Hack of Kindness: Constant Iteration

At Cwmpas, just before Christmas we worked out that we’d delivered 25 Hack of Kindness events throughout 2022. In alignment with innovation culture and always looking to iterate, I can’t recall any of the 25 being the same. True to form, Martin Downes and I thought we’d kick off 2023 by introducing 5 new techniques to 3 sessions we delivered over the past week. We’ve used a number of these techniques before but it was interesting to see if/how they added value to our Hack of Kindness agenda. Here’s how it went…

Empathy maps

As we advocate a human-centred approach to service design, we thought that by introducing this technique, it would help the participants identify a ‘typical’ persona/avatar to focus on. I’ve used this technique from the book “Gamestorming” many times before to good effect. However, this was the first time I’d employed it in a Hack of Kindness event where teams are specifically comprised from diverse backgrounds. The technique involves creating a fictitious persona/avatar of the ‘typical’ user of your service by completing the various sections. Overall, I believe the response was mixed; I had one team that struggled to agree on a persona because their backgrounds and experiences were so diverse, plus it also became evident that some members of the group were trying to resolve multiple issues simultaneously, thus making it increasingly difficult to create a ‘typical individual’. In contrast, another team that had been more specific in its problem to solve, openly praised the technique as it helped them find better context around the subject and helped them focus. The learning here is that in order to create a successful Empathy Map, we need to be very specific on the problem/context at hand. In retrospect, the following technique “Future Circles” would have achieved that if we had employed that technique first.

Future Circles

This technique was completely new to me. I discovered it in the excellent book “Creative Acts for Curious People” by Sarah Stein Greenberg and I’m really pleased with the results. In ideation, it is imperative to frame a problem correctly and succinctly. Trying to deal with a multi-faceted subject such as the ‘Cost of Living Crisis’ is simply too big to tackle; an impossible task one may say unless its broken down into separate, more manageable elements. This technique helps by having a number of concentric circles with multiple spokes, each asking “so what can that lead to?”. This allows the problem to be broken down into more manageable elements, providing more focus while simultaneously providing multiple angles for anyone to contribute to the larger problem. I found that this is an incredibly useful exercise for breaking down large social problems and I will be using this more in the future!

Storyboard

For our previous 25 hacks, they’ve each culminated in a pitch (to either other attendees, or to a panel). We still insist on having a short pitching session but we realised we wanted to do something different; we realised that delivering a 20minute workshop on “How to pitch” at the end of each hackathon was taking away precious ‘creative’ time while also taking people briefly outside of the innovation culture. Then, over the Christmas break, after some inspiration from “Creative Confidence” by David Kelley and randomly coming across a comic strip later that afternoon, it hit me! The result; we now ask the participants to draw a storyboard explaining their idea in a maximum of 9 squares. This has not only reduced the need for a ‘How to pitch’ session, but it has also made the ideas more visual and brought a surprising amount of reinvigorated energy to the end of the day. I had completely underestimated the power of drawing! Again, I can see this technique being used a LOT more in the future.

World café

Ok, so the ‘world cafe’ technique where you take your idea/concept ‘on tour’ to other tables in the room, is neither new nor ground-breaking. However, the reason we have chosen to include this technique is because we want to ensure that our Hack of Kindness events are ‘collaborative over competitive’. Ultimately, we all want to see social improvements and by taking an idea to resolve social issues to another team, this also adds their perspectives, supports further iteration and invites them to contribute. Therefore, at the end of the hackathon process, if team members wanted to support other groups with the development of their idea, they now feel part of it as they have already contributed. Furthermore, our ‘elevator pitch’ section is always under 2minutes, therefore, this is an opportunity for the pitcher to ensure that their storyboard is clear and that their narrative is within the time constraints. For my next trick, I’m considering using the storyboards and delivering world cafe format as an art gallery. Hmmmmm!

The Sarick Effect

Traditionally, our pitching sessions have involved one, two or a number of team members presenting the benefits of their idea in under 2minutes. Yet, this implied that the idea was complete and well formed… which is false — unless the participants are geniuses (no offence to our previous 1000+ attendees), there is no way that an idea can be conceived and perfected in a single one-day session. It was only after reading Adam Grant’s “Originals” where I heard of “the sarick effect” where one pitches what is wrong with an idea, rather than an overly-optimistic sales pitch. This is not being pessimistic, its being realistic. Therefore, our pitches now have 2 elements; 1) a 60 second pitch on the idea premise and its benefits, and 2) what is wrong with the idea and what help do they need to make it happen. This has brought so much more value to the process; by embedding the sarick effect, it demonstrates humility from the team, it reinforces that the idea they have is not the finished article and finally, it asks the other teams and the panel for help in the areas where it is needed most, yet again solidifying what makes a Hack of Kindness different to traditional hackathons; a non-competitive, pro-collaborative process.

As you may have gathered, our Hack of Kindness events are a bit like those stairs at Hogwarts, always changing and always taking you on another tangent. Personally, I love it because every event is different and has the potential to generate so many great ideas for good.

Everyone and anyone is welcome to attend any of our public Hack of Kindness events, you don’t necessarily need to be from the area, nor be involved in the subject matter; everyone brings a different perspective and has the potential to be a changemaker!

Contact either paul.stepczak@cwmpas.coop or martin.downes@cwmpas.coop for more details on our Hack of Kindness events.