Hackathons as anti-process process by Saher Sidhom
Innovation is the conspiracy of the mediocre majority.
There is a new bandwagon in the business world called innovation. Some recognise the need for transforming their business and some are purely doing it for keeping up appearances or worse; for vanity. Sadly the majority tend to be the latter.
The corporate world is fine tuned to jump on the latest bandwagons and often appropriate terms, methods and approaches made by far more imaginative individuals and groups in sub-cultures.
Hackers and Hackathons are no different. The terminology has lost almost all of its meaning by the people who truly come from that world. It just sounds ‘cool’ to have something to do with ‘Hacking’. Gives corporates a contemporary edge and currency that is potentially exploitative in nature and at best ignorant of the values of hackers and their mindsets.
Let us start with the mindset.
If you delve into any literature on computer science hackers and the Hacker Ethic you will find most of the following:
Hackers want to solve new problems.
That’s where they can push the edges of existing knowledge and feel the true thrill of discovery.
Hackers don’t believe that a problem should be solved twice.
Just calling someone a hacker doesn’t make them one.
Whilst attitude is important, it is irrelevant without actual competence.
True hackers believe any information should be free + hackable. Hackers want to get the ‘system’ to do stuff it was not intended to do but is capable of doing.
The ‘thrill’ is from building something, learning while doing it and getting the recognition from other hackers — not managers.
Hacking is fun, it’s a highly sophisticated form of play.
Do you think your organisation has any, some or all of the above values?
Maybe. But I bet they want to run a Hackathon or ran one already. In our world we needed new ways for building, transforming and more importantly discovering. The corporate innovation processes, if exist, have plenty of challenges that stops them from ‘hacking’ their future. Here is how we summarise these challenges:
Too slow in a fast world. This is obvious. But to illustrate the point Google makes 6 times the revenue of WPP in half the time since both companies started. HP lost nearly 100BN from it’s valuation in the period from 2000 to 2012. Any watchers of new disruptive models can easily point at a few major upstarts who disrupted entire industries in periods of less than 5 years. Think Tesla (2003), Airbnb (2008), Zenefits (2013). Even established tech companies repeatedly need to pivot adapt and re-configure their propositions in increasingly shorter product / platform cycles. Technology giants are looking at dramatic changes to their directions to create whole new categories of services & industries. Meanwhile the incumbents are still trying to run digital training for all their employees …
Too self-obsessed in an outsider world. Any cursory glance at where transformational businesses have come from — or the entrepreneurs who changed the game in an industry will highlight an interesting phenomenon. They were all outsiders. Most businesses today are still looking at their feet. They repeatedly and consistently fail to have a clear view of where are the value drivers of their future — or who will invent those values and change their world. In a recent experience of ours with the travel industry it was clear that while most major players are preaching change and transformation; their tech-roadmaps, processes, collaborations and understanding of the underlying technology is at best; primitive. Most are not actually tech led but they are led by language such as this: ‘we are in the business of putting bums on seats’.
Too structured in a networked world. Here lies the ultimate challenge. If you compare any organisation founded and built in the last five years to any of it’s classical predecessors you will find the older generation were built to serve the structures of the industrial era. Production lines, top down management, silos, politics etc while the modern businesses are the children of the information revolution where almost everyone is organised around data and the newer ones mirror in a way how the internet itself works with automation built-in from the start.
Hacking is an anti-dote process to the above challenges.
It is the complete opposite to the behaviours underlying the above challenges. It’s fast, outward looking and externally networked. When we set up our network we asked ourselves a couple of further questions:
How can we build processes that enable us to optimise our curiosity, enable us to make things that are 10x better & embed us even further into the network of top 1% talented hackers?
We already had the mindset and the competence of hackers. We naturally come from that world and understand it intuitively. But we needed to evolve the process and ensure we can deliver inspiring new knowledge.
We had to look outside ourselves and hack the hackathon. We investigated the best techniques of top high performance teams — who are not computer hackers — but nevertheless embody their ethos naturally.
Our research covered institutions that managed to innovate repeatedly and worked in environments where discovery, imagination and invention were not vanity or pr exercises but literally mission critical. Amongst the sample were: Darpa, Pixar, Intelligence Teams, Y-Combinator and couple of cutting edge courses / science labs at various universities. We learned from the processes they employed and identified the principles of high end problem solving.
Five Principles: for running hackathons for creative problem solving under pressure and with quite a number of constraints / limited resources.
HACKERS FIRST. Whilst challenges maybe supplied by a client or external organisation ultimately the challenges need to fit with the dreams and ambitions of the hackers. The best hackathons aim at giving hackers the tools to build their dreams and more importantly give fair pay and real opportunity to own the outcomes.
HANDPICKED. Top high end research & innovation groups have highly selective criteria for bringing in hackers. Firstly they have to have a natural in-built hacker ethic. Secondly they have to be extremely competent at what they do. Attitude is no replacement for competence in the hacker world.
STATE OF THE ART IN THE LEAD. The best hackathons start with new problems. In order to create new original solutions hackers need to use new technologies in new ways. Anything that resembles an iteration on what we already know would be a waste of the creative energy of everybody involved. No problem should be solved twice.
10 TIMES BETTER. The challenges hackers take on aim at getting to solutions and new models that are 10 times better than anything that exists. Hackers are fundamentally concerned with solving hard problems that will change how we will live in the future.
NOW OR NEVER. Well run hackathons tend to have a very synthesising experience. It’s a one-off community of brilliant talent coming together only once with very extreme conditions of time and technology constraints to solve a problem there and then without the luxury of postponing the solution to the future. Great hackathons are unique and unrepeatable.
While many attempt and do run hackathons for all sorts of misguided reasons our message is clear. Don’t lose sight of the hacker ethic. Doing anything else simply kills the creativity, the motivation and the opportunity to create something ground breaking and you may just end up with another soul-less corporate sponsored hackathon.
Saher Sidhom is founder of HACKMASTERS London . This is part of the “Hacker” section of our new series of Hacker, Maker, Teacher, Thief essays. You can buy the book that inspired the series, Hacker, Maker, Teacher, Thief: Advertising’s Next Generation, here.
