The four workarounds scrappy organizations use to push past obstacles

In the 1980s, British aid worker Simon Berry was stymied by how to deliver a life-saving oral rehydration solution in Zambia. Childhood diarrhea is the second leading cause of death for children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa. The remedy is cheap and easy to take, but the roadblocks in a low-income country can be enormous, with few health-care facilities in remote areas and inadequate vehicles or other resources for outreach.

But even in such countries, Coca-Cola has developed a system for delivering its product seemingly everywhere. So Mr. Berry began to take advantage of that system, arranging for his oral remedies to be packaged between the bottles of Coca-Cola on the delivery trucks.

Paulo Savaget, an associate professor at the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering and Said Business School, calls the arrangement piggybacking, and it’s one of four workarounds he found commonly used when he studied how scrappy organizations – many of them non-profits – squeeze by obstacles.

Previously a consultant, he had been watching as large companies clamoured that non-profits should be more like them when he was actually finding there was a lot that corporations could learn from small, plucky non-profits that make an outsize impact.

“But in the business world, learning from the innovative wit and practical ingenuity of these ‘ugly ducklings’ was uncharted territory,” he writes in The Four Workarounds.

Workarounds are effective, versatile and accessible methods for tackling complex problems. The workaround ignores or even challenges conventions on how, and by whom, a problem should be solved. It can be particularly valuable when traditional problem-solving methods have failed or you lack the power or resources to pursue the conventional path.

The four he delineated are:

• The Piggyback: This takes advantage of seemingly unrelated relationships. Mr. Savaget notes that in the mid-50s, when television commercials by regulation were 60 seconds, they were out of the price range of many potential advertisers. Uncle Ben’s Rice and M&M’s invented what became known as piggyback commercials, sharing the costs. Piggybacking involves moving out of your silo and finding unconventional pairings. “Think laterally about what, and who, is at your disposal,” he says.
• The Loophole: When informal or formal rules create a barrier to reaching a goal or are unfair, you may try to go around them by capitalizing on ambiguity or seizing on an unconventional set of rules that weren’t initially obviously applicable. We think of loopholes as being negative, but they can be positive for determined leaders. When Brazil’s federal government was failing to fund the acquisition of ventilators early in the pandemic, Flávio Dino, Governor of Maranhão, got local executives to donate money to a supermarket chain that could procure ventilators from China and then kept their entry to the country secret to prevent the feds from seizing them. As a former judge, he knew the law – and the ways around it.
• The Roundabout: This involves disrupting or disturbing self-enforcing behaviour patterns that are creating an obstacle. St. Louis, Mo. was one of the first cities to enforce social distancing when the pandemic began, breaking with the patterns of closeness then prevailing, and was hit less severely than cities slower to make the change. Bootlegging is common in technology, where people work on projects that go against the norm until their value is proven.
• The Next Best: When we can’t do much to change our situational constraints, we sometimes have to give up on the ideal and repurpose or recombine existing resources to find another way to progress. A universal, world-wide plug makes a lot of sense but in the meantime a travel adapter is a next best workaround. To advance the status of women, early in her career Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her husband Marty took on the case of a bachelor denied a tax deduction for a caretaker he paid for his dependent 89-year-old mother. “RBG showed that when sidestepping obstacles, we work first with what is possible,” writes Mr. Savaget, using the common shorthand for the late Justice.

These workarounds, even if derived from non-profits, can be applied by or within different organizations. Similarly, a strategy Insead professors W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne uncovered challenging a basic notion of prevailing capitalist thought has often been applied for social innovations but applies to all organizations.

Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction pervades our thinking on innovation: New ideas benefit society but destroy the existing model. In fact, Mr. Kim and Ms. Mauborgne show in Beyond Disruption that powerful innovations can create new products and markets without harming existing organizations. The modern sanitary napkin didn’t disrupt an existing industry. Nor did Sesame Street, which created a brand-new opportunity in children’s TV. Microfinance helped poor women in Bangladesh, who existing banks didn’t want as customers, establish their small businesses and has blossomed into its own multi-billion-dollar industry.

We have been told repeatedly – particularly in technology – that effective innovation requires defeating, even burying, a competitor. As with the workarounds, nondisruptive creation is an approach you need to understand because at some point it may open a path to success.

Cannonballs

• Perspective swaps can end wars between executives and different fiefdoms in your organization, as well as unlocking organizational change. Example: Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz had the heads of customer support and sales engineering swap posts after blistering complaints about each other’s unit. Just one week later, the leaders were able to gain a deeper understanding of each other’s challenges and resolve the issues.
• The best path for hiring top people is referrals from your own top people, says recruiting specialist John Sullivan. Back that by educating your hiring managers and recruiters about the many benefits that accrue from reaching your diversity goals, and make it clear to all employees that diversity candidates are a top priority.
• The best way to change the world is in concentric circles: Start with yourself and work your way out from there, advises Atomic Habits author James Clear.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.