used by many different organizations and individuals. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Then the king married Scheherazade. She had a gift for telling stories that left the listener enthralled and able to forget reality, if only for a moment. Once in the king’s chambers, Scheherazade asked if she could bid one last farewell to her beloved sister, who had secretly been instructed to ask Scheherazade to tell her a story. The king lay awake, listening with awe to Scheherazade’s story until dawn, when she broke off at an exciting moment. Riddled with curiosity, the king delayed her execution: he insisted on hearing the rest of that story. She used her captivating storytelling method to work around the inescapable authority of the king on that night and repeated the same workaround for 1,001 nights, thus successfully delaying her beheading one day at a time. With her indirect resistance, Scheherazade flipped the power equation: By the time she finished her thousandth story and said she had no more to tell, the king had fallen in love and decided to spare the life of the woman who had by that time borne him three children. “Once in motion, normalized situations may seem difficult to disrupt, but disruption is precisely what roundabout workarounds offer.” For ages, global corporations have been lecturing small organizations and not-for-profits on how to get things done. As it turns out, it should have been the other way around. In this groundbreaking book, award-winning researcher Paulo Savaget shows how the most valuable lessons about problem-solving can be learned from the scrappiest groups. Consulting gave me the opportunity to peek into realities that were very different from mine. Yet whether I was making recommendations for science and technology policy in high-income countries or evaluating social projects with traditional populations in the rain forest, my reports (and, in fact, all the studies I had read) included similar types of recommendations, such as “collaborate more actively,” “improve coordination and alignment,” and “engage in long-term planning.” These recommendations aren’t wrong, but they are too generic. They fail to suggest next steps, particularly in situations where we can’t afford to wait for a solution to a tough problem. This myth of the hero entrepreneur, who is visionary and who knows where we are going and is leading everyone to this, is not only inaccurate, but it’s undesirable as well on so many levels. It recreates and reinforces a very toxic culture in organizations that value some people who are portrayed as if they had special skills and abilities—change-making abilities—as if they know the future, and completely dismisses or ignores the contributions from a lot of other people who made things happen.

The Four Workarounds by Paulo Savaget | Waterstones

If you watched On the Basis of Sex, the biographical legal drama about RBG, you’ll have seen how by arguing from the position of a man’s diminished rights in front of all-male judges, RBG and her husband successfully set a historic precedent that unequal treatment on the basis of sex is unconstitutional. They chose the seemingly low-stakes case of Charles Moritz. If Moritz were a woman, he would have been entitled to a tax deduction for a caregiver’s expenses, but the law didn’t consider the case of a single man caring for his elderly mother. By winning this case, RBG exposed the broader sexism in US laws that afflicted women the most, creating precedents to press for changes in laws in Congress and to contest many court decisions that discriminated against women. Some roundabout workarounds are familiar to all of us. Social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic allowed us to buy time and avoid unsurmountable pressure on healthcare systems while we developed vaccines. Employees who invented some of our most beloved products, like the large-screen display monitor, aspirin, and the blue LED lighting, worked around corporate rules to experiment more freely until their invention was ripe to be revealed to their superiors. Homeowners in India, frustrated with men urinating on their walls, curbed this practice by placing tiles of Hindu gods on their walls; after all, urinators wouldn’t commit such a heresy. A smart guide to finding creative solutions for a variety of difficulties ... clever case studies enlighten, and business readers will appreciate the suggestions on how to make one's workplace "workaround friendly." ... Wise and level-headed, this delivers." — Publishers Weekly This book helps us live happier, successful, and more fulfilling lives." —Jenn Lim, CEO and cofounder of Delivering Happiness, and bestselling author of Beyond Happiness

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The Four Workarounds by Paulo Savaget | Hachette UK The Four Workarounds by Paulo Savaget | Hachette UK

The next best workaround focuses on repurposing or recombining resources, which can range from tangible to intangible, and from the most high-tech to the most basic. The key is to focus on alternatives that are available but largely ignored, as well as the different and unconventional affordances or assemblages of resources at your disposal. They provide an environment where people can experiment, where they can test, where they can be flexible. It’s adaptive-management style that works really well. Also, this idea of portraying them as heroes with special skills has been often reproduced by the media, for example, or even by business books, like the myth of the dropout. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Leaders must complete a rigorous examination of each of the four workarounds and then select the one that is most appropriate. The single greatest value of the material in this book will probably be derived from Savaget’s explanation of WHAT each workaround requires and then HOW to achieve success with it. Once in motion, normalized situations may seem difficult to disrupt, but disruption is precisely what roundabout workarounds offer. Here, we can learn from Scheherazade, the legendary Persian queen who used a series of workarounds to change the course of a seemingly inevitable fate bestowed upon her by her husband, King Shahryar. The story goes that Shahryar discovered that his first wife had cheated on him, and he came to believe that all women would betray him. After having that wife executed, the king decided to marry a new virgin every day and have her beheaded in the morning, before she had the chance to dishonor him.Oxford University professor and award-winning researcher Paulo Savaget reveals the ways that the scrappiest organizations problem solve and how everyone can use the same tools at work and in life. These cases remind us that we often find ourselves constrained or even trapped by pre-existing rules. However, there’s more than one way to be right, and simply following or breaking rules isn’t always the best way to get something done; often there is an option that lies in between. With some creativity and close attention to what rules do (and don’t) say we can benefit from their inadequacies to circumvent or otherwise avoid their purpose. This is especially appealing when we don’t have the power or resources to change things, or we don’t have time to wait for things to change because the need is too urgent.