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

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There are norms, rules, constraints that warrant the opportunities to work around them as well. For example, I reported in my book that some inventions that were created, like Aspirin and the blue LED, were created by people who were deviating from corporate rules and working around all these sorts of obstacles to develop their own personal projects. 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. 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. 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

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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. 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.’Interested in how business leaders and policy makers can improve our lives and spread happiness across the world? Could you do with a how-to go guide for subverting the norm and achieving huge wins, all with minimal resource? Or would you like to delve deep into your social brain, so you can create dynamic, happy and high performing teams? If you’re interested, then read on … 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. What are the main challenges and benefits of using AI for ATM network fault detection and diagnosis? Most entrepreneurs do not drop out of school. The school allowed them to build on their networks, build their knowledge and skills, provided a safe environment for them to test early-stage ideas. In Brazil, everyone crosses. I’m still conforming to the rules. I’m conforming to the rules of the game because everybody does.

Paulo Savaget on The Four Workarounds | McKinsey

A hymn to deviance and “scrappiness” and a rich repository of stories . . . Entertaining’ Financial TimesIn this volume, Paulo Savaget focuses on workarounds —“a creative, flexible, imperfection-loving, problem-solving approach”— and each workaround at its core “is a method that ignores or even challenges conventions on how, and by whom, a problem is meant to be solved.” He devotes a separate chapter to each of the four. Albert Einstein once suggested that problems cannot be solved by the same way(s) of thinking that caused them. Long ago, Charles Kettering observed, “If that’s how you’ve always done, it’s probably wrong.” 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.

FT Business books: what to read this month - Financial Times

Workarounds are very powerful mechanisms for deviating from norms, from these rules that constrain us. 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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.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.