Paulo Savaget, an associate professor at Oxford University's Engineering Sciences Department and the Saïd Business School
Large companies are considered to be inherently superior, better run, and better equipped than scrappy organisations and intrepid entrepreneurs. But Saïd Business School’s Paulo Savaget has a contrarian perspective. Edited excerpts from an interview:
Q. Could you give us a peek into the book’s backstory?
I didn’t plan to study workarounds; I bumped into them as I searched for resourceful ways to tackle complex problems. More specifically, I noticed the value of workarounds when studying computer hackers. The essence of the hacker approach is that they weave through uncharted territory and, instead of confronting the bottlenecks that lie in their way, they work around them. I also learned that hacking isn’t limited to the world of computing–many scrappy organisations worldwide hacked their problems. From working around their obstacles, they addressed critical issues and were sometimes able to leave a powerful legacy, especially when it came to issues that, despite best efforts, seemed intractable.
Q. What value does a ‘workaround’ offer in contrast to the conventional approach?
A workaround is a flexible and creative problem-solving approach that defies the conventions around how problems are traditionally solved—and by whom they are solved.
One of the analogies I make is the Trojan Horse story from mythology that names one of the most notorious computer hacks. The Greek soldiers didn’t have to scale the walls of Troy or break through its gates to seize the city. They came up with an ingenious idea: They built a giant wooden horse that was presented as a gift to the Goddess Athena celebrating the Trojans’ victory over Greece. What they didn’t know was that there were 38 Greek soldiers hiding inside it. They were able to sneak out after dark and won the battle. That’s the very essence of a workaround.
Now let me exemplify with one of the many cases I report in the book. Many medicines cannot be found in remote regions of Sub-Saharan Africa because of hard-to-solve bottlenecks in healthcare, such as poor infrastructure and logistics systems. A workaround doesn’t try to tackle these bottlenecks; it circumvents them instead. The organisation I studied in Zambia, ColaLife, worked around them by piggybacking on Coca-Cola’s distribution channels. They realised Coca-Cola can be found even in the remotest places on earth—so why can’t medicines take a free ride with soda bottles?
Q. You talk about four types of workarounds…
There are four workarounds, and each uses a different attribute.