The next best workaround focuses on repurposing or recombining resources, which can range from tangible to intangible, and from the most high-tech to the most basic. The key is to focus on alternatives that are available but largely ignored, as well as the different and unconventional affordances or assemblages of resources at your disposal. They were approaching problems in very unconventional ways, very creative, very flexible, adaptive ways, sometimes out of necessity. But that stimulated them to create amazing interventions that have sometimes outsize impacts, considering the budgets they had and the access to resources they had.

The Four Workarounds by Paulo Savaget | Waterstones

Most entrepreneurs do not drop out of school. The school allowed them to build on their networks, build their knowledge and skills, provided a safe environment for them to test early-stage ideas. Professor De Neve, also a co-founder of the not-for-profit World Wellbeing Movement, said: ‘The question of human happiness is one that has been explored by many, over very many years. Our book aims to serve not only as a cornerstone of this exciting new field of wellbeing – with its significant consequences for economics as we know it – but also as a call to action for more policy makers to sit up and take notice.’Some roundabout workarounds are familiar to all of us. Social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic allowed us to buy time and avoid unsurmountable pressure on healthcare systems while we developed vaccines. Employees who invented some of our most beloved products, like the large-screen display monitor, aspirin, and the blue LED lighting, worked around corporate rules to experiment more freely until their invention was ripe to be revealed to their superiors. Homeowners in India, frustrated with men urinating on their walls, curbed this practice by placing tiles of Hindu gods on their walls; after all, urinators wouldn’t commit such a heresy. Once in motion, normalized situations may seem difficult to disrupt, but disruption is precisely what roundabout workarounds offer. Here, we can learn from Scheherazade, the legendary Persian queen who used a series of workarounds to change the course of a seemingly inevitable fate bestowed upon her by her husband, King Shahryar. The story goes that Shahryar discovered that his first wife had cheated on him, and he came to believe that all women would betray him. After having that wife executed, the king decided to marry a new virgin every day and have her beheaded in the morning, before she had the chance to dishonor him. On this episode, he shares a little about each of these tactics and how we can employ them each day as leaders and creative pros as we discuss the new book The Four Workarounds. We constantly encounter complex problems at home, in our places of work, and in society at large. Even if we had all the time and money in the world, sometimes no good solution can be found. So, what should we do, especially when we can’t wait? The answer: a workaround.

The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) - Todd Henry The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) - Todd Henry

A smart guide to finding creative solutions for a variety of difficulties ... clever case studies enlighten, and business readers will appreciate the suggestions on how to make one's workplace "workaround friendly." ... Wise and level-headed, this delivers." — Publishers Weekly All the change-making efforts involve deviance. What I tried to show in my book is that deviance, first, is different from disobedience. You can be disobedient and still conform to the rules. I had the desire to communicate with many different audiences, not only restrict [myself] to abstract concepts that normally stay in academia. I wanted to make sure that this knowledge could be used by many different organizations and individuals.

Helps us live happier, successful, and more fulfilling lives’ Jenn Lim, CEO and co-founder of Delivering Happiness and bestselling author of Beyond Happiness Part I covers what workarounds are and how to come up with them. In Part II I dig into how to cultivate a workaround attitude and mindset, including how to reflect on the ways you typically see, judge, and approach your obstacles. Then, on the more practical side, I’ll show you how you can systematically conceive workarounds to your problems and how your workplace can become more workaround friendly. I conclude with a reflection on how workarounds can ultimately help you with your daily, sometimes messy life. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Paulo Savaget cleverly reveals how you take scrappiness to success: the workaround. In The Four Workarounds, he uses real world examples to show us smart, efficient ways to problem-solve. This book helps us live happier, successful, and more fulfilling lives." —Jenn Lim, CEO and cofounder of Delivering Happiness, and bestselling author of Beyond Happiness There are norms, rules, constraints that warrant the opportunities to work around them as well. For example, I reported in my book that some inventions that were created, like Aspirin and the blue LED, were created by people who were deviating from corporate rules and working around all these sorts of obstacles to develop their own personal projects.