There's a reason MacGyver became a verb.

The show was ridiculous, of course. (Unless you were 10 years old in 1992).

A guy defusing bombs with chewing gum and a Swiss Army knife, escaping locked rooms with nothing but duct tape and sheer determination. Week after week, the same formula: impossible situation, no resources, ticking clock—and somehow he'd pull it off without all the hype of Walker, Texas Ranger’s need for unnecessary roundhouse kicks.

It was pure fiction. But the concept lodged itself in our cultural vocabulary because it captured something true about how creativity actually works.

We don't say "let's MacGyver this" because we believe we can literally build a radio transmitter out of a paper clip. We say it because we recognize the principle: sometimes the best solutions come when you're forced to work with what you've got.

The Comfort Trap

In wealth management—and honestly, across most of financial services—we've gotten comfortable. Not comfortable in the sense that business is easy, but comfortable in how we approach problems. We've built processes. We've established "the way things are done." We've created enough padding around our operations that we rarely feel the sharp eyes of true constraint anymore.

And that comfort is quietly killing our creativity.

When you're not fighting for survival, when you're not improvising your way through each day, something gets lost. The grit fades. The spontaneity disappears. The muscle memory for creative problem-solving atrophies because you simply don't need it anymore.

I see it in firms all the time. They have resources. They have technology. They have teams. But they've lost the scrappy energy that built them in the first place. They've traded the paper clip mindset for a procurement process.

The Fixers Without a Voice

Here's the thing—most firms actually have their own MacGyvers. They're the people in operations who've rigged together workarounds to keep things running. They're the advisors who've figured out how to make three incompatible systems talk to each other. They're the ones who see problems before anyone else and quietly fix them.

But too often, these people aren't given strategic influence. They're stuck in tactical mode, patching holes rather than shaping direction. The firm benefits from their creativity but never elevates it. Never asks them what they're seeing. Never brings them into the room where decisions get made.

This is especially missed in the maze of consolidation.

That's a massive missed opportunity. The people closest to the friction are usually the ones who understand best where the real problems live.

Why Constraints Actually Work

The reason MacGyver resonated—the reason it became cultural shorthand—is that it reflects something real about human cognition.

Give people unlimited options, and they freeze. Give them boundaries—tight ones—and they start innovating. Constraints force your brain to make connections it would never make otherwise. You start seeing potential in things you'd normally overlook.

This isn't just folk wisdom. A 2019 Harvard Business Review article reviewed 145 empirical studies on the effects of constraints on creativity and innovation. The finding? Individuals, teams, and organizations alike benefit from a healthy dose of constraints. It's only when constraints become too extreme that they stifle creativity.

The show was exaggerated, but the underlying truth wasn't: limitation breeds invention. Every entrepreneur who's bootstrapped a company knows this. Every small team that's outmaneuvered a bigger competitor knows this. Every person who's had to figure it out because there was no other option knows this.

AI May Be Your New Swiss Army Knife

Here's where this gets practical.

Think about what your best problem-solvers actually do. They connect dots. They remember that client situation from three years ago that's relevant to today. They spot patterns others miss. They know where to look.

Now imagine giving them a tool that can do all of that instantly, across every piece of data your firm has ever touched.

When your data is organized and accessible, AI can help your team answer questions in seconds that used to take hours. Which clients are approaching a life event that might trigger a planning conversation? What's our exposure to a specific sector across all portfolios? Where are we bleeding time in onboarding?

The fixer who used to spend half their day pulling reports can now spend that time actually solving problems. The advisor with a hunch about a client opportunity can validate it with real data in minutes.

But here's the catch: AI is only as useful as the data you feed it. If your information is scattered across disconnected systems, if your client data lives in six different places with six different formats, AI becomes just another tool that promises more than it delivers.

The firms getting real value right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who've done the unglamorous work of getting their data house in order.

What's Coming

Where we are going is about to get a lot faster.

The next few years won't reward firms that are best at improvising with duct tape and paper clips. They'll reward firms that have their data in order—the ones who've built the foundation to drive meaningful change rather than just react to it.

When the pace accelerates, the gap between firms that are prepared and those still patching things together will widen quickly.

Getting Ready

This requires intentionality. Elevate your fixers. Bring them into strategic conversations. Ask them what's broken that nobody's talking about.

Get your data house in order—not as a someday project, but as an urgent priority.

And honestly assess whether your firm is building capability or just buying time.

A cheesy 80s TV show understood something we keep forgetting: the magic happens when you've got nothing but your wits and whatever's within arm's reach. But the next chapter isn't about making do with less. It's about being ready for more.