853: The Four Workarounds that Help Solve Nearly any Problem with Paulo Savaget

Pete Mockaitis
Paulo, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Paulo Savaget
Thank you very much for inviting me, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, I’m excited to be chatting about your wisdom. And I’d love to hear, you’ve seen a lot of creative solutions to a lot of interesting problems. Could you point to any particularly intriguing and creative solutions that have really stuck with you over time?

Paulo Savaget
I think I have to start with an example before defining the concept that I introduced in this book of workarounds. I work with these organizations in Zambia that address lack of access to diarrhea treatment. It’s an organization composed only by two staffs, so very small organization but feisty and creative in the ways they address the problem.

If you think of why medicines and many, including lifesaving medicines, that are cheap over the counter, that even populations living in extreme poverty could possibly afford, and if you try to understand the bottlenecks preventing these medicines from being found, you’re going to identify things like very poor infrastructure, or logistics, or governance issues, things that are very difficult to tackle.

And many organizations worldwide have been trying to address these bottlenecks but they might be very costly, there are many failures that arise throughout the process, failures that you may not be able to conceive from the outset.

So, what did this organization do? They realized that you don’t find these lifesaving medicines in remote regions, but you find things like Coca-Cola everywhere, even in the remotest places on earth, you find Coca-Cola and other fast moving consumer goods, like sugar, coffee, cooking oil. So, they started, literally, taking a free ride with Coca-Cola bottles to make medicines available in remote regions.

That’s what I call a workaround. It’s this idea that you don’t have to necessarily tackle an obstacle to get things done. There are many creative ways of addressing problems. And, in this case, as you can see, Pete, they bridge across silos, they addressed a problem in healthcare by piggybacking on the success of fast moving consumer goods.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when we talk about a free ride in the Coca-Cola bottles, the medicines are literally placed inside the bottles of Coke?

Paulo Savaget
In the beginning, they started fitting medicines between bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. When I went to Zambia, I saw how the distribution of Coca-Cola happens, and it’s very decentralized. So, Coca-Cola doesn’t necessarily know where the bottles travel to. Let’s say that Coca-Cola produces Coca-Cola, and then there’s a local bottler that is outsourced, then many wholesalers, retailers, supermarkets, and people transporting Coca-Cola ranging from vans of hospitals, so even bicycles when they’re reaching the last mile.

I’ve seen, for example, someone riding a bike with a crate of Coca-Cola and, like, a goat strapped around the bike. So, it’s a very decentralized value chain that Coca-Cola doesn’t even know where the bottles end up going to sometimes. And it’s fascinating how robust and resilient the value chain is because these glass bottles, they return. They go and they return to the origin.

So, the idea that was initially fitting medicines between the bottles in Coca-Cola crates, so the medicine can take a free ride. And as they started this intervention, they realized that they could build and piggyback on the entire distribution chain that makes fast moving consumer goods so successful. It’s not simply fitting medicines between bottles to take a free ride, you can actually use the same actors that distribute and sell Coca-Cola to do that for diarrhea treatments, which is over the counter.

There’s no prescription and it doesn’t require refrigeration. People who live in even extreme poverty could afford this medicine. So, that’s how they evolve the intervention. And the uptake of the medicine, in a very short period of time, we’re talking about six, seven years, increased the intervention districts from less than 1% to more than 50%, saving thousands of lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, there’s one right there, the piggyback, and so there, it’s quite literally distribution of something on top of something else. That’s really cool and beautiful to see the impact when that’s implemented.

Paulo Savaget
Pete, it doesn’t necessarily have to be distribution. You might piggyback, for example, in a marketing budget from another organization. For example, let me give an example that is not distribution-related. Airbnb, when it was very small, it started with this value proposition of matching people who had lodging to offer with people who needed lodging.

At that time, most people who didn’t want to stay at hotels and wanted these sorts of arrangements, would go to Craigslist, but Craigslist didn’t have a very good user experience because it had, literally, everything bad. It was sort of the yellow pages on the internet. So, when Airbnb started, they had a better platform with better user experience and offered a more customized service, including professional photography of the houses that would be listed.

The problem was that people didn’t know about Airbnb. So, what did they do, which was genius, this workaround that they pursued? They started piggybacking on their rival, on Craigslist, to increase the visibility for their listings. And how did they do that? Let’s say that I’m Airbnb and you are someone who want to list your house on Airbnb, and you are a first mover, you identified Airbnb pretty early and you post your listing to your own Airbnb. And then I would send you a message saying, “Hey, Pete, you listed your house here with us. And if we cross-post your listing on Craigslist, it’s going to increase your visibility because a lot of people use Craigslist, and it’s free, and we’re going to do that for you.”

And, of course, you would say, “Yes, go ahead,” because you have nothing to lose, not going to take any of your time or money, and it would increase your chances of getting your house rented. So, they did that, they cross-posted on Craigslist. And let’s say that someone else who’s going on Craigslist who did not know about the existence of Airbnb, and then they tried to find accommodation, then they see your listing that was much better, it looked better, it had professional photographs, once they click on it, they are redirected to Airbnb’s website.

So, what would happen to these people? They started going directly to Airbnb the next time they were searching for lodging. And that happened to a lot of people and it had an exponential impact as well because of word of mouth, they started talking about Airbnb. That was a way of scaling and increasing massively the user base of Airbnb without having to draw up diamond ads. They simply piggybacked on their rival. And when Craigslist realized that Airbnb was trying to poach their users, it was already late. Many users were already using Airbnb, and Airbnb took off.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, we got a piggyback there in the marketing domain, so beautiful. All right. Well, so we’ve got a couple fun examples of piggybacking, which is one of the four workarounds. Can we zoom out a bit and tell me what’s sort of the big idea or main thesis behind the book The Four Workarounds?

Paulo Savaget
The main idea is that we often find ourselves in complex situations, problems that you may not necessarily be able to solve, or that make you feel paralyzed, and workarounds can help you with that. They allow you to get things done in a very effective way but also in a resourceful way, getting quick results, and sometimes allowing you to make outsized impact as well.

So, workarounds are very accessible imperfection-loving methods that allow you to get things done in very different contexts. And I try to show that based on the knowledge and this research that I’ve done starting with computer hackers to see how they hack systems to make change so resourcefully, and sometimes with meager resources. They make these huge impacts in computer systems. And then with very scrappy organizations worldwide that were being hacky as they approached their own problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense as I imagine being in a computer situation, like, “Huh, how do we get this thing to go everywhere fast? Well, piggyback off something that’s already going everywhere fast. Okay, there’s a resourceful thing we just did there without a lot of developer time, without a lot of money. We made that happen.”

So, we talked about the piggyback. I understand there’s three other categories of workarounds in the book: the loophole, the roundabout, and the next best. Could you define and then give an example of each of these? For example, with the loophole, I was intrigued by the Brazilian ventilator case study. Can you lay it on us?

Paulo Savaget
Sure. The loophole consists of these approaches that reinterpret rules and that leverage ambiguity, and sometimes tap into different systems of rules that are not necessarily the most obvious but are applicable to your circumstance as well. In this case that came from Brazil was from a governor of the poorest state in Brazil, called Flavio Dino.

At the time, well, he’s a former judge, and he had a very good understanding of what the rules allow but also what they don’t, and he was an enemy of the then president Jair Bolsonaro, and he saw himself, as many other politicians at the time, struggling to get ventilators for the hospitals in the time that COVID hit in the very beginning. And it’s a state that is particularly challenged to offer healthcare because it’s one of the poorest ones.

So, he got some funds from local partners, many partners that were in the private sector, to buy ventilators but the problem was that every time they tried to purchase these ventilators something happened. So, once, for example, they tried to purchase ventilators, and because the ventilators were coming from China, and they had to stop somewhere to refuel because there’s no direct flight from China to Brazil, they first went to the United States, and because there was a shortage of ventilators, the ventilators were confiscated.

Then the second time they did that in Germany, and the same thing happened. The ventilators were confiscated in Germany. Then they thought, “We have to work around this,” and they worked around a series of obstacles to get these ventilators into his state, and they had to stack workaround after workaround.

So, the first one was that, because of the accountability and the bureaucracy from the state, it would take a lot of time to be able to procure directly these ventilators from the manufacturer in China. So, instead of getting the funds from the companies and purchasing through the government, the companies themselves were purchasing the ventilators and then donating to the state. So, that was a first way of speeding things up.

Then, because one of them was a supermarket, and the other one was a mining company, and both had operations in China and many suppliers in China, they had local connections, and these local connections went to these manufacturers, procured, and also waited until they actually got the ventilators.

Then they took a flight that wasn’t a commercial flight, as in the previous times that they failed. So, they got a plane to do this flight, and instead of going through more conventional routes, they stopped in Ethiopia to refuel because the chances of getting the ventilators confiscated in Ethiopia, or even monitored by local authorities, was not as high.

After refueling, they had to go to São Paulo. They couldn’t go directly to that state, so when they went there, the challenge was that all ventilators, at the time, were being controlled by the federal government, and redistributed by the federal government to the states. But these were being procured by a single state, the state of Maranhão. So, what did they do?

They went to São Paulo at the time in which they already had a second flight arranged in a way that they wouldn’t have to go through customs in São Paulo. They could do that in Maranhão because there was also custom services at the airport in Maranhão. But when they landed in Maranhão and everything was planned, it was a time that people who worked at customs were no longer working because it was after their work hours.

So, when it landed in Maranhão, the team of the governor took the ventilators to the hospital and signed the documents saying, “We’re going to come back here later to do the customs procedures, the necessary customs procedures that are our responsibility from the federal government.” So, they took the ventilators to the hospitals, they started being used immediately, and next day, they went there to file the paperwork for the federal government to do the customs procedure.

When the federal government realized, they were not happy because these ventilators were supposed to be taken by the federal government and redistributed, but they couldn’t go to the hospitals and take these ventilators that were already being used and already saving lives of people. They would never be able to do that. And when they tried to bring this case to court, they didn’t really have a strong case because the process was technically right, and it was a state of emergency as well, so they didn’t necessarily violate any rule.

They did the technical administrative procedure to get these ventilators through and to the hospitals in Maranhão but they found these ingenious ways of circumventing all these obstacles in the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, keep them coming. Let’s hear about the roundabout.

Paulo Savaget
So, the first one, the piggyback, was about leveraging these different relationships, cross silos, finding unconventional pairings, like addressing lack of access in medicines with Coca-Cola’s value chain. And the second one, as I said, it’s about rules, reinterpreting or leveraging ambiguity, different sets of rules. The third one is about self-reinforcing behaviors.

Self-reinforcing behaviors, when I teach systems change here at Oxford, we describe them as positive feedback loops. It’s another terminology for that. That means that there are some behaviors that spiral out of control, and that normally they become…they’re seen as if they were inevitable. So, let me give a few examples, a very trivial one.

When I was a child and I have an older brother, I would fight against my brother very often, and I would flick him, he would slap me, I would punch him, and then, suddenly, like he was trying to choke me, and we were trying to kill each other. So, things spiral out of control. The same with a snowball, for example, that’s what we call self-reinforcing behavior.

And the workaround that I call roundabout offers the possibility of disturbing or disrupting a self-reinforcing behavior. A very critical example that I like to share is one that I noticed when I was in India. I was in Delhi, and I realized that some walls were drenched in urine because public urination is a very normalized behavior, and it’s a very gendered issue because women do not necessarily urinate in public spaces but men do.

And every time you talk to someone, and say, like, “Why is this issue still such a big problem here?” people would say, “Ah, it’s inevitable. It’s culture. It has existed for so long.” So, it’s this kind of self-reinforcing behavior that is very difficult to change, to tackle. Even the efforts, for example, to provide public toilet facilities have not necessarily generated the results that the policymakers expected.

So, this roundabout workaround that is so small but so genius was that some wall owners, who had their walls drenched in urine, started putting tiles of Hindu gods on the walls.

Pete Mockaitis
Tiles of what?

Paulo Savaget
Hindu gods, like Shiva.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Hindu gods. Okay.

Paulo Savaget
Yeah, because a man, regardless of their religion, in a country where the majority of the population is Hindu, they would not dare to urinate on a god. So, by putting these tiles of Hindu gods, they disturbed these self-reinforcing behaviors, and the walls that were once drenched in urine became cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner, and they diverted the stream of urine to other places, not to their walls.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Paulo, this is fresh. We haven’t had a good urine example across 840 plus episodes, so I dig this. When I was reading through your book a bit, I don’t know if this example fits neatly into this categorization, but it kind of reminded me, like the reinforcing, the roundabout, when we invert it, we’d get a different result.

I remember one time I did some speeding. Naughty Pete. Drive safely, everybody. But I did some speeding, I was young and foolish, and I didn’t know that the speed limit changed quickly from a state route to, like, we’re inside a village. So, anyway, I got a ticket for big speeding, and they said, “Hey, if you go to this driver safety class, then we can reduce the fine and prevent it from being on your record and causing problems and insurance, whatever.” I was like, “Okay, yeah, let’s do that.”

And I thought I was so brilliant; this state police officer was teaching this class on safe driving that nobody wanted to be at. All of us just wanted to just, like, tuned out but that doesn’t make for a great educational environment in which you can really learn and retain things. So, he did what I think – Paulo, you tell me, this might be a roundabout. He ingeniously said, “Okay, every time you answer a question, or you contribute, I want to make a tally mark on this chalkboard, and that represents one minute that you get to leave earlier.”

So, the class was maybe four hours, I don’t know. And so then, suddenly the incentives were turned around, like, “Oh, well, we would like to leave sooner, and even though this is boring, we can achieve the objective of leaving sooner by participating.” And, sure enough, it made for a pretty engaging class on safe driving that none of us wanted to be at because he inverted our incentives on us.

Paulo Savaget
Exactly. That’s a great example that I hadn’t heard before, and it reminded me of an example that I didn’t include in the book but it’s kind of similar to what you said, also about speeding in Sweden, that they created this policy that they took the fines from people who were speeding, and created a lottery for people who did not speed.

So, let’s say that you didn’t get a fine that month, you would be joining the lottery, like you might make some money out of this. But, of course, we like the gamification aspect of this. We like lottery. We like the thrill. So, a lot of people stopped speeding, not because they didn’t want to pay the fine but because they wanted to be part of the lottery.

And that’s similar to what you’re saying, you change the incentive. You turn something negative into something positive. Or, the language of many economists, it would be turning the sticks into carrots, the idea of carrots and sticks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, let’s hear about the fourth workaround here, the next best. You got a cool drone example. Could you share that?

Paulo Savaget
Of course, yeah. So, the next best is about repurposing resources or recombining them in ways that are unconventional and beyond the original design of these resources. And resources can be tangible or intangible. The drone example is from an organization called Zipline. As you know, there’s a lot of expectations about drones as technologies.

Perhaps the company Amazon will soon be delivering your products, Amazon Prime, Next Day with drones in New York, like going in San Francisco, but the reality is that it’s not viable yet. So, the many organizations that are interested in investing in drone delivery in places, where at places that are not as busy, and in a way that they can build capabilities, they can develop themselves, they can patent, and then later have this competitive advantage when a drone becomes viable in many places.

So, these organizations, I thought it was genius how they used drones to forge a hand in this game, and they used drones in Rwanda. Also, a case about the last mile, these very remote regions where healthcare is very difficult to get, and they deliver to remote regions, blood for blood transfusions, because blood is very challenging to deliver or to store in remote regions with very poor electricity and healthcare facilities but they are needed urgently, like you don’t have a lot of time, it cannot wait much if you need a blood transfusion.

So, they started shipping from a central facility in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, blood to these many rural regions that are so hard to reach via roads or normal more conventional transportation methods. And this has been extremely successful and has scaled to other places as well. And as they did this, they created patents, they understood better how to operate drones, to make deliveries with drones, and they built all these skill and knowledge while saving lives and contributing a lot to healthcare in Rwanda.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful, Paulo. So, we got a nice little rundown of these four workarounds. I’m curious, is there a type or category of problem or trigger that gets you thinking, since you know this stuff really well, “Ah, there’s probably one of the four workarounds I can use here.” What are some of those triggers or signals?

Paulo Savaget
They boil down to the core attributes. If there’s something that you think is paralyzing you because it’s a very normalized behavior, go with the roundabout. If there’s a rule, for example, that is constraining you, a legislation, a customary rule, something that is habit, for example, or something that is in the constitution but you think is unfair, go with the loophole.

If you have these possibilities of crossing boundaries and these lines that managers often draw, but they might be arbitrary. We don’t have to address healthcare problems only with the methods from healthcare. We can use fast moving consumer goods to deliver medicines to remote regions. That’s a good way of thinking of a piggyback, how you benefit or leverage the success of orders for your benefit as well.

And if you have resources at your disposal, and that you can repurpose or combine them in different ways beyond the original functions or the most conventional ways of using them, then go with the next best.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. All right. Well, let me just put you on the spot and throw some problems on you that I hear from listeners frequently. One, “I’m overwhelmed by too many projects, responsibilities, action items, emails, meetings.” How can we work around some of that?

Paulo Savaget
That’s great. I also face similar challenges and I try to constantly work around some of them. The idea of working around requires adaptation, flexibility, and it is imperfection learning as well. Like, you do something that is good enough. So, when you start with pursuing workarounds, it conduces to planning less and being more adaptive. It’s more pragmatic. It’s more practical. It’s less about long-term changes and behaviors.

Let me give an example of something that I’ve done that was related to sending emails that I think might resonate with some of our listeners. A long time ago, before I started studying workarounds, I was an intern and I had a boss who, very erratically, answered emails. And, of course, I was frustrated because I wanted my emails to be answered. Then I started talking to other people who worked with him, and I realized that he had a certain pattern of email answering that he normally started from the top of his emails, and he started answering emails very early in the morning because he was an early bird.

So, let’s say he woke up at, like, 5:00 a.m., and then he would answer emails for, like, two hours starting from the top. I infer that based on conversations and from the many emails I had sent him that were answered or not. So, what I started doing, I programmed my emails to be sent in the wee hours of the morning.

So, let’s say that I wrote the email at 6:00 p.m., I would program that email to be sent at, like, 3:47 a.m. because then it would go to the top of his pile of emails. And that increased a lot the rate of response for all these emails that I wanted to get answered. That was a workaround in our workplace that might…I still haven’t told that former boss what I’ve done.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, he’s not listening. And just to reinforce the learning, I guess we might call that a piggyback, in that you are piggybacking your way into the golden timeframe via simple software a bit. Or, what category would you put on that?

Paulo Savaget
I would actually consider that a next best because the next best is about resources and repurposing resources. I thought of emails and use them in different ways to communicate and identify the times that work best for my emails to be sent. We don’t normally think of the times that your email will be sent, and that’s how I repurposed, yeah, the ways I communicated. So, I would call it a next best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hear another one. This might be tricky when it’s about interpersonal relations. Like, let’s say someone says, “My boss, or my key colleague, I got to work with is just a jerk. They’re engaged in some toxic and narcissistic behaviors, and it is just tough being around them.” Any clever workarounds that can be put to this thorny interpersonal stuff?

Paulo Savaget
Definitely. One of the chapters in my book describes how you can pursue workarounds in your organization. And I try to challenge a little bit this idea that collaboration is necessarily beneficial or better in every circumstance. Sometimes you will face people that are toxic, that you don’t want to work with, or that might be too slow or not contributing much to your projects.

So, many of the cases and the ways that I describe workarounds is not about pleasing people. It’s about getting things done, and things that will benefit you or whichever goals you have in mind. Let me give an example that I covered. It’s a roundabout workaround.

In many organizations, the bosses will not necessarily allow employees to pursue their own innovative projects because it might not be the priority for the organization, it might not align with the goals or priorities of the organization. So, what do many employees do? It’s what is called boot lagging by innovation management scholars and has resulted into some of our most beloved projects, like the aspirin, or blue LED lights, or large screens by HP.

And the idea is that instead of getting the support or endorsement from bosses, they work around these direct orders, sometimes simply ignoring rules, sometimes actually ignoring what bosses said, so they can develop the innovative projects when the idea is still very rough in the beginning of innovations. It’s what we call sometimes hopeful monstrosities. They are hopeful but they are monstrous. They might not align. You don’t really know necessarily how it’s going to turn out to look like.

And then by working around direct orders, people can invest in these ideas, going underground, and develop the projects until the moment is right to communicate to others in the company. So, you pretty much buy time while developing your solution, your product, or technology. And once that becomes more viable and more attractive, then you make it public and you go to your bosses, and that will be a much better time for presenting that idea instead of in the early stages when the idea is still very crude.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, Paulo, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Paulo Savaget
No, I think we’re good to shift.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Paulo Savaget
That’s very difficult for a nerd like myself who works with so many quotes. But one that I use a lot is from this organization called Alight in Zambia and they describe how they embrace complexity, and instead of building riverbeds if there’s water flowing, you go with the water. You try to embrace those flows and make use of what is already there instead of trying to create things that might not be viable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Paulo Savaget
Wow, that’s also a very difficult for a nerd like myself. The many books that I really enjoy in business, for example, some of the most recent ones that I’ve read includes Originals by Adam Grant that is very nicely written. I really enjoy the books by Malcolm Gladwell, for example.

And there’s a book by Caroline Criado-Perez called Invisible Women that is fascinating as well, describing how gender inequality impacts data, and how this data that we pretty much collect only from men impact the products we use and the services we have available to us as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Paulo Savaget
Well, l would say that my favorite tool or technology is a coffee machine because I need a lot of coffee. As a Brazilian, I’m constantly caffeinated. And in order to also get things done, I need to get a lot of coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do to be awesome at your job?

Paulo Savaget
I’m a bit hyperactive so I need to exercise very often, and it also helps me focus. So, I try to exercise every day. I swim, cycle, play tennis, do many different kinds of sports.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share, something that really seems to connect and resonate with folks when they’re talking about your stuff, they quote back to you often? Or, do you have any quotable Paulo original gems that folks, they’re Kindle book highlighting, they’re retweeting, they’re saying, “Man, when you said this, that really stuck with me.”

Paulo Savaget
One of the quotes that I have in the book that a lot of people enjoy, and I’ve heard many comments about, that was about deviants, that I said that deviants are frowned upon but I think we don’t deviate enough. And then I try to bake a case about how deviants is important as means of challenging the status quo, and how it’s different from disobedience.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Paulo Savaget
I would say reach out. I’m always very happy to talk and exchange. I really enjoy learning about workarounds that people have pursued after being exposed to my work or before as well, that they hadn’t really given much thought about. And, of course, my website and the profile that I have available on the Oxford website.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Paulo Savaget
I would say working with others can be much better and much more fruitful but sometimes we got to be adaptive and make sure that we don’t necessarily go for the people-pleasing solutions, that we can think of different ways of addressing our problems, and that workarounds might help you with that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paulo, this has been a treat. I wish much fun and many good workarounds.

Paulo Savaget
Thank you very much. I hope you’re going to also face with many workarounds.