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November 2, 2023 /

Strategic Thinking Skills

In this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Rich Horwath to discuss his new book, STRATEGIC: The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence.

Rich Horwath is the Founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, where he serves leadership teams as a strategy workshop facilitator, executive coach, and strategic advisor. His work has been featured in publications including Fast Company, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review. Chief Executive Magazine has introduced him as “the world’s foremost expert on strategic thinking.”

As a former chief strategy officer and professor of strategy at the graduate level, he brings a practical, real-world approach based on strong foundational principles to help executives develop their strategic capabilities. Rich has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX TV to share his perspectives on current business strategy issues. In addition to his work facilitating strategy workshops for leadership teams and providing executive coaching services and strategic counsel, he is a highly sought-after keynote speaker for groups ranging from 10 to 10,000.

Rich earned an MBA with Distinction from the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University and has completed postgraduate courses in strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College.

Listen to the full episode here:

Listen on: Apple | Spotify | Google

INTERVIEW SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS

In this insightful discussion, Rich provides a wealth of knowledge, offering practical approaches for leaders to enhance their strategic thinking and overall effectiveness. Rich simplifies the concept of strategy, highlighting the smart use of resources to achieve goals. This discussion covers strategic thinking, the necessity of perpetual learning, effective time management, and the significance of purposeful meetings. Throughout the talk, Rich underscores the value of leaders taking time for self-reflection and promotes a holistic approach to executive responsibilities.

Some key take-aways from this talk:

  • This talk underscores the importance of continuous learning and the role of reading as a catalyst for strategic thinking. Rich emphasizes the need for leaders to be effective synthesizers, connecting ideas from diverse domains. He also highlights the significance of asking critical questions after reading, illustrating how this process aids in applying concepts to real-world challenges. (6:21)
  • Rich offers a Strategic Fitness System, a comprehensive approach for leaders to strengthen their strategic capabilities. This system falls into four areas:
    • Strategic: Involves decision-making, resource allocation, and competition.
    • Leadership: Encompasses identifying leadership philosophy, values, principles, personal performance, and energy management.
    • Organizational: Focuses on tools, techniques, and checklists for effective organizational management.
    • Communicational: Emphasizes collaboration and effective communication and engagement with others.
  • He introduces a three-step approach – acumen, allocation, and action – to stimulate strategic thinking on a daily basis. This involves gaining insights, reconfiguring resources based on new learning, and prioritizing tasks to avoid distractions. (13:03)
  • Rich stresses the need for conscious time management and recommends tracking where your time is spent for one full week to see how much your time allocation aligns with your goals. He also suggests “mono-tasking” for at least 90 minutes daily as a means to enhance focus and effectiveness. (17:12)
  • This discussion also emphasizes the importance of aligning meetings with specific goals and priorities to ensure discussions drive value. Rich highlights the need for thorough preparation prior to every meeting and to focus on decision-making within meetings. (26:13 – 33:47)

Rich provides valuable insights into the realms of strategy and leadership, his emphasis on continuous learning, time management, and collaborative communication serves as a beacon for leaders navigating the complexities of today’s business landscape. He encourages leaders to focus on their long-term legacy and think beyond day-to-day tasks, fostering a mindset of growth to create value and have a larger impact. His actionable insights on strategic thinking provide valuable takeaways for leaders striving for excellence.

FAVORITE QUOTES

“I define strategy as really the intelligent allocation of resources through a unique system of activities to achieve a goal.” (2:55)

“The best leaders are really carving time in their calendar to stop and think about the business individually, and then collectively with their teams.” (5:04)

“What I’ve seen is 20% of meetings are really about decision making and 80% are about talking about things, giving updates, and it really should be flipped. It should be 80% on decisions and 20% on that discussion.” (33:47)

“New growth comes from new thinking. So, if you don’t have anything stimulating your thinking and you’re not thinking in different ways, meeting different people, reading different things it’s Einstein’s definition of insanity: We’re doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. So, I’m a big believer that new growth comes from new thinking.” (36:49)

RESOURCES

Rich Horwath:
Website | LinkedIn
Book: Strategic: The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence

FULL TRANSCRIPT
Sue Bethanis 0:03
Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposas monthly podcast, we provide perspectives on leadership. Today we’re excited to welcome Rich Horwath. Rich has been described by Chief Executive Magazine as the world’s foremost expert on strategic thinking. As founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, Rich serves executive leadership teams as a strategy facilitator, strategic advisor and executive coach. He has helped more than a quarter million people around the world develope strategic thinking and planning capabilities. That’s a lot Rich, a lot of people, you have been doing it for a while. Rich is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today Best Selling Author of eight books on strategic thinking, and has been rated the number one keynote speaker on strategy at national conferences, including the Society for Human Resource Management Strategic Conference, he has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS Fox TV to provide commentary on the strategic aspects of current events. And his work has appeared in publications, including Fast Company, Forbes, HBr. And today, we will discuss his new book, Strategic: The Skill to Set Direction and Create Advantage and Achieve Executive Excellence. So I really like to welcome you Rich, I’m just getting off the pickleball court. And I know that Rich also plays so we really want to talk about that today. But we’re going to try to talk about strategy, we could talk about, there is a lot of strategy in pickleball actually, but we will keep that later. For now what I want you to do, I’d love to hear your personal journey and why you decided to write this particular book. I read your bio, but now I want to hear the real stuff, the real good stories.

Rich Horwath 1:40
Yeah, thanks Sue, it’s great to be with you and excited to have the opportunity to chat with you all today. So my journey really started from this standpoint, about 25 years ago, and again, I’m dating myself a little bit. But at the time, I was working as a chief marketing officer writing a lot of marketing strategy plans for folks. And we were having a typical offsite meeting doing some strategic planning, and at one of the breaks were having coffee, and a manager came up and said, you know, Rich, I just had my performance review with my boss. And she said, I’m too tactical, I need to be more strategic. How do I do that? And Sue as you know, 25 years ago, most of the books on strategy by were people by planning, it was more corporate strategy. And so that was the light bulb for me that said, you know what, there’s not really a lot out there to help the individual leader be strategic day in and day out. And so that was really what started my journey, where people have a roadmap to move from tactical to strategic and change strategy from, you know, a birthday, where it happens once a year, there’s a lot of side of fanfare that kind of goes away to something that people do on a more regular basis.

Sue Bethanis 2:51
Yeah, like every day. Yeah. So how do you define it?

Rich Horwath 2:55
So I define strategy as really the intelligent allocation of resources through a unique system of activities to achieve a goal. So in simple terms, I really see strategies, how are you planning to achieve your goal? It’s not the plan itself. It’s how are you using your resources, your time, your people, your talent, your capital, to get to the destination that you want to get to. So that’s really what I see, you know, there’s lots of different definitions out there, I think 91 different definitions. So it is important.

Sue Bethanis 3:26
I think that all?

Rich Horwath 3:27
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it’s really important I think for people in your organization, however you define it, to have a similar definition across the teams.

Sue Bethanis 3:37
Well, I know because it’s like, strategy is the what, is the how, I think it’s both frankly, I mean, it takes in what, in terms of the goal, and then the how to get there. And then what about the strategy, but I think that a lot of people do look at it and put it in the bucket of planning. So I’m wondering how you delineate between strategic planning and strategic thinking, thinking should be happening all the time, every day. So how do you define those?

Rich Horwath 4:05
Yeah, absolutely agree with you, Sue. I define strategic thinking as the generation of insights on a continuous basis to achieve advantage. Again, I define it simply as a learning that leads to new value. So to your point, Sue we should be generating insights, new learnings on a daily basis, and then the strategic plan, that’s when we channeled those insights into strategic direction.

I like that. I’ve not heard it that way. I like that channel insights. I like that a lot. I like that word channel. Good. Love it. Okay, because I’m gonna learn something here too, Rich now. I love that. So when you’re going into these organizations, these quarter million people you’ve been working with, that’s amazing. What are you seeing in terms of what’s going on with their leaders and them not being strategic? What are the challenges that they’re facing, mostly?

Yeah, I think the biggest challenge that I see Sue is it almost feels like in many places that taking time to think is almost something that you can’t do. Almost that you need permission, because we live in such an action oriented society. Run that activity treadmill, what did you do today? What did you do last week? Tell me your numbers, what’s the metric right now? So we don’t get off that activity treadmill enough, and stop and really think about, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And how can we do it differently or better. And really, what I found in the people I’ve studied is that the best leaders are really carving time in their calendar to stop and think about the business individually, and then collectively with their teams.

Sue Bethanis 5:53
And how do you fit in reading? So one of my thoughts, one of my frameworks I use is that, I actually use the word strategic influencing. I don’t separate those terms. And I think that, you know, one has to be able to read and understand markets, and then translate that and then message it right. Okay. So in that requires reading, okay, so it’s not just thinking time, so when you say thinking time, are you including reading time too?

Rich Horwath 6:21
Yes, absolutely. And to your point, when we think we need we need some type of stimulus. So whether we listen to a podcast, whether we read, I’m a big believer that the best leaders, and I know in your book, you talked about a lot about daily reflection. And I think that’s such an important piece, we’ve got to be able to reflect and reading oftentimes can catalyze our thinking even, it can give us different ways to think about similar projects. I mean, as you know, innovation a lot of times is about borrowing ideas, concepts, domains. Exactly. So to your point, reading is such a great way to do that.

Sue Bethanis 6:58
Yeah. Let’s talk about reading for a second. Because I get this a lot like people execs will ask me like, What do you read? And what should I be reading? And besides their particular function, they need to be reading an ad or CIO, they need to be reading about IT and things like that, clearly, and the trends for digital transformation, things like that. But there’s more to it than that, because what our hope is with an executive that they’re going to be able to contribute to the overall strategy of the company. So what are you suggesting that people read these days? A couple of things?

Rich Horwath 7:36
So I’m a big believer, first off, that you’ve got to be a good synthesizer today. Yeah, we’ve got artificial intelligence now, which is able to create and generate lots of content. To me, what’s going to distinguish leaders today is, are you able to synthesize? Are you able to connect the dots of certain ideas in different ways? Your point what specifically, I mean, things like Popular Mechanics, I think is interesting, Scientific American. So again, I just try to dabble in different domains. And then to your point, what I love to do when I read is I’ll have one or two questions after I read, that will help me start to apply some of those things and think about how does that impact a client I’m working with or challenge that somebody is going through? So if you read an article, let’s say on biomimicry, from a biomimicry journal, and we’re talking about how do you then apply concepts from nature to your business? So if I’m working with a client, and they’re doing succession planning, I read an article on biomimicry, I might ask myself, well, what principles of biomimicry would help this company do succession planning more effectively? And so we can talk about, you know, is there a way to take a one present state of their business, and then transform it into something different? So let’s say in science, you’ve got a solid state, and you want to get into a gas or liquid state? How would we do that in business? How would we transform people’s mindset from what is a solid state the status quo into a more fluid state? So that’s again, just an example.

Sue Bethanis 9:11
Yeah that’s great example. Yeah, I mean, I love what you said about borrowing. I mean, we use that a lot, metaphor, you know, from one kind of biology in this case to another. I’ve taken people to the museum and zoomed in zoomed out taking photos and using photography to look at zooming in and zooming out on ideas. So there’s all sorts of different ways to do that. But I think that I liked that you talked about the sciences, I think the Economist is really good because it does have a lot of different content to draw from. So I have a liberal arts education, so I guess I’m sort of biased, but I think it’s important that we read in different domains, and then and apply it. So this idea of having two insights from the reading and then two applications of those insights. That’s kind of the way I look at it, I’m the same way I try to take something from it, right? Yeah. So good. That sounds great. Okay, so let’s talk about your system. So you’ve got four areas of the Strategic Fitness System at strategic, leadership, organizational and communicational. That’s a new word. Talk about all four, but I’m actually really interested in the communicational. Okay, yeah, so all four of those strategic, leadership, organizational, and communicational.

Rich Horwath 10:39
Yeah, so what I’ve tried to do over the years is determine when I’m working with executive teams, I used to focus just on strategy. But as you know, Sue from all of your work, it’s not just about strategy, there’s lots of other things that senior leaders need to be good at, especially these days, when it comes to the different stakeholders that they have, the communities they serve. So what I tried to do is say, how do we holistically look at what an executive does? And so those were the four areas that as I looked at all the tools, the techniques, the checklists, the writings started to fall into those four areas. So I simply use that as a compass to help leaders think about those things. So strategy is really again, about, things that we talked about decision making, resource allocation, competition, you know, that’s going to be that strategy realm, the leadership realm is really going to be about have you identified your leadership philosophy, your values, your principles, your legacy. What’s your personal performance look like? What’s your energy management look like throughout the day? Are you doing those things, the mindfulness, the gratitude, the nutrition, the sleep, all of those things that contribute to that mental toughness? I think I know you’re a former coach, you’re a pickleball player today, you understand the importance of the mental side, in sports. And I think in business, we don’t borrow enough techniques like visualization, for instance, which you know, most of the Olympic athletes, a lot of professional athletes use. Those are important things, too. So those are just some of the things that I’ve thought about. And then you mentioned the communication piece. You know, to me, that’s really these days about collaboration. It’s about being able to, when you collectively get together, be able to effectively and efficiently engage with one another. Too often, what I see Sue, and maybe you see it, too, is that meetings are monologues, they’re not they’re not interactive dialogues they are to their mind. So what I really give people how are you collaborating more interactively versus, you know, just giving orders?

Sue Bethanis 12:41
Right, right. Well, let’s take that strategic one. And let’s dive deeper into that. In terms of some of the some of the ideas, some of the framework, some of the metaphors, even in terms of how does one bolster, boost their strategic thinking? Well, and as a daily activity.

Rich Horwath 13:03
Yeah. So the first thing, what I typically do is I recommend three A’s acumen, allocation, and action, so those three A’s acumen, allocation, action, I think, are a good way to trigger us to think strategically. So acumen, what’s the insight? What’s the new learning in this situation? So whether it’s a one on one meeting, it’s a meeting with a customer, it’s a meeting with your board of directors? What’s your takeaway? What’s your learning from that situation? So that’s always first and then based on that new learning, that new idea, how are you going to configure your resources, your time, your talent, any budget, or people that you have in order to realize or enact that new value that you can bring either internally or externally? And then that third A is action, how do you really prioritize what’s important so that you’re not getting distracted by the urgent things that pop up on text and email. And so we’ve got those one to three priorities that really are driving what we do day in and day out. So I think that’s the biggest thing, and maybe the simplest thing people can do is subtract, you know, there’s been some good books written in the last few years about the ability to not necessarily just think about how do we grow? But what could we stop doing or takeaway from either our individual business or collective business that would bring more value to people? So I would say those three a’s and the ability to subtract a really are some things I’ve seen people use to be effective strategic thinkers.

Sue Bethanis 14:27
Can you give us an example, you’ve done this with so many people, give us an example of something that’s come up lately, in terms of helping someone make the shift between being more tactical to be more strategic in every day?

Rich Horwath 14:40
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the women that I’m coaching, she runs a $3 billion organization. And so she’s moved from being a divisional manager to the CEO role. So she has a lot more people responsibilities. And so one of the things that she was doing was as we observed and as she journaled she was spending a lot of time with direct reports in her previous division. So from a tactical standpoint, she was even weighing in on things like who should be the speaker at the conference, what day should the conference start on. So things that she would do in the past. And so what we talked about was just the concept of lead at your level. And again, I think too often when we transition from one leadership role to the next, because we’re experts in that area, we want to dive back in quickly, but we’re not allowing people behind us or with us to develop their skills. So that would just be one example of, especially as a senior leader, leading at your level, focusing on the topics that are going to bring the most value, I think one question I hear a lot of leaders use is, am I the only person that can make this decision or do this task? If the answer is yes, then that’s great. You should be doing that. If the answer is no, than that should be something you’re probably delegating.

Sue Bethanis 15:57
And 90% of the time, it’s probably no, it should be no.

Rich Horwath 16:00
Exactly.

Sue Bethanis 16:01
Okay, so acumen allocation action. I like that. A lot. So what is stopping people in your mind from why is it so difficult? I think everyone, no one I’ve ever coached has said, oh, yeah, i should be less strategic. No one. Right. So no one, I don’t care what level they are. So they know they need to do this. So we could say that time is in their way. Okay, so then how do we as coaches, or how do we as managers, help our managers, our directs be more strategic? I get that a lot like, I work with somebody who might be strategic, but they want to have their directs be more strategic. Or in the case of that one client right now where she wants her directs, she’s the VP of PRAR, and she wants them to be more strategic partners with the business rather than order takers. Okay, so you know, thinking more like how consultants think, so more of that synthesizing. So what do you think stopping people?

Rich Horwath 17:12
So the first thing I said, you mentioned time a moment ago, I think the biggest thing is, people are really not aware of or conscious of where they’re spending their time. So first thing I’d recommend is everybody, next Monday, on a piece of paper, you can use a journal, jot down every 30 minutes, where you’re spending your time for one full week, at the end of the week, put the categories together total up the time, and then I want you to graph it out visually. So on the x axis on the bottom, put email, one on one meetings, customer meetings, Board of Directors preparation, and then on the y axis, put the hours 1,2,3 up to 20, whatever it might be, then graph it out. And then once you graph that out, think about what are your top three goals for this quarter for this year, and then match up your goals, overlay that with where you’re spending your time. To me that’s the biggest thing is there’s a huge disconnect for where people have their goals and priorities and where they’re actually spending their time. So when I do coaching, that’s one of the first exercises we do. And typically 50% of the people we work with are shocked that they’re spending their time on things that really are not moving the needle for the organization. So I think that’s the biggest thing and as a build to that Sue. The other thing I’d recommend is idea of mono tasking. You know, we all multitask, people multitask all the time. But all the research out of Stanford from Professor Clifford Nass, and others talks about the fact that we make double the errors, we’re 30% less effective when we multitask. So I really tell leaders, have your direct reports mono task they need to spend at least 90 minutes every day on a topic that’s not email, that’s not reactive, it needs to be a proactive topic, something that’s on their agenda. And I recommended that first thing in the morning because once we start opening email and checking texts we head in different direction. What have you seen Sue from your perspective? I mean, what techniques or tips have you given folks are seen as best practices when it comes to you know, being more disciplined with where people are being strategic or not?

Sue Bethanis 19:18
They gotta a calendar it, they got to put in their calendar. Yep. And also my time with them, it tends to be like that, too. So I try to make it that more strategic, although, although most of the time I’m talking about their talent and their lack of, you know, the problems they’re having an issue with so and so. And, you know, that’s yeah, so that kind of gets in the way sometimes but those people you know amazing. I think we need to I think they need to definitely calendar it and I think that they need to, spend time on, I don’t care what you call it, strategy time, reflection time, reading time, and it’s all the same thing it’s sitting back and reflecting, and not being an action meeting mode. And I think the zoom just made it worse. Yes, I mean, much worse. So, but it also makes it easier to get away and do it too. So, I think what zoom did is it, I feel that this is gonna be a problem forever. It’s not going away, because most of our clients are remote first. So I think that what it means is that people can be so much more efficient at making meetings. So we’re in meetings so much more than we already were in too many meetings. So now we’re in even more meetings. And you just have to block it off and go for a walk, listen to podcasts. I don’t care what, listen to your podcasts while you’re walking, or in my case, I’ll get on the bike first and listen to something or read or whatever. I mean, I don’t think this is a silver bullet. I think that people, I am pretty adamant about this, I think people have to read. And I think they have to take the time to do it. I don’t know how people could just make shit up about, you know, what’s going on in the world, what they think their company should be doing if they’re not reading, right?

Rich Horwath 21:16
Yeah, absolutely. You got to have a good awareness of your situation, I always equate it with, you know, you wouldn’t go to your doctor’s office, let’s say you had a bad knee, right? Your knee was bothering you. And you walk in the exam room and the doctor comes in, she doesn’t ask any questions, she doesn’t take any tests, he just writes a script and hands it to you and leaves, we’d never take that because we know in medicine, the adage is prescription without diagnosis equals malpractice. But to your point, we’re not taking the time to diagnose and to read and understand what’s happening in our situation, before we prescribe a new initiative, a new strategy, a new project.

Sue Bethanis 21:53
Well taking your analogy even further, if you know you have a bad knee, or something’s up with you, most people would actually read about their situation before they go to the doctor, because that helps them ask better questions, right? Well, it’s the same process, right? It’s the same process in terms of like, before you start whatever, you need to be reading about it. And I mean, I think again, no one’s gonna disagree with me that we’d like to read more. Everyone wants to read more. Oh, my God, I don’t have enough time. But that’s the trick, how are we going to make the time? How are you going to set aside moments to do it? And I think that’s the hardest thing for an executive. Yeah, Kelly, please go for it.

Kelly 22:41
The first thing was very, very interesting years ago, I had my senior leader used to have us write all of our tasks and how we spent our time on either strategic, operational, or administrative, those were our buckets. And then we were to bring them in and have a discussion with her, and then to determine, really, it was to show us that we spent way too much time not doing the strategic things. But it’s really hard as HR executive to be able to have those conversations and to explain so this is really helpful to hear. When people say, well, my boss just says I need to be more strategic. I just need to think more strategically, what does that mean? And I thought, Oh, okay. So, you know, if I could have $1 every time I’ve heard that. One other thing that I’ve recently heard is that, I want to say it was Albert Einstein, but I do not recall exactly is that you cannot make a decision or come up with a decision or an idea at the same level of consciousness that you had it. And so that’s why they always say you come up with good ideas right before you go to bed or in the shower or whatnot. So I always try to you know, coach my executives to like get go on the bike, go for a walk, go to the beach, go do something different change the environment, unlock that lock and then that really comes out. But this has been really helpful because if anything, just validates the wrong of doing similar things and, and just spending that time away for thinking it’s very similar to recruiting like, I don’t have time to recruit, but I need somebody and it’s like, well, if you don’t spend the time to recruit that you’re never gonna get out of the tailspin that you’re in. And so really getting it on the calendar. And back in my early days, when I did ergonomics, when I had software engineers, they had to put on their schedule when they would do their stretching, because otherwise they would never get out of the chair. So I think that was a really good point Sue, about putting on your calendar, but it’s just a matter of you got to put it into a behavioral pattern and as a habit. So thanks for letting me chime in.

Sue Bethanis 24:35
I mean I would say that about everything like everything needs to become a habit and and I think particular strategic thinking needs to be, it’s not just only on the calendar because I think that you’re right that there is gonna be those in between times when you’ll be doing some thinking as well. But I actually I’m really big on people understanding the market and not just your market, but the economics, the world. It’s understanding the world. And I think that if there’s ever a time that we need do to understand the geopolitical issues of our world, it’s right now. And so. So I mean, my gosh, unbelievable what’s been going on. So and this affects business, you can’t help but affect business. Not to be an expert on it, but we need to understand what’s going on. So great question or comment, Kelly, I appreciate it very much. Very much. Okay. So you talk about these four areas. So we spent some time on strategic can you spend more time on the communicational and effective cooperation? And especially with hybrid it’s rough out there. I mean, we spend a lot of time on this with people. Yeah, it’s like, okay, let’s do a hybrid. Okay, let’s have you come in the office one to two days a week and then be on Zoom when you’re in the office. Yeah, so what’s you’re thinking about being strategic about hybrid?

Rich Horwath 26:13
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is we need to have a common understanding of one another’s goals. What are we trying to achieve? Too many times when I when I do audits, with executives on the meetings that their teams are attending and leading too many times the meetings are not attached to specific goals and priorities. They’re legacy meetings, they’re legacy interactions. The meetings themselves really move into the tactical realm much too quickly. And so one of the things that I’ve seen be effective is, and Kelly talked about it in her comments, which I thought were great. She talked about the strategic, operational, administrative, I do think, to build on Kelly’s point, your agendas should almost be color coded, to say these are going to be strategic topics, administrative, operational, because what I bet is most people out there, their strategic topics for meetings, they may have one or two on there, but they’re probably spending five to 10% of that meeting time, energized by the adrenaline of the fire drills and what’s not working to your point, I need to get rid of this person, they’re not doing as well as they need to, or we’ve got a communication issue here. So we get into the firefighting mode in these meetings, right? Not spending enough time talking about the things that are really going to drive value.

Sue Bethanis 27:32
I know, it’s, I mean, and what happens invariably is that and we do it on my own company, we have the strategic thing there and then it gets thrown off, because we have to do all the other stuff. The other stuff gets in the way, because we got to worry about the holiday party or the color on the website. Yeah, I know Allison’s laughing right now. Yeah. So yeah, I think that you do have to devote time and be disciplined about it? For sure. But I love what Kelly said about those three areas and figuring out where are we spending our time? I mean, when you have your executives that you work with or you know, you’re in your workshops, and also in your coaching, what are they what are they spending their time on? Is it mostly admin stuff?

Rich Horwath 28:15
Well, for a lot of it is what I would bucket as firefighting. So it’s things that they didn’t plan on doing that week, but pop up. And again, sometimes it’s a customer issue, it needs to be handled, but the reality is most of the time it does not need their attention. So the first thing I recommend is, when they have those meetings, when a topic comes up, that’s really not something that’s goal or priority oriented. Let’s just say stop for a moment, let’s put that on the side and then let’s come back to that at the end. And typically when we get back to that at the end, it’s not something that people feel strongly about, or we don’t really need to spend as much time on that. Because again, we love the urgent, the urgent seems to dominate things that we do. So I’m a big believer that you’ve got to audit what you’re doing. And I like scoring, you know, it’s super easy. You were a D1 volleyball coach, you know the importance of scoring. So I like to say score every interaction you have for a week, whether it’s a one on one interaction, it’s a meeting, zero is no value., three is high value, and then categorize that at the end of the week, what are your scores? And again, sometimes it’s on us, sometimes we’re leading meetings that maybe aren’t as valuable. So we’ve got to sometimes look in the mirror and say, was that a three? Was that a high value for people in that meeting or in that interaction? What value did I bring? So to your point Sue, the biggest problem I see is people are not preparing for meetings because there’s so easy. They’re so quick to do it on Zoom. People aren’t preparing for those.

Sue Bethanis 29:50
Because they’re going from one to the next.

Rich Horwath 29:52
Exactly. So what I tell folks is it should be a one to one, if you’ve got an hour meeting, you should be doing an hour of prep. And people fall out of their chairs, are you crazy? But if you start to try to implement that, number one, you have much higher quality meetings. And number two, you’ve got to eliminate meetings because there’s too many meetings on the books already. And a lot of them shouldn’t be there.

Sue Bethanis 30:15
My hope is with AI. I was just reading an article about this the other day, that the number one way we can, actually one of the number one reasons where we can use it is just to at least delineate what’s important in the meetings, and you know, they can be recorded, and then the bot can record it, and delineate stuff that s most important and relevant and then people can get it and go, I mean, at least we can do that. Because it’s ridiculous how many meetings we have, I mean, when I have like five or six meetings a day, I’m like, first of all, I’m exhausted. And the only reason why I like to do it is because or maybe it’s probably more like seven or eight. It’s like that’s what my clients are doing, so at least I understand how they feel. But I just, it’s exhausting. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense. So I mean, I don’t want to turn this into like meeting management. But that is a part of it in terms of if you’re having meetings just turning things out and trying to make decisions and then not make decisions, then it’s a waste of time. It’s not, there’s no value. So I do like the idea of your thesis scoring idea. It doesn’t have to be a score, per se. But just figuring out was that valuable and what value am I adding to the situation? And can someone on my team add just as much value by them being there instead of me?

Rich Horwath 31:41
Yeah, and I really believe in, you know, what I found in my work with senior leadership teams is that the proliferation of meetings oftentimes is because there’s not clear decision rights in the organization on who’s making what decision. So now we got to get everybody together, we’ll talk about it. A lot of times they’re trying to use consensus, when at the end of the day, yes, you want everyone’s input, but everybody should not be weighing in on the decision itself. You don’t have to have consensus for every decision, you know, Amazon, Stripe, some of these other companies have really bought into the idea of disagree and commit, here’s my input, but at the end of the meeting we’re gonna move forward with a direction. So I might disagree but I’m going to commit to that direction. I don’t see enough people doing that.

Sue Bethanis 32:29
Well, right. And then the answer is to have another meeting about it.

Rich Horwath 32:35
That’s exactly right.

Sue Bethanis 32:36
Yeah. And Astelle just popped in and said, Yes, I agree. So she’s obviously seeing that in her company. Yeah, I mean, I just think that the continuation of lack of decision making is, we have a very short and sweet communication checklist. And there’s four different things that are going on in meetings and so you’re not just delineating the content, you’re delineating and putting a process to each thing. It’s like, Is this brainstorming? Is this feedback? Is this decision making? Is this requests? That’s it, like I should get updates too. Shouldn’t do too many of those things in meetings. But that’s it. So it’s like, Okay, we’re gonna brainstorm then commit, brainstorm and make a decision. Great. So you just say that real quick before you started thinking, time box it, 15 minutes, we’re gonna discuss and then make a decision at the end. And maybe it goes 20 or 25, even, but you know what you’re doing, you’re not just sitting around talking about it. There’s just too much sitting around talking about stuff.

Rich Horwath 33:47
Exactly. I mean, what I’ve seen is 20% of meetings are really about decision making an 80% are about talking about things, giving updates, and it really should be flipped. It should be 80% on decisions and 20% on that discussion.

Sue Bethanis 34:05
Then updates should be an email and slack and whatever. Yeah, totally. And in fact, we made this communication checklists, because when we were working with Cisco, and this was 25 years ago, okay. 25 years ago when we started, and I was noticing the same exact thing, I might have even said 20 and 80. I said, people are updating in meetings and making decisions on email, this needs to be flipped. Yeah. So well, this is really interesting. So what else as far as we didn’t talk about leadership and organizational focus areas, is there anything you would like to add in those areas that would be helpful to the group right now and anyone who’s listening?

Rich Horwath 34:51
Yeah, the main thing I would say from a leadership standpoint, is really give thought and reflection to what your legacy would be when you finish. I think too often we’re in the day to day we’re in what’s my next job look like? What does this job look like? But really, you know, you talk a lot about it in leadership chronicles, I think you’ve got to step back and reflect on, you know, when, when I’m done, what do I want people to say about me? What what type of value will I have contributed? And I think if we start with that end piece, then as leaders, we can start to say, okay, what are the leadership principles, the guidelines that my team and I work through day in and day out to help us get to that legacy. So I think that’s the biggest thing is we’re just not thinking forward enough about where we want to be and who we can bring value to. We’re too caught up in in the minutia day to day.

Sue Bethanis 35:45
Right, right. Okay, so organizational, anything you want to mention?

Rich Horwath 35:50
You know, the main thing, and I know you’ve worked with hundreds of startups, and when you work with your startups, a lot of the work is around the business model, I mean, simply put, how do we create value? How do we deliver it? And then how are we going to capture it in the form of profits, subscriptions, sales, whatever. I don’t see enough of the mature companies, spending time on the business model each year, to startups are spending a lot of time, but once you get to be a mature company, people are not taking a close enough look at how can we create value? How can we deliver it and how we capture it? And that should be done, I think at the organizational level, and each functional area as well. So that would just be another take home is really think about how are we creating, delivering and capturing value?

Sue Bethanis 36:32
Nice, nice. I like it. Okay, so before I get into some more of your information, I want to put you on the spot here. What’s the one thing that people should take away if they want to be more strategic? What’s the one thing they need to do for sure?

Rich Horwath 36:49
Well, I’m going to build on what you said earlier around the reading piece, to build on that, new growth comes from new thinking. So if you don’t have anything stimulating your thinking and you’re not thinking in different ways, meeting different people, reading different things it’s Einstein’s definition of insanity: We’re doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. So I’m a big believer that new growth comes from new thinking. And I like the idea of reading to stimulate that.

Sue Bethanis 37:17
Right, right. Gotta stay curious. Yep, absolutely. Hashtag stay curious. Okay.

Rich Horwath 37:23
Sherlock Holmes, be a detective. That’s right.

Sue Bethanis 37:27
Be an antrhopolost, I love it. Well, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much Rich, and I want to make sure people have all your information. Your website is strategyskills.com. And that has all your information, your book and stuff, all your books, actually. And then you can find of course Rich on LinkedIn, linkedin.com.in/richhorwath the book, again is Strategic: the Skills to Set Direction, Create Advantage and Achieve Executive Excellence. I have really appreciated your discussion today. And I’ve also appreciated the input from our participants as well. So thank you for for that. So Rich again, thanks so much. Hopefully see you on the pickleball court.

Rich Horwath 38:16
Thank you. So it was great to be with you. I really appreciate it.

Sue Bethanis 38:19
It’s been fun. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time. Bye. Aloha.

Rich Horwath 38:24
Bye bye.

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November 2nd, 2023|
April 5, 2023 /

Solve Complex Problems with a “Workaround” Mindset

In this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts award-winning researcher Paulo Savaget. Paulo is an associate professor at Oxford University’s Engineering Sciences Department and the Saïd Business School. His primary fields of expertise are entrepreneurship, sustainable development, systems change, and innovation management.

The emphasis of his work is on transforming unjust systems through entrepreneurship. He formerly served as Postdoctoral Researcher at the Skoll Centre and as an Assistant Professor at Durham University. Outside academia, he worked as an entrepreneur and as a consultant to large companies, non-profits, and government agencies in Latin America, and the OECD. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar.

Paulo is the author of the new book, The Four Workarounds: Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest Organizations for Tackling Complex Problems, a smart guide that offers a behind-the-scenes look at groups around the world that have mastered the art of subverting the status quo.

Listen to the full episode here:

Listen on: Apple | Spotify | Google

INTERVIEW SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS

Paulo’s research on workarounds provides an insightful view on developing creative solutions to complex problems. He focuses on four types of workarounds, the roundabout, the loopholes, the piggyback and the next best. Paulo describes workarounds as ways of thinking outside the box and using innovative ideas to problem solve. They can be applied to all types of issues across industries and in our daily lives. He even demonstrates how workarounds can be for the smallest task such as boiling an egg without a stove, but how this type of thinking can be applied to larger scale circumstances to tackle serious dilemmas.

The four workarounds and some key take-aways from this talk:

  • Roundabout: For this workaround Paulo highlights how many tech employees have gone underground to workaround supervision and direct orders to be more innovative and explore creative projects. This has led to new inventions and ideas such as the blue LED light. If these individuals followed the status quo rather than using a roundabout workaround, many of the technologies we have today wouldn’t exist. (11:05)
  • Loopholes: This workaround is about leveraging ambiguity in rules to find solutions. Paulo provides an example of how the Netherlands gives women access to abortion by doing so on international waters when it’s illegal in other countries as it’s out of that countries jurisdiction. (7:27)
  • Piggyback: Paulo provides many great examples of this workaround which solves problems by finding a way to connect the issue at hand to a different method or industry. The primary example he gives is how diarrheal medicine is distributed to Zambia through Coca Cola supply chains. As going the conventional route to get the medicine to people in need would take years of infrastructure but other industries already had supply chains in place that could be leveraged. (3:34)
  • Next Best: This is about repurposing resources. For example, why build your own AI when you can access great ones already, or how a company uses discarded cell phones to monitor for logging in rain forests, rather than building or buying new technology. (25:35)

 

Paulo also talks a lot about how companies should be looking at ways to be scrappy and resourceful because this is where the best workarounds take place. Even though larger companies have the resources to make new technology and such, adopting a scrappy mindset can lead to more creative and revolutionary solutions. By encouraging workarounds, we often see more sustainable and innovative practices arise.

 

FAVORITE QUOTES

“I call them scrappy because they are feisty, resourceful, normally small, operating in the fringes. They don’t have the budgets from IBM or Google to start with. But Google and IBM were scrappy once right?” (16:39)

“They looked not through the lenses of scarcity, they look through the lenses of abundance, right? I think that that’s transformative, if you just think of what is lacking in a context, you miss out so many opportunities.” (21:41)

“They remind us how we get numb to alternatives. We think of technologies based on what they were designed to do, and not what they could do.” (31:06)

RESOURCES

Paulo Savaget:
Website | LinkedIn
Book: The Four Workarounds: Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest Organizations for Tackling Complex Problems

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Sue Bethanis  0:00

Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposa’s monthly podcast. We provide perspectives on leadership. Today we’re excited to welcome Paulo Savaget. Paulo is the associate professor at Oxford University’s engineering and science department and the Said business school, his primary fields of expertise or entrepreneurship, sustainable development, systems change, and innovative management. The emphasis of his work is on transforming unjust systems through entrepreneurship. He formerly served as postdoctoral researcher at the school center and as assistant professor at Durham University. Outside of Academia, he works as an entrepreneur, and as a consultant to large companies, nonprofits and government agencies in Latin America, and the OECD. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge as a gate scholar. Paulo is the author of the new book, The Four Workarounds – I love that title – Strategies from the World’s Scrappiest Organizations for Tackling Complex Problems. It’s a smart guide that offers a behind the scenes look at groups around the world that have mastered the art of subverting the status quo. That’s a mouthful. Okay, we didn’t write that I think that was lifted from from your press kit, but that is subverting the status quo. I love it. So that was your bio I just read. And I want you to just talk a little bit about you from your perspective, in terms of why you wrote this book. What inspired you? How did you decide on the many things you could have written about? How did you decide on this?

 

Paulo Savaget  1:31

Thank you, Sue, for hosting me. And for this great question as well. I started this research without necessarily aiming for workarounds, I actually bumped into workarounds. At the time, I was working as a consultant. And I had worked in many different contexts ranging from the Brazilian Amazon with traditional populations to the OECD, and the World Bank. And I realized that even though I was working on sustainability and innovation, for very complex problems, my reports were getting a little bit similar. So regardless of where I was working if I was providing recommendations to improve projects, for traditional populations, so working with a very large company, my reports, but they have recommendations, like you need more collaboration, or you need more alignment, things that are not necessarily wrong, but they were generic. And I would start getting interested how all the groups of changemakers were approaching systems change and work trying to put that tackle complex. And then I came across the work of computer hackers. And that point to find workarounds I hadn’t thought of workarounds, it was through my engagement with computer hackers, as a researcher that I identify is a very powerful way of addressing complex problems.

 

Sue Bethanis  3:01

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Because that’s what they’re, that’s what hacking is, right? Well, let’s start out with that example. I mean, you’ve got these four types. But I just want you to just give us an example of what a workaround is to you. I mean, in my mind, I’d have all these thoughts about it. I own for four different properties. So I’m constantly doing workarounds for people that doesn’t work this will work. And that’s very tangible. So it’s a little easier to sort of grasp, but let’s talk a little about organization change and how you think of a workaround.

 

Paulo Savaget  3:34

Sure. Yes, when I worked with computer hackers, just to give you a metaphor, one of the most notorious computer Hacks is called Trojan horse. It’s named after the man, the idea that you don’t have to break into the walls of a walled city that he’s very well protected to get in, right, like you can find an unconventional creative way to get in. But one of the organizations, because I started with hackers, and then I realized that there were many organizations out there that were being hacky in other systems to address problems in say education, healthcare, sanitation, or problems within the corporate environment as well. And the workaround was the core of this hacky approach that these many organizations that I call scrappy, were implemented. So let me give you an example that is a bit more tangible. I work with a small nonprofit in Zambia on a problem that is one of the most complex problems in the world is actually providing access to diarrhea treatment, because diarrhea is a killer of children under the age of five in many low income countries around the world. It is a serious problem and it’s a bit obscene how this is still a problem if you start to think a little bit about it. The medicine is extremely cheap. It can be afforded by people who live in extreme poverty. It doesn’t require refrigeration. It’s over the counter, right? The medicine that control diarrheal infections. So why is this medicine not still available everywhere in remote regions for examples, and then there was an organization that was super hacky, if you think of the mainstream way of addressing this problem, you’re gonna say, you got to confront these obstacles preventing medicines from being found. So you’re gonna improve infrastructure, you’re going to fund more health care facilities in remote regions, right, you’re gonna go head on and supply chain and so on. So you’re gonna try to improve by viewing and confronting the obstacles that prevent that this medicine from being found. And the approach that work around was not doing that, they started piggybacking on Coca Cola distribution chain, because they realized that you don’t find lots of medicine but you find Coca Cola everywhere in the world. So why can I take a free ride with Coca Cola bottles in a crate to reach this country.

 

Sue Bethanis  6:16

That’s really a good one. I was gonna say, also, when you’re telling your story about how the prevention, because the water is what’s causing this right? probably, obviously, water food. So that’s a much bigger, much bigger work around, not even really a work around. It’s more than that and very contextual.

 

Paulo Savaget  6:34

It can be water it can be, for example, that causes a lot of diarrheal infections, malaria, there are many causes. Oh, yeah. What I think is, the most absurd thing in this problem is the lack of access to medicines, right, like the causes, but not having access to these basic medicines is absurd.

 

Sue Bethanis  7:01

Yeah. Well, also you could use that supply chain for a lot of things. You know, not just diarrhea medicines, right? That’s a good one. I like that. So you discuss in your book, these four types of workarounds, the roundabout, the loopholes, the piggyback and the next best. So that was clearly an example of piggyback so talk a little bit about these other ones, the roundabouts, the loopholes, and the next best I can? I’ve read about them, but like, I just want you to explain in your words.

 

Paulo Savaget  7:27

Sure, thank you. The four work arounds spewed on different attributes. And very roughly speaking, the core attributes of each of them is that the piggyback as you noted, from the keys that I just mentioned, builds on different relationships, they find different pairings, you don’t have to address a problem in healthcare only by doing things that are conventionally healthcare, you can use fast moving consumer goods to address that problem, right. That’s the idea, find the pairings cross silos. The second one, the loophole is about rules. It’s about reinterpreting rules or leveraging ambiguity in rules in ways that allow you to get what he wants. So to give an example of loopholes, there’s an organization in the Netherlands that is pro choice, they think that women should be allowed to get an abortion service if they want to. And the most countries around the world and now in the United States, some states as well won’t allow women to get abortion services on demand. Unfortunately, yes, exactly. So what did they do? They rent a boat from the Netherlands, and they sail to places where abortion is illegal. So let’s say they go to Poland. And then women who want to get an abortion service go on board, and they stay on international waters, which is very close. And then the legislation that applies is the one of the flag of the boat, the obstacle preventing these women from getting an abortion service is the legislation of the countries where they reside. But this is a workaround that takes them to international waters on board of that ship. So you’re using Dutch legislation as the work around.

 

Sue Bethanis  9:22

Sure you’re working around, in this case laws. Yeah. So it is I can see why it can be controversial. We have a situation in the States. It’s similar in that, you know, people going across borders, in another state to go get an abortion, but then you have the issue of especially poor women, you know, don’t have the money to cross the border. So then how do we provide the loophole or the workaround, there would have to be like, how are we providing transportation, there’s that you can’t bring a truck that’s, you know, from another state and bring it in and I guess you could bring it in taking them back, but you’ve got to have a way that to do transportation. Exactly, that’s the workaround.

 

Paulo Savaget  10:01

There are many creative workarounds for that. And another workaround that this organization started pursuing was to boast a boat of pills with the prescription from a Dutch doctor. And the label because he was originally designed for something else and abortion is a side effect of that pill.

 

Sue Bethanis  10:24

Oh wow. Okay, so that’s yeah, so this idea of transferring or piggyback I’m you’re calling to piggyback, and that happens in medicine all the time, where the effect of one medicine is actually end up being the effect. You know, there’s a different there’s a different there’s another word they use, and I can’t think of the word right now. It’s the same. It’s a borrowing, we integrative thinking, we call it borrowing. So but it’s the same idea, you’re borrowing an idea from something else and apply it to something. So you’re using a piggyback, I like actually, that’s even more, it’s more sexy. Okay, this is great. So then let’s talk about roundabouts and then next best. And maybe we can use a tech example if you have any tech examples.

 

Paulo Savaget  11:05

Yes. Well, I have many tech examples in the book like Airbnb transfer wise, that is now called wise, many employees working on the ground in tech companies. So let me give an example from a roundabout example, that comes from tech, is actually many of the products that we love and use daily were created because of this work around the essence of this work around this, that you disturb a self reinforcing behavior, self reinforcing behaviors are the situations where the more something happens, the more it tends to happen, and then it becomes normalized. So for example, to give a very prefilled bad example, but of a self reinforcing behavior, I have an older brother, and when we were young, we would fight in ways that perhaps he would flick me and then I would slap him, he would punch me, and then suddenly, I was choking him, and we were trying to kill each other right, so that’s a self reinforcing behavior, it spirals out of control. And that happens very often many situations we face today, and some of the worst challenges are very normalized. So how can we disturb that? One of the normalized things that very often happened in corporate environments is that employees feel that the culture is not allowing them to develop their creative projects, the innovations, they feel constrained, and the more they feel constrained, the more they won’t have the ideas, right, and that is self reinforcing. So the work around that many have done and that led to creations like the aspirin, the pill that probably all of us have already taken. And blue LED light, large display screen, this all came from employees that went underground to develop the ideas with working around direct corporate orders. And what happens in innovation projects is that in the very beginning of a project, the ideas are very rough. They won’t necessarily be approved by the managers who will think that resources might be best spent in in a different way. Or perhaps it won’t align with the organization. But when they go underground, and they start working on a project that they believe in, and then they think the superiors want to the point that the project becomes viable, and becomes more appealing, interesting to others. And then they go public and show to the superiors when the idea so they buy time to develop the project to the point that it can be made. And so, for example, there’s a case of an inventor who received a medal of defiance from packets from the P of HP for the invention.

 

Sue Bethanis  14:09

P of HP. Yeah. So this reminds me of iterating. Just the idea of iteration. So I have a lot of background in design thinking. So when I think about iteration, it’s a roundabout way of figuring out something, it might take a lot longer, it’s circuitous. It’s not a linear thing at all. So I mean, I love I really love these words. I’m wondering, I’m wondering how much your background and how much you have background in design thinking or experience in design thinking because so much of what you’re talking about is this reminded me of just like thinking.

 

Paulo Savaget  14:45

So my background is on systems change. So I use a lot Design Thinking systems approaches, and that’s how I started this research. I started with an emphasis on different systems approaches to address complex problems, right? And when I started honestly, like my assumption was very different from my assumption today. Now I think that workarounds are very effective and graceful ways of addressing complex problems before I had started, and I think it will resonate with you as well like my, how I challenge this assumption today, I realized the value of simple solutions, I think I was much more interested in promoting solutions that I now think are too complicated. And complexity is different from complicated, right. Complicated is not good for complex situations.

 

Sue Bethanis  15:43

Well, you’re singing my song, because I actually have a degree in organization transformation. And I didn’t go into that profession, because I was like, Okay, this is way too complicated. Like, it’s like, it’s two intractable problems. I mean, I wanted to do workarounds. And this is exactly that. Of course, I didn’t say that to myself. But I’m more of a workaround girl. So I think that we had the same sort of thought that like, hey, these things are too big. And then, frankly, you don’t have to necessarily solve the big enchilada you can. The big  complex context, you can you can solve part of it, and then that will lead to other things. So tell me a little bit about, I want to know a little bit about your process. So you talked about systems thinking, when you go into an organization like who typically hires you? And is there like an already big hairy problem that it’s there that they want you to look at, tell me a little bit about that. I’m just kind of curious.

 

Paulo Savaget  16:40

Organizations of all sizes, implement workarounds. What I found out through this research is that these very scrappy organizations, that I call them scrappy because they are feisty, resourceful, normally small, operating in the fringes. They don’t have the budgets from IBM or Google to start with. But Google and IBM were scrappy once right? They no longer are, but I’m emphasizing the resourcefulness that they have in the early moments, or when they are small. And these are the best places to find workarounds sometimes because they have to work around out of necessity. They face high stakes, very often, they work with budgets. And most cases, I found that were extremely creative and unconventional came from them. But after working with many scrappy organizations worldwide, I have cases from like dozens of countries, different areas, different goals. I identified many large organizations that worked around as well, both like staff, for example, working around in a large organization, but also from the top of organizations also working around when stakes were very high. And they had to make decisions urgently. In these cases, organizations of all sizes work around, they have a case, for example, from that luxury conglomerate, that is one of the largest conglomerates in the world, working around in a high stakes situation. And that came from the quote, the main shareholder of the company, right? Work arounds happen kind of everywhere, what I tried to show here, not only value, this knowledge that I got originally from these scrappy organizations that are so good at doing this, but also to show how we can do that more systematically. You can do that in your life, you can do that in your work, regardless of the organization you work for. There will be many opportunities to work around. And these are great problem solving methods in complex situations.

 

Sue Bethanis  19:01

Right, right. Okay. This is awesome. I love it. So we didn’t talk about next best. I mean, I can guess what that is, but like, I’m gonna have you give an example of that.

 

Paulo Savaget  19:08

Yeah, the fourth one next best is about repurposing resources. So assembling resources, very different ways. I have many cases of scrappy organizations but also individuals, policymakers, judges. One of the cases I use is from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, how she saw and identify the case with her husband when she was still a lawyer and professor at Rutgers University before she became a judge. She was trying to promote gender equality and fight sex based discrimination. She came across a case of a man who had been discriminated for his tax, and she saw that as a very powerful next best opportunity to go to it. It’s a quote composed only by male judges, right. And she was constantly struggling to show that women were being discriminated because male judges at the time would consider that they were getting the best of two worlds, they were so fragile. And then when she saw this case of a man who, if he were a woman, he would have been entitled to a tax benefit, because he was single, and he cared for his elderly mother. And the law only conceived women in a caring responsibility. So women got a benefit a man would not get he was discriminated. And that was an easier case in quote.

 

Sue Bethanis  20:40

Next best. Yeah, I love it. It’s a great example. And I remember reading about that she’s super, that means he’s very famous for that. So that’s awesome. Okay, I want to stop for a second. We’re halfway through here. And we have people on the call. And I would love it if if you want to just pop in with a question or a comment about similar workarounds that you’re having to deal with. Maybe have a question for Paulo. Anybody want to jump in?

 

Speaker 3  21:08

I’m really curious about the constraints idea. And of course, there’s a wonderful book called Beautiful Constraints, how, when you don’t have enough, it’s the time to sort of really look harder at the options, the opportunities. So I’m just wondering if you have a great case of a constraint because the companies I work with is nonprofits and so forth. Yeah. I mean, International Federation of the Red Cross Red Crescent, they have nothing. And yet they do so much.

 

Sue Bethanis  21:36

Great question Chuck. Okay. Right.

 

Paulo Savaget  21:41

Look, I really appreciate this comment. And most of the most of this research came out of the knowledge and the practical ingenuity of organizations like the ones you work with, really appreciate them. These organizations are very often constrained financially. But in some ways, they’re much more unconstrained in other ways than large organizations in other sectors, right. And that also propels them to find workarounds to different complex problems. What I’ve come across during this research, with many workarounds coming from all sorts of organizations around the world, is that they are very unconventional in finding ways to address problems. But they, they also challenge the convention, whose meant to be addressing that problem in the first place. So let’s take that example just for because it’s also connected to international development and aid as you describe the organization in Zambia that piggyback on Coca Cola distribution chain. That intervention lasted for about five years, seven years, and the uptake of the medicine in many districts increased from less than 1% to more than 50%. It’s an amazing result. If you think of the very tight budgets they have, because they were resourceful. And they looked not through the lenses of scarcity, they look through the lenses of abundance, right? I think that that’s transformative, if you just think of what is lacking in a context, you miss out so many opportunities. There was already an entire supply chain from Coca Cola and many other fast moving consumer goods reaching the hardest reach places in Zambia. Why can’t we leverage what is already that to address all the problems in healthcare. And I think that’s one of the insights of, especially this piggy back work around, there’s always an opportunity, there’s always something happening. If we look through unconventional ways, and we can find different berries, we can find different possibilities to leverage relationships or resources in different ways.

 

Sue Bethanis  24:13

That’s a good that’s a good example. Awesome.

 

Speaker 4  24:15

So I did not know what to ask, but I really appreciate this presentation. So I was more kind of curious about innovation that you know, Paulo has probably done a lot, I think, so for me in the talent acquisition, I’m always trying to think creatively how can I help my company you know, as it’s growing, so it’s not IBM, it’s not big company. It’s a growing medium sized company. So it’s in a fast changing technology landscape, right? There’s so many things the AI is taking control. So like we are like every company is like looking at AI. So how do you go back and go, you know, we have a great product so you So how can we promote talent acquisition prospective? So also like, you know, just a middle management? How can we change our thinking and focus on some innovative ideas to lift our own, you know, day by day daily work, focus on that, and also just, you know, help our teams to grow as well like innovative and even from a company’s perspective. So, what are the methodologies or tools that we can utilize, you know, thinking innovatively

 

Paulo Savaget  25:35

Excellent question. Thank you for asking this. The book has many cases of innovative approaches from organizations that were once small, for example, Airbnb TransferWise. What we notice in very early stage companies that are on a tight budget, or if it’s an organization working in a very fast changing environment, they have to act quickly, right, you’re not going to focus on the ideal or the perfection, you’re going to focus on the good enough and work arounds the essence is that they go for the good enough, they don’t aim for perfection. But that allows you to explore many new possibilities that you didn’t conceive from the outset. So just to give you something more material, more tangible, most technologies that you can think of, well, not that you can think of them as assemblages of all the technologies that are out there. Can you piggyback for example, a lot of organizations that piggyback on chat GPT now right like you don’t have to develop Chat GPT yourself, you can go and work around many obstacles that you may have in your business by piggybacking on what is already open source, and widely available. Is the other one the next best that is the most common workaround, can you find different ways of repurposing this resources, it has been using a specific context, can you use it in a different context? I have a case for example, of an organization that use discarded mobile phones to monitor illegal logging in forests around the world. It’s an amazing idea, right? These phones have been discarded, they are free, they can be charged with electrical with solar energy. That is there’s no shortage of solar energy in forests in rainforests. And they listen with a very simple AI that the main in libraries around the world, it listens to the sounds of forests, and identifies the sound of chainsaw. So when there’s a chainsaw it can tell the way illegal logging is happening, and that can be caught in the boat and interrupt illegal logging in the act. So you’re using discarded phones, to listen to the sound of forests and prevent illegal logging completely repurpose, right that these resources are already out there? How can you repurpose or reassembled in meaningful ways?

 

Speaker 4  28:14

Fantastic. Thank you for that great example. Thank you.

 

Sue Bethanis  28:18

That’s a great example.

 

Speaker 4  28:20

Yeah, any books that you can suggest? For learning, please do so you know, you can put it in the chat.

 

Sue Bethanis  28:27

Also, his book right. the four work arounds, that’s his book. Yes.

 

Paulo Savaget  28:36

What I also cite many references in the book that I would highly encourage you to read. And you can always reach out to me as well if you want something more specific. But these research was built on the knowledge of many other scholars and practitioners, right? Besides the many scrappy organizations around the world that were very generous with their knowledge and shared a lot with me.

 

Sue Bethanis  29:03

Thank you, Rama, wow, Paulo, these are such great examples. Again, I just keep going back to iteration and borrowing, you’re using word repurpose, which is even a better word. As far as like how do we borrow apply from other things that are simple to tack or vice versa? I love that mobile phone idea is a great idea. I’m assuming that they’re like able to monitor them remotely. I think that that’s how they’re using them as a kind of a remote device. So that’s how they’re able to do it.

 

Paulo Savaget  29:35

Mobile phones are more available. More people actually around the world have access to mobile phones than toys. It’s all so many been discarded. And that’s actually a big sustainability problem as well. So can we use them for other purposes, and there’s so many uses that could be, we normally think of technologies with the intended design. Let me give a very trivial example that might help understand this. When I work with computer hackers, I once visited this hacker that worked in a, in a in an office and very oddly, he wanted to boil an egg for lunch one day, and he didn’t have a kettle or he didn’t have a stove in his office. But he’d had a coffee machine, a very fancy coffee machine that brewed like all sorts of coffee flat whites and cappuccinos. So we normally think of that as a coffee maker. But the coffee maker boils water it froths it grinds coffee, because many functionalities that together combine for coffee making, but you can also think of the sub functions like boiling water to boil an egg. And that’s whathe did to boil his egg.

 

Sue Bethanis  30:57

The egg inside of the coffee maker. Yeah. Yeah. Does it crack? Does it crack and get all over the place? But yeah, that’s awesome.

 

Paulo Savaget  31:06

And it’s a very small case, right, like very everyday, small scale case. But I like them, because they remind us how we get numb to alternatives. We think of technologies based on what they were designed to do, and not what they could do. That phone is a case of that. They were not planned to be monitoring illegal logging forests, but why not?

 

Sue Bethanis  31:33

Right? Yeah, right. Right. Well, and I think sometimes living in life to heart here of Silicon Valley, because San Francisco has become actually more of the companies are coming here now. We are always thinking about, you know, the VC money for new new new new new and the new new new new is really repurposing so it’s like it feels almost sometimes like it’s too much waste in a way. It’s like if we just if we just think about how we can use resources to repurpose something, then we’re not creating a bunch of waste. And like all these phones, for example. So a lot of waste, right? I think another great example that maybe you’ve even hit upon is already is I don’t know about you, but I get about four or five packages Amazon packages a week. And I feel guilty with all the cardboard, I mean, I recycle it but what I really want to do is this like literally take it and give the cardboard back to the UPS driver, he gives me something he or she and then I can just give trade. Here’s the boxes from the last few weeks, the amount of cardboard and paper that is being used, that can be repurposed is crazy. Why not use the same way it got here to take it back as an example.

 

Paulo Savaget  32:45

And the many, many issues with waste. You already mention paper waste, plastic being very obvious as well, right? Lots of plastic that is discarded and electronic waste, like the case I shared about mobile phones, electronic waste is one is very contaminant. It’s one of the worst kinds of waste. It’s classified in a similar way as medical waste from hospitals. Because if it’s not discarded properly, it can contaminate soils, the many carcinogenic elements, they can be extremely negative for populations living closed or in landfills. And it’s a bit absurd if you think about it, because there’s so many valuable resources in a mobile phone, even if you’re not going to use the mobile phone to listen to the sound of forests, there’s more gold in a kilogram of mobile phones then in one ton of ore there’s the many rare earth minerals there as well. So we are because of this very linear pattern of consumption, production, consumption, disposal, right? We wasting a lot of money and opportunities as well. And work arounds can be great ways of finding creative uses for all that waste.

 

Sue Bethanis  34:17

Yeah, that’s interesting. I do want to ask you about your work with hackers in particular, criminal hackers. So what tell us a little bit about that it’s sort of a part of your book that’s interesting. Yes. How did you get how did you decide to go that route? And what did you learn?

 

Paulo Savaget  34:33

That was actually the very beginning of this research. I started with hackers because I was interested in how they broke into systems and made changes so quickly and so resourcefully and I wondered whether we could use a hacky approach to expedite change in other domains for healthcare and education and so on. So that was my initial punch. And as I worked with hackers, Not only I found that workaround was the core of their approach. I also identified many other things that I thought were very valuable. One is that they already referred to organizations in other systems that were not computational as hackers. And that was really interesting, because they pointed me to many cases of people hacking, for example, the financial sector, right? Or solutions in healthcare. And also, they have taught me a lot about different ways of organizing, that are very stimulating for whoever’s involved. That could also be used by all the organizations, if you think of many of the tech companies in the Silicon Valley, where you are. So they started with a hacky ethos, because these were IT geeks who started these companies. Mark Zuckerberg recently said that he wished the hacking ethos was more incorporated into Facebook these days, there’s a lot of opportunity for that. And the way that they organize that is not necessarily focused on hierarchies, it’s much more focused on excitement and enjoying the process in more fluid ways, for example, can be thought of, or can inspire different ways of organizing.

 

Sue Bethanis  36:30

Well and by its by its nature, it’s about practical, it’s about getting something done. And so it has that ethos is important. So talk a lot about black hats and white hats, like I talked about with my kid who’s 17, the one who has COVID. You know, I thought, punishments, okay, let’s, let’s turn the internet off. It’s like, okay, good. He could hack a lot of things. So it’s like, I keep telling him like, there’s black hat and there’s white hat. And of course, I hate that analogy. He’s like, Mom was racist. I said, Well, isn’t racist per se, because that’s what that’s how it’s been used. But I do not like the black hat, white hat. Is there another way we can talk about black and white? That’s the first thing I want to ask.

 

Paulo Savaget  37:15

You know, the many hackers that some people would classify as white hat hackers. Don’t even use the term hacking for people doing it for malicious purposes, they would call it cracking instead of hacking the technologies. But at its core, hacking is subversive, it’s subversive to some norms and status quo in that specific domain. So bio hackers are subverting biological and medical systems, computer hackers, subverting some norms in, for example, cryptography cipher technologies in the early beginnings were monopolized by the NSA, and the FBI, for example, not all of them were doing that to steal credit cards, most of them don’t. Most hackers actually are not motivated by profit. So that’s a distinction and actually like these days, it’s like for over 10 years, there’s this terminology of ethical hacking, that hackers would practice hacking to platform so let’s say Google and find bugs, and they report back and report it. Yeah, paid by a company. That’s something that is very controversial as well, because the original hackers think that they are not being subversive, they are being co opted by the market, right that they are selling. Hacks shouldn’t be sold. So there are different ways and interpretations often describe it. Yeah. Like it’s not really malicious. That’s what I would highly emphasize.

 

Sue Bethanis  38:52

No it there’s malicious. I mean, you could use the word malicious, ethical and malicious, but you can use those words, but the vernacular is white hat and black hat.

 

Paulo Savaget  39:03

Sorry, malicious hacks a very became very. I don’t really call it by the media, right. So people normally associate hacking with something malicious, but it’s not reflective of the reality of cracking.

 

Sue Bethanis  39:20

Right. Gotcha. So how do we hack the situation of remote work? And hybrid work? What’s your opinion about that? We, my company are trying to help people hack hack, you know, workarounds. That’s what we’re doing. helping people figure out how to connect when there’s no there, literally. So what’s your opinion about that?

 

Paulo Savaget  39:44

I would welcome you to pursue these workarounds and share them with me. Perhaps it’s going to be in the sequel of my book. No kidding. I very often engage with questions like this. How can I come up with a work around. And that actually inspired me to add a chapter in the book that I walked the reader through a brainstorming exercise for building blocks of what is the exercise could look like. And what I notice is that there are many possible workarounds to every circumstance. And every time I run a workshop, I run many workshops in events. And it’s fascinating to see how people come up with completely different workarounds in a similar setting. Let’s see, even if they all choose piggy back, they might come up with very different approaches. And that’s really enriching, right, because it opens up so many possibilities, I would encourage you to try to do this brainstorming exercise following the recommendations, I give you the book. And if you do come up with ideas, please share with me, I would love to know more.

 

Sue Bethanis  41:05

Yeah, and we’re, of course, helping people think outside the box and think about work around. I mean, a little workarounds because they’re working around. Because I think that people think hybrid is either you’re working at home, or you’re working in the office. But there’s a lot of different other different alternatives to that. You could go work at Starbucks, you could take a walk, you can, you know, meet in Tahoe, a lot of things you can do that is not just being at home or being at work. I think that what we’re noticing is that people are choosing not commuting over connection. And so that is in tech, I’m not going to speak for insurance companies, I’m going  to speak for tech, because that’s where primarily we’re in, that’s going to be the case. And I don’t think that’s going to change much that’s going to be the case, then, then if people are going to go in once a week or twice a week or not at all, those are kind of the three, three options, then how do we help people connect? How do we how what’s the hack for that? And I you know, we’re spend a lot of time helping people figure that out. Now, it’s like, what are the how do you linger more? After zoom calls? How do you somebody for coffee? How do you meet somebody for a walk? How do you get somebody off the zoom and, and have them talk to you on on their walk? You know, instead of you both take a walk even though you’re not in the same vicinity, at least you’re not on Zoom. So we think about this, if this would have happened 10 years ago, or heaven forbid, 20 years ago. I mean, this wouldn’t have this, we would have not done this. But now it’s so comfortable for people to be on Zoom. So it’s sort of like it’s a good thing, bad thing. You know? So that’s the answer to the question I asked for my perspective. But I think that I think it needs to be designed. And I think that people need to have be able to brainstorm because when they start when they sit and brainstorm, they come up with lots of interesting ideas, in terms of how to connect, so I loved our conversation. Thank you so much. I hope that you loved it, too. I mean, you appreciate Yeah, I love I love it. So the website is PauloSavaget.com You can also follow Paulo on LinkedIn. The book is The Four WorkArounds: Strategies for the World’s Scrappiest Organizations for Tackling Complex Problems. And you can find that on Amazon, of course. Next month, everybody on May 24 at 2pm. Pacific. We’ll have Nick Sonnenberg. He’s the author of Come Up for Air. Paulo, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you being with us today. I learned a lot. And I’m going to show give some of these examples to my clients and also have them read your book.

 

Paulo Savaget  43:44

Thank you very happy to hear this. And thank you again for inviting and for everyone else who tried to call today.

 

Sue Bethanis  43:50

Yeah. Have a wonderful rest of your evening. Thank you. See you later. Bye, everybody. Thanks again.

 

 

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April 5th, 2023|
March 29, 2017 /

Problem Solved

Sue Bethanis hosts Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, founder of CSE Consulting and the author of the upcoming book, Problem Solved: A Powerful System for Making Complex Decisions with Confidence and Conviction. Cheryl teaches as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and has won several journalism awards for her investigative stories about international politics, business and economics.

Cheryl and Sue discuss:

  • How to use the AREA method as a flexible and repeatable decision making process.
  • How common biases and mental shortcuts tend to impede good decision-making.
  • How research is a fundamental part of decision making that can be broken down into easy-to-follow steps.
  • How to improve learning, stay focused, and make your work easier.

To learn more about Cheryl please visit her website: areamethod.com.

Follow her on Twitter: @cheryleinhorn

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March 29th, 2017|
October 21, 2016 /

Defining Your Edge of Disruption

Sue hosts Julie Williamson, Chief Growth Enabler for Karrikins Group. Julie and Sue discuss her newest book co-authored with Peter Sheahan, Matter: Move Beyond the Competition, Create More Value, and Become the Obvious Choice, and how to:

  • Identify your most valuable edge of disruption
  • Become the disruptor not the disrupted
  • Initiate change within an organization
  • Become a thought leader in your marketplace and influence more senior buyers

About Julie Williamson:

Julie Williamson, PhD, Chief Growth Enabler of Karrikins Group, responsible for strategy and research. She is a leading voice in how organizations create sustainable growth by linking communication, design, strategy, sales, marketing, and service. Julie is a grounded theory researcher, and she uses traditional and progressive resources in her strategy and transformation work. She focuses on helping clients arrive at solutions that are informed by data and inspired by creativity. Julie has a passion for working with clients on customer and employee engagement, as well as building strategies focused on growth. Her work with Peter Sheahan on the business book Matter: Create More Value, Move Beyond the Competition, and Become the Obvious Choice, highlights Julie’s commitment to working with clients to find and deliver on opportunities for growth and development.

Follow Karrikins Group on Twitter: @Karrikins

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October 21st, 2016|
September 23, 2016 /

How to Win in the Age of Disruption

Sue Bethanis hosts Terence Mauri, a top leadership expert and author of The Leader’s Mindset: How to Win in the Age of Disruption. Terence inspires new leadership thinking and powerful shortcuts to help you disrupt your industry, your organization and, ultimately, yourself.

Sue and Terence discuss:

  • Pathways to discover your leadership purpose
  • How to act brave and decisively in the face of adversity
  • How to use failure for rapid learning
  • Incorporating 10X thinking into your leadership

About Terence Mauri:

Terence Mauri is on a mission to spread entrepreneurship – that’s the skill, the spirit and the courage that rewrites how business is done. He serves as an Inc. Magazine Columnist, entrepreneur mentor and keynote speaker. Prior to his current role, Terence was a senior consultant at Informa PLC, an FTSE 100 company. He is the author of the new book, The Leader’s Mindset: How to Win in the Disruption Age.

Follow him on Twitter: @terencemauri

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September 23rd, 2016|
August 19, 2016 /

Embracing Disruption for a Competitive Advantage

Sue Bethanis hosts Cat Lee, Head of Partner Marketing at Pinterest. Known as one of the most innovative platforms in the world, Pinterest has revolutionized how people discover products and content, and how customers engage with businesses. Cat provides an insider’s view on how Pinterest has become an extremely disruptive social media powerhouse while building 100 million users.

Cat and Sue discuss:

  • Pinterest’s innovative vision for future growth through visual search
  • Strategies and processes to understand, anticipate, and lead market disruption
  • How Pinterest is eliminating traditional barriers for business participation
  • How Pinterest partners with retail companies

 

About Cat Lee:

Cat leads the Global Partner Marketing team at Pinterest. Her team is responsible for developing the solutions that deliver value to businesses on Pinterest and includes product marketing, education, marketing solutions, industry relations, creative and brand strategy. Prior to taking on this role she was Head of Growth, leading product strategy to drive user growth for Pinterest across acquisition, activation, engagement and virality teams. Before joining Pinterest in 2012, she was on the Facebook Platform team and led Developer Tools & Experience.

Follow her on Twitter: @catleecatlee

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August 19th, 2016|
July 21, 2016 /

The Disruption Dilemma

Sue Bethanis hosts Joshua Gans, Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and the author of The Disruption Dilemma.  While Joshua’s research interests are varied, he has developed specialties in the nature of technological competition and innovation and economic growth, industrial organization and regulatory economics.

Joshua and Sue discuss:

  • The features of disruptive technologies
  • Why companies need to have an internal disruptive strategic framework
  • The difference between demand-side and supply-side disruption
  • Why supply-side disruption is so dangerous
  • Three prescriptions for long-term survival

Follow him on Twitter: @joshgans

For more info, visit: http://www.joshuagans.com/

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July 21st, 2016|
June 22, 2016 /

Transformation for the Digital Age

Sue Bethanis hosts David Rogers, professor at Columbia Business School and the author of The Digital Transformation Playbook.  David is a globally-recognized leader on digital business strategy. He has appeared on CNN, ABC News, CNBC, Marketplace, Channel News Asia, and in The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Economist. His most recent research with Columbia’s Center on Global Brand Leadership has focused on Big Data, the Internet of Things, in-store mobile shoppers, digital marketing ROI, and data privacy.

David talks with Sue about why traditional businesses need to rethink, adapt, and learn from todays’ digital disruptors and innovators. He reveals how to harness customer networks, platforms, Big Data, rapid experimentation, and disruptive business models―and how to integrate these into your existing business and organization.

Follow him on Twitter: @David_Rogers

For more info visit: davidrogers.biz

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June 22nd, 2016|
June 4, 2016 /

Are You a Strategist?

Sue talks with Cynthia Montgomery, Timken Professor of Business Administration and immediate past head of the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where she’s taught for over twenty years.  on how to be the strategist your company needs. Cynthia will discuss her book, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs and teaches the strategic tools to not only outwit your competitors but offer you, as a leader, the means to shape your organization decisively.

Follow her on Twitter: @leadstrategy

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June 4th, 2016|
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Pathways to Growth

Sue hosts Laurence Capron, INSEAD Professor of Strategy, and author of the book, Build, Borrow, Buy: Solving the Growth Dilemma. Laurence is the author of numerous articles, including “Finding the Right Path” in Harvard Business Review (with Will Mitchell). She sits on the Editorial Board of the Strategic Management Journal, the leading academic journal in the field of strategy.

Laurence will help you solve the reasons why companies fail, which pathway companies should choose to gain competitive advantage, and how to guide your organization for optimal growth.

Follow her on Twitter: @LaurenceCapron

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June 4th, 2016|
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