When you need to get things done quickly and effectively — especially if you have limited time, power, or resources — you need a guide to scrappiness. You need a playbook for finding new, creative ways to get from here to there.
And that’s just what you get in Paulo Savaget’s book, The Four Workarounds: Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest Organizations for Tackling Complex Problems.
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About the Author
Paulo Savaget is associate professor at University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science and Saïd Business School. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar.
Before entering academia, he was an entrepreneur and consultant focusing on social and environmental challenges such as poverty, inequality, and climate change. What he found was that generic management recommendations rarely work for nonprofits. They needed more specific guidance for overcoming the obstacles they faced.
So Savaget began looking for ways to think outside the box and innovate. He began to study hackers.
“The secret of hackers is that they weave through uncharted territory and, instead of confronting the bottlenecks that lie in their way, they work around them.”
He started his Ph.D. to answer the burning question: “Can we learn from hackers and deploy their methods to address our world’s most urgent and high-stakes socio-environmental challenges?”
The Four Workarounds is the manual for what he learned: Hackers and startups are masters of workarounds. When they can’t tackle a problem head-on, they approach it from another angle. And their workarounds fit neatly into one of four categories:
- Piggyback
- Loophole
- Roundabout
- Next best
About the Book
The Four Workarounds is divided into two sections. The first is an overview of the four workarounds. The second is how to use them in real life situations.
In Section 1, Savaget deconstructs one workaround at a time, explaining what it is and sharing case studies of scrappy organizations that have used it to move their projects forward.
One of the first things that stood out to me was the breadth and depth of Savaget’s research. The first few case studies in The Four Workarounds are from Africa, India, and Brazil. They aren’t from big corporations but small organizations I’ve never heard of. In fact, you may never have seen these case studies at all.
That’s precisely what makes this book so important. The underlying message is that we can all move mountains. We don’t need privilege or Ivy League degrees. We don’t need someone to give us a leg up. We only need a workaround mindset and a few workaround building blocks.
And that’s just what you learn in Section 2.
Here, Savaget describes the workaround mindset and how to explore possible workarounds when you need fast, effective results. He also explains how you can incorporate workarounds into a slow-moving enterprise business model and your personal life.
Section 2 was easier to read because it was Savaget the consultant talking rather than Savaget the professor. But don’t take this critique the wrong way. Every page of every chapter is valuable. If you gloss over any section, you’ll miss a strategy or lesson for applying workarounds to your projects.
My Takeaways
I felt incredibly empowered and validated by this book. And it’s largely because Savaget hasn’t drunk the business-school Kool Aid.
You’ll notice right away that he doesn’t teach lessons from enterprise organizations, though he does teach lessons from the three little pigs.
When talking about leadership, he says, “Instead of idolizing … so-called change makers, I suggest focusing on two key aspects that the management community undervalues in leadership: the importance of a safety net and the ability to manage messes.” (Bold added by me.)
You can almost see Savaget shaking his head. The gurus aren’t always your best role models. In fact, you hold yourself back when you try to imitate people who don’t value the same things or face the same struggles.
More importantly, what worked for someone else will rarely work for you. They had different resources, advantages, and opportunities. You need to find the best workarounds for your unique situation.
Here’s the truth…
It’s okay to be scrappy, messy, and not know what you’re doing. You can (and may need to) hack your way to success.
The Four Workarounds is brilliant. I highly recommend it. Not only is it well-researched and well-written, it will likely change the way you think about what’s possible.
