5 Key Ways A Hacker Approach Can Benefit Managers

An efficient manager should think like a hacker. I bet your eyes just rolled and your mouth dropped because the definition of a hacker is a person who cuts through something with heavy blows. The idea that a manager should think more like a hacker sounds counterintuitive—maybe even nefarious—especially given the workplace trends of training managers to use more soft skills and emotional intelligence. But according to Paulo Savaget, associate professor of engineering and Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, rather than being dismissed, the knowledge and ingenuity that hackers bring to systems thinking doesn’t have to be malicious or illegal. He uses the myth of the Trojan Horse—one of the first hacks—in which the Greeks didn’t need to break Troy’s gate or walls to get in.

Savaget, author of The Four Workarounds, believes a manager’s workaround mindset can be invaluable in management. “Managers often believe they can solve every problem with rational design, comprehensive evaluation and logical implementation, but this over-planning explains why projects often overpromise, overspend or drag on interminably,” he argues. “A hacker mindset can help managers take a step back from these worn-out management tenets and adopt more adaptable strategies instead. This can be particularly beneficial in situations where stakes are high, resources are scarce and there’s no time for the usual drawn-out decision-making processes.”

When the professor started his research, he was astonished at how hackers with meager means and training were able to crack complex computer systems. “I knew nothing about coding, but hackers intrigued me, and I couldn’t find much information about them at the time,” Savaget told me. “Management scholars seemed to be interested in hackers only when it came to cybersecurity, and journalists seemed more interested in reinforcing negative stereotypes about hackers than in revealing how they hacked. Despite the fascinating things they did behind computer screens, we knew very little about their methods.” The professor’s research enabled him to identify five key ways that a hacker approach can improve manager efficiency.

Five Ways A Hacker Approach Can Benefit Managers

1. Work around obstacles. “It’s human nature to tackle obstacles head-on,” Savaget admits, “but If we believe that every complex problem requires a complicated solution, we wind up trying to tackle our obstacles head-on, but this often results in us banging our heads against the wall or feeling completely paralyzed. Through workarounds, hackers on and offline obtain quick wins, and these sometimes pave the way for big changes which they could not have anticipated.”

2. Find opportunities across siloes. “Managers often need to draw lines to maintain order, manage expectations and get through their checklists more quickly,” the professor notes. “But when they can’t see those lines, they get numb to different ways of interpreting situations. A hacker’s approach of starting without too many assumptions can help you chart unexplored territory and find unconventional pairings from different areas. This creative, flexible, imperfection-loving mindset empowers them to navigate ambivalent situations and is conducive to identifying unconventional, quick, and resourceful ways to make outsized impacts.”

3. Cultivate a culture of pragmatism. “Managers often believe they can solve every problem with rational design, evaluation and implementation, but this over-planning explains why projects end up floundering,” he explains. “Hacking can help them create a culture of pragmatism, valuing experimental and incomplete approaches with the resources they have on hand.”

4. Mobilize staff around a process instead of goals or outcomes. “Management scholars have increasingly highlighted the importance of mobilizing employees around purposes that go beyond making a profit—such as social responsibility or a sense of belonging,” Savaget says. “A hacker approach can expand on that. Most hackers are self-organized and diverse groups of individuals who are much more interested in embarking on exciting processes than in a predetermined end goal or ownership of an outcome—and embracing the process can motivate your team.”

5. Keep it simple and complex. “Hackers know how to strip away the ‘accidental complexity’ of unintended complications and focus on ‘essential complexity,’ or the key properties of the beast they’re trying to beat—while keeping things as simple as possible to prevent things from going wrong,” according to Savaget. “When managers believe that every complex problem requires a complicated solution, they wind up trying to tackle obstacles head-on and fail to parse essential complexity from the accidental. Some of the world’s toughest challenges are complex because they are constantly evolving and intertwined, and would-be solvers who try to address every facet are bound to come up short.”

The Four Workarounds

Workarounds are effective, versatile and accessible methods for tackling complex problems. At its core, a workaround is a method that ignores or even challenges conventions on how, and by whom, a problem is meant to be solved. The four workarounds, named by Savaget, are the piggyback, the loophole, the roundabout and the next-best.

1. The piggyback capitalizes on pre-existing but seemingly unrelated systems or relationships; they rely on looking for pairings that might have gone unexplored.
2. The loophole makes rules work in your favor; while it has a negative connotation, it can be used in positive ways by identifying technicalities and ambiguities in what rules do and don’t say.
3. The roundabout disrupts self-reinforced behaviors with the goal of buying time or turning an undesirable into desirable behavior.
4. The next-best repurposes or recombines readily available resources to find different ways to get things done.

Savaget believes that managers can make their organizations “hackier” if they stimulate a culture of dynamism and pragmatism, valuing experimental and incomplete approaches that get past the default ways of getting things done. “This involves planning less, stimulating an imperfection-loving culture, giving employees flexibility (one in which it’s best to ask for forgiveness than permission), pivoting and stacking quick wins to make the best of unforeseen opportunities and being ready to scale when opportunities arise,” he concludes.