What To Do When Life Serves You a Kobayashi Maru? (II)

So what did Dave do next?

If you're confused, read part 1 of this post here.  Go on, we'll wait for you. 

All up to speed now? Great!

So we saw that Dave suddenly found out that:
his MBA assignments had doubled;
his time was cut in half;
not finishing = extra money he couldn't afford;
and he regularly works 10-12 hours a day, which is basically all the time we really have.

And the choices provided by his College were:
1) Apply for a 5 day extension, and the reasons that would be accepted were: A sudden illness of Dave/someone he had to care for; or a short notice project at work.  
Or
2) Dave could just try to finish which assignments he could, and accept failure for the others.

There were no good options.  It was a no-win scenario, a "Kobay Maru".

In Star Trek mythology, Captain James T. Kirk was the only cadet in Starfleet history to beat the dreaded Kobayashi Maru scenario. 

The original no-win scenario was a training simulation in which cadets encounter a civilian ship in distress. The cadet is presented with two choices: enter the Neutral Zone to save the civilians, thereby violating treaty and potentially provoking war with the Klingons; or avoid war by abandoning the Kobayashi Maru, thus condemning the civilians to death. 

In the simulation, choosing to enter the Neutral Zone results in the Klingons attacking and destroying the ship which the cadet is commanding. The Kobayashi Maru was constructed as a no-win scenario. How did Kirk beat it?

Kirk reprogrammed the simulation, so that it was possible to save the civilians and avoid war with the Klingons.

Some consider that cheating, and it is arguable that Kirk didn't get the true point of the simulation.  

We prefer to think that young cadet Kirk recognised that he was playing a rigged game, and decided to change the rules of engagement.  And that's exactly what Dave did.

His reading of the college regulations showed a common premise behind all the "acceptable" extension reasons that were presented to him: circumstances beyond a student's control that would negatively affect their preparation of their assignments.

He asked himself, "How is my loss of thirty days prep time, due to an administrative decision to suddenly change their published dates, any different?" He thought, why should he beg for five days, from the same body that took his thirty days?
As a full-time professional, wasn't his time just as important?

The options Dave got from the student liaison ignored these issues, and five days really couldn't do much to help him.  He didn't see any profit in going to war with the college, but he needed to talk to someone at a higher level, who had the power to make a difference.

Dave presented his case to the College President. 
He took a leap of faith.  Faith that any reasonable person would understand the injustice of the situation.  Faith that God would influence those in authority to do the right thing.

Faced with a no-win scenario, and only two bad options, sometimes we need to challenge those options that we take for granted.

Sometimes, we need to find that third option we hadn't considered before.  Sometimes, we need to try to change the rules of the rigged game.

And sometimes...we may just succeed.

How have you dealt with your "no-win" scenarios?
Let us know in the comments section!