Hacking inclusion and creativity

I did something for the first time today.

I led a team in our company’s hackathon, Australia Post Hack Dayz.

For the past couple of years I’ve been ‘hack-adjacent’, supporting the movement through showing up to pitch events, marketplace events, and generally encouraging anyone and everyone to get involved.

And yet, I’ve never actually participated myself.

Why not?

Well, I’ve seen Hack Dayz as a place for our technology and digital people, those uber-savvy and clever individuals who talk in a completely different language. I can’t write code. I work in a humanistic profession. And I didn’t think I had the time to commit. When I dig into my reasons, I think that I just didn’t think there was anything I could contribute… that my role was more on the sidelines, cheerleading the hackers on.

This time, I was cajoled and encouraged by Derani, one of our amazing organisers of Hack Dayz, to submit an idea into the portal. I decided to take on the challenge. Hack Dayz requires you to submit an idea and all I had was a problem to be solved! As the customer, I was able to quickly determine in a quick huddle with some of my team members the kinds of features we’d like to see in an ideal world to solve our real and pressing challenge. In my pitch to gather team members, I described the problem and what I wanted to see in an ideal world. I had no idea if this was even technically feasible. Have I mentioned I’m not a tech person?!

Who would’ve known… but there were solutions available. I had two brilliant intrapreneurs approach me separately offering to join the team and hack together the solution we so desperately needed. And we were off. Nagendra Prasad and Tony Xu didn’t know each other before, but they were happy to collaborate. Nagendra quickly asked a couple of his colleagues, Rachit Gupta and Sukanya Gogoi to join the mission and I invited a couple of my team members, Steph Melrose and Robyn Lambropoulos to help with the hustle at the marketplace.

I learnt an important lesson today. Those of us who work in different areas of the business have different perspectives and insights that our technology people do not. And our technology people have ways to solve our problems. But we don’t join up enough. We don’t even know if something is feasible so don’t even think to submit an IT request for a solution. Our IT folks perhaps don’t get the full picture of challenges and issues, and so are focused on solving issues that have been raised, rather than those that haven’t been discovered.

And although I know diversity is critically important to creativity and innovation, today I felt the impact of diversity and inclusion. Today we had a team that was incredibly well balanced in terms of gender, cultural background, technical background, and experience. Together we genuinely brought our different attributes and talents to the fore. Everybody had the freedom to express their creativity, to try something without seeking consensus, and build a novel solution to a problem that’s genuinely impacting on our ability to support our people.

My team has two key priorities this year, the first being to build a truly inclusive workplace, and the second is about enabling creativity and innovation for the benefit of customers. Hack Dayz has reminded me today that the second will not occur without the first. My commitment to purpose has never been stronger and today has shown that inclusion enables creativity.

Oh, and guess what?

We won an award! Sarah Moran of Girl Geek Academy presented our team, People Power, with the New Kid on the Block award for solving a very real problem that large companies struggle with, and for doing so by bringing together different areas of the business to collaborate.

Here’s my takeouts:

• Get involved in your company’s hackathon even if you’re not a technical wizard. You can hustle, you can connect those who can code to the problems that matter. If you don’t have a hackathon, perhaps you can be the one who starts one!
• Inclusion builds creativity and is the basis for building something different to the rest. Seek out those who have different perspectives to your own to help you see problems from different angles.
• If you, like me, are from a humanistic profession, you can still lead a tech team. You don’t have to write code! You can simply engage people around a problem and explore the possibilities. This goes for startups too. If you’re inspired to solve a big problem, focus on sharing the problem with others and inspire them around the change you would like to see.
• Pitching around the problem to be solved, with a clear, human-led purpose, inspires others to get involved. If you pitch around the technology or solution, expect to attract people who are solution-focused.

When have you found yourself in a situation where you wish you’d engaged others from different perspectives?