How deeply do you seek alternative solutions to problems at work?

It has been a busy week or two, and I haven’t been able to keep up with my favourite TV programmes. That means I’ve fallen a week behind in watching the latest series of Dragon’s Den, the UK version of the American Shark Tank, in which budding entrepreneurs bid for investment in their business ideas. Only on Wednesday did I discover the talented Yana Smaglo , who appeared on the show last week.?

Yana fled from Ukraine once the attacks on Kyiv began in 2022. She escaped with her laptop and a few personal items before finally ending up with friends in Huddersfield. Two years later, she was in front of the Dragons, who were emotionally moved by her story. Indeed, Deborah Meaden admitted she was unusually “choked up”. A few hard-nosed questions later, and Yana received ￡40,000 from Deborah and the same amount from fellow Dragon, Steven Bartlett.?

Quite apart from her evident entrepreneurial skills, Yana’s story shows that it is perfectly possible to find a solution to your difficulties if you try hard enough.? With almost nothing, Yana was able to create a business that became investible, all within a year or two.?

You might wonder if Yana has read Aesop’s Fables. His story of “The Crow and the Pitcher” shows that if you think deeply enough, you can work out a solution to a problem. The crow discovers a pitcher but cannot get his beak down to the water inside. After thinking, the crow drops stones into the pitcher, making the water rise so that he can eventually get a drink. You might call this necessity being the mother of invention. Yana was the same, it seems. She devised her new business idea because she had to do something to remove herself from the problematic situation forced upon her by Putin.

I watched this Dragon’s Den episode on the same day that I heard about the new Chinese AI system, Deepseek. As the Financial Times explained, this AI system had been created at a fraction of the cost of the current darling of the AI world, ChatGPT. The final training of Deepseek cost around $5m, whereas the same work for ChatGPT cost more than 20 times that.?

The Deepseek engineers were forced to find a way to solve their problem because they had little access to the powerful chips from the likes of Nvidia following trade bans imposed by the USA. The accepted “wisdom” in massive tech firms in the USA is that you can’t train an AI system unless you have powerful microchips and servers costing billions. It turns out this is a false notion. The Chinese company behind Deepseek has proven it is perfectly possible to train an AI system without the powerful kit deemed essential by US tech billionaires.

When you have tons of cash at your disposal, and governments worldwide are falling over each other to provide funding, you don’t have to think too hard about what to do. However, the Chinese developers had to think deeply about seeking a solution to the problem because they did not have endless amounts of cash or high-tech equipment. They invented a different way because of necessity. They thought about the situation much like that fabled crow.

Here’s the issue for many businesses: faced with accepted “wisdom” and relatively easy access to funds, they can buy themselves out of problems. The mantra in many firms is: Just throw money at it, and it will go away.

However, as Yana from Ukraine and Deepseek found out, you have to think carefully when you face necessity and don’t have access to all the funds and tools you need. Perhaps the solutions to your problems in the workplace could be found by restricting budgets even further and removing some of the tech tools you rely on. The result will be the creation of a more restrictive environment, meaning that it will become necessary to invent something new to solve the problem. Perhaps we end up with many business problems because we are too comfortable with easy funding and all sorts of tech at our fingertips.