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

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If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. To find out more about the workarounds, join the Skoll Centre on the 10th March for a seminar with Paulo, Steve Naudé, Head of Wise Platform, and Professor Marya Besharov. Register for the next Insights for Action Seminar . As you search for loopholes, try it from two different angles. First, you can make use of a different, more favorable set of rules than the status quo. When zooming out of what constrains you and focusing instead on less common types of rules or paths less taken, you may find loopholes to get what you want in a technically right but unconventional way. Second, you can look more closely at the specific performance of the rules you find restrictive to either void them or make their enforcement impossible. This task involves the analysis of the ambiguity of the rules and the circumstances under which they can, or cannot, be enforced. 4. The roundabout workaround. 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. 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.

The Four Workarounds: Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest

The Four Workarounds, by Paulo Savaget Associate Professor of Engineering (Engineering Entrepreneurship) at Saïd Business School, a joint appointment with the Department of Engineering Science. 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.Here are other passages that also caught my eye, listed to suggest the scope of Savaget’s coverage: Professor De Neve, also a co-founder of the not-for-profit World Wellbeing Movement, said: ‘The question of human happiness is one that has been explored by many, over very many years. Our book aims to serve not only as a cornerstone of this exciting new field of wellbeing – with its significant consequences for economics as we know it – but also as a call to action for more policy makers to sit up and take notice.’

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

Women on Waves, a feminist pro-choice group, for example, offers legal and safe abortion services to people living in countries where abortion is illegal. People choose to terminate their pregnancies on board one of the Dutch ships in international waters. Why? Because on board a Dutch ship in international waters, the pro-choice legislation of the Netherlands applies. The organization uses the fact that what constrains people’s access to legal abortion is not their nationality but the law in the jurisdiction where they live. 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. This is the first field-defining book on the economics of wellbeing and authored alongside Lord Richard Layard (LSE). It is a foundational text on a new science that aims to span the whole of human life. So why can’t we take a free ride with Coca-Cola bottles to make medicines available as well? That was the initial workaround that ended up leading to many other workarounds. And with that, they increased the uptake of this medicine from less than 1 percent to more than 40 percent, 50 percent in a matter of a few years.

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This organization worked around these obstacles when they realized that you don’t find medicines, but you’ll find Coca-Cola in the remotest places on Earth. 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 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. 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. At its core, a workaround is a method that ignores or even challenges conventions on how, and by whom, a problem is meant to be solved.

The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) : The Accidental The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) : The Accidental

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. 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. What we observe in entrepreneurship, including but not limited to workarounds, is that the most successful leaders are not necessarily visionary. 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. Workarounds are good ways of getting things done and defying the status quo. But they’re not necessarily people-pleasing solutions. There are many ways of using workarounds. You’ve got to think a little bit about the impact of these workarounds that you may pursue. 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.” An extraordinary and iconoclastic study, The Four Workarounds…should be brought to the attention of every corporate executive, business manager, and entrepreneur with an interest in business decision making and problem solving. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented… Highly recommended for personal, professional, community, corporate, college, and university library Business Management collections and supplemental MBA curriculum studies lists.” —Midwest Book Review 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?

The Four Workarounds: A book review by Bob Morris The Four Workarounds: A book review by Bob Morris

In Brazil, everyone crosses. I’m still conforming to the rules. I’m conforming to the rules of the game because everybody does. Wellbeing: Science and Policy , by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve , Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science and Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. What are the main challenges and benefits of using AI for ATM network fault detection and diagnosis? Tracey and Samantha wrote their book for those leaders who are curious about how to lead sustainable high performing, innovative and impactful groups of people. They were approaching problems in very unconventional ways, very creative, very flexible, adaptive ways, sometimes out of necessity. But that stimulated them to create amazing interventions that have sometimes outsize impacts, considering the budgets they had and the access to resources they had.

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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-03-09 23:03:06 Guid 7d4370a9-24eb-4513-afe7-536e020138f5 Identifier 1lk8ocefg5nxwxn96jscwzisbebh39yyu8i237cn Podcastindexid 745412 Rssfeed 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. What are the best Fintech Frameworks and Standards to design user-friendly, scalable, and secure solutions? How can SWIFT messaging collaborate and coordinate with other ISO 20022 stakeholders and communities? 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.