What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. – Morpheus
Have you ever felt like something is not quite right in your company? That day in and day out there is a monotonous repetition, a recursive loop of drudgery and monotony. That the interactions you have every day are somehow repeating themselves; the same meetings, the same conversations, the same problems repeating themselves over and over again.
I certainly have, and I fear that our organisations and the people within them are slowly becoming less human as they watch our businesses grow into bureaucratic behemoths, chasing shallow targets at the expense of efficacy and empathy towards the humans that built it.
I can't think of a better illustration of this recursive loop than the scene in the Matrix Resurrections where Neo seemingly loses his mind while grappling with the apparent reality that the Matrix is just a video game. Each day blends into the next as the awareness of what is real and authentic slowly fades.
"It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams."
But what if this wasn't the only way to do business? What if we could create thriving and effective organisations without the side effects of bloat, waste, and dehumanisation? I believe there is, and it starts with creating a crack in the fabric of our firms to expose the reality that there is a better way of doing business, a better way of working together, a better way of achieving our goals that doesn't leave a path of destruction in its wake.
Organisation hacking
To begin hacking your organisation, we need to start with some principles. These principles will guide our mindset, behaviours, and actions to ensure we're working together on creating a better business for everyone and building each other up in the process.
Guiding principles
1. Keep it simple. Test one or two hypotheses at a time, starting with the most valuable.
2. Use volunteers. Don’t compel anyone to take part in the experiments.
3. Make it fun. Think of ways to gamify the experience.
4. Start in your own area. Reduce the layers of permission you need to get and minimise the chance of someone pulling the plug.
5. Run the new in parallel with the old. Don’t blow up the existing process until you’ve validated the new one.
6. Refine and retest. Create an expectation that this will be the first of many experiments.
7. Stay loyal to the problem. Don’t fall in love with your solution. If it doesn’t pan out, search for other possible hacks.
Applying these principles, we can begin to look at our organisations from a different lens, the lens of a hacker that doesn't care for red tape that hinders progress, but cares about creating innovative solutions to the most complex and challenging problems we face.
Next, we can surface the most pressing problems using the Bureaucratic Mass Index (BMI) survey. Once we have a clearer picture of the main themes to explore, we can start to organise a hack day for teams to come together and brainstorm ideas, solutions, and designs for hacks that would enable the organisation to operate more effectively for everyone. We can use the below questions as a guide for the day, ensuring we stay on track with hacks that will have a measurable positive impact on the company, building motivation for more hacks as a result.
Guiding questions
1. What’s the name of the hack ?
2. What are the key components of the hack?
3. What hypothesis are we testing?
4. Who will participate in the experiment?
5. What are we going to ask them to do?
6. How will we measure the impact of the hack (what data will we collect)?
7. What’s the time frame and resources that will be needed?
As we progress throughout the day, we will jump from defining the principles that guide our approach, exploring the problem space based on the themes identified, probing processes and policies to hack, and finally designing experiments to solve the problems. At the end of the day, we will have several hacks to experiment with, people committed to each hack, and executive support to help with making the time and resources available to team members.
As Morpheus said, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. To make real lasting change, we need less complaining and more conscious choices to create companies that are fit for the future. For those who want to begin the process of re-inventing your organisation to be as capable as the people within it, reach out to me at hello@culture-coach.org.
Otherwise, check out this guide for a full run-down of the hack day.
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