3 lessons from Nielsen Pacific's hackathon v1.0

We made our first attempt at an internal hackathon (more like an internal workshop than a software devs’ hackathon) this past December and although the concept is not new for many of us – it’s still a tough ask in a 93 year old company which has only just in recent months identified via its company values that it wants its data to be open and connected to the world of big data.

In the end after months of planning we brought together 42 of our best people from 5 offices, almost every department of the business in Australia and New Zealand, went for 30 hours in total and produced 8 fantastic concepts to be reviewed and either invested in, or considered as potential additions to roadmap.

Along the way we of course learnt many lessons and reaffirmed many that we have all heard of before from such events:

• agility (constant iteration) is mission critical
• getting senior leaders to buy in and turn up to support gives the event credibility and momentum
• making sure everyone is clear that their input to how you run the event is critical to its current / future success
• ensuring teams have a dynamic mix of different people / roles / skillsets that will work well together

Even though the items above were all key lessons, they are common lessons you would have heard from everyone that has run a similar event before. The big 3 however were ones that we completely underestimated, yet had the biggest impact:

1.      A hackathon is only ‘real’ when you get external people involved.

I remember spending months getting various stakeholders including my colleagues on the senior executive team engaged, educated, and supportive of the event. For months of hard work behind the scenes, it wasn’t until one day we secured our first external judge that I received an email from a colleague: “Wow – this is real!”. From this I realised that the event does not feel real to participants or other stakeholders until you are locked into a date / time / format by inviting in external people – judges, partners, coaches etc.

2.      External parties (clients / partners / thought leaders) are keen to help you succeed

We were also blown away by the vocal and proactive support of people we talked to: potential partners who had run similar events who lent us free advice over a cup of coffee, senior clients and industry leaders whom we invited to attend as judges for the event, several of whom thanked us and congratulated us…before we had even run the event.

In the process we also unexpectedly received offers to partner for future hackathons which of course opens new commercial and innovation opportunities…more on that in 2017.

Many thanks again to the individuals from PwC, News Corp, Nestle, Zetaris and Westpac who lent us their time, commentary and ideas, and to the senior executive from Coca-Cola who wanted to join us but simply had scheduling conflicts.

3.      The positive impact on your internal culture is bigger than any one idea or hackday.

It was always our intention to use a hackathon as a way to show the grassroots of the business how everyone had a role to play in kickstarting innovation, integration and agility. Although we had planned carefully to bring this to life – none of us could have imagined the amplified effect the event had on people within the business from the graduate to the Director level. Weeks later we were still receiving emails from participants, their managers, and people who had decided they wanted to participate next year who were simply buzzing about the impact on the way they thought about the business, our leadership team, the impact they as individuals could have on change and transformation, the new people they met, the new things they learnt about our business….the list goes on. I remember an old colleague of mine Stephen Johnson always talking about ‘starting a movement’ to bring about change within communities and organisations; this event was a great way to apply some of the lessons he taught me.

Someone asked me recently what my top 3 achievements were for 2016, and it wasn’t too hard to bubble this one up to that shortlist. Thanks again to my partners in crime Eleanor Saxton and Luke Oldridge for bringing the event to life with me.