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

Product Information

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

The Four Workarounds: Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest The Four Workarounds: Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest

As Airbnb’s listings were far superior (they offered professional photography services for their listings, a more user-friendly experience, and personalized ads), users started going straight to Airbnb, ignoring Craigslist for their lodging needs. It’s a remarkable strategy that is suitable for use by everyone from nonprofits in low-income countries to big corporations in Silicon Valley. Boosted by high doses of caffeine and pain au chocolat, I spent months reading, synthesizing, categorizing, and comparing the data that I had gathered from the field. So, in a country like Zambia, diarrhea can be the second-biggest killer of children under the age of five.Rather than simply pushing forward on the work in a traditional way, you might try to leverage a \"workaround\", or a less-direct method of solving the problem. 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. This pivot took me to unexpected places, where I had the privilege of learning from scrappy organizations that don’t get the widespread credit they deserve. To my surprise, I realized that despite their different settings, characters, and plot devices, the stories unraveled in similar ways.

The Four Workarounds by Roger Wayne | Hachette UK The Four Workarounds by Roger Wayne | Hachette UK

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. The way hackers get things done also made me realize that people often follow conventional wisdom, which streamlines our responses to daily tasks. In 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. I had the desire to communicate with many different audiences, not only restrict [myself] to abstract concepts that normally stay in academia. Just about thirteen years later, and after very little additional formal training, Gonzalez was being prosecuted in one of the world’s largest and most complex identity theft cases.

This task involves the analysis of the ambiguity of the rules and the circumstances under which they can, or cannot, be enforced. His new book, The Four Workarounds, draws on examples from social impact organisations who employ four particular workarounds: the piggyback, the loophole, the roundabout, and the next best. In their creative approach, they have provided an example for a type of workaround that I’ll refer to as piggybacking. 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. These workarounds may not solve problems all at once, but they enable hackers to obtain good enough immediate outcomes—and quick wins can sometimes pave the way for big, unpredicted change.