Solve Complex Problems with a “Workaround” Mindset
Guest Speaker Dr. Paulo SavagetIn 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.
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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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