The world stopped, the streets emptied, and the offices lay vacant. Within the context of a post-apocalyptic setting where people are separated by sheets of plastic and glass, forced to communicate through apps and made to compete with their meowing cats and their screeching children, what is a HR department to do to keep their people healthy, fresh, and bursting with creative energy?
COVID-19 roared through the population, forcing people to huddle in the confines of their homes. Unable to gather to communicate, problem-solve or laugh, what does this do to innovation? Many people suspected that if innovation was a person, during COVID, she’d be on a holiday – enjoying the beach with her phone turned off. But thankfully, innovation didn’t go on holiday. She was here with us all along, as was proven by one of our clients, a fintech company. Let’s call them: Company A.
“Innovation cannot be put on hold!” Company A decided. They deliberately chose to do an event – so seemingly unsuited for the virtual space, so innovative in its unlikeliness that few companies had attempted it – they chose to run a virtual hackathon.
“Innovation cannot be put on hold!”
It’s common to hold hackathons in face-to-face settings, where teams huddle together to deliberate ideas, debate their merits, and to passionately agree (or disagree) with one another. Hackathons are loud and boisterous – people rub shoulders, with heads butt up against each other. Through this dirty, sweaty and (often) inelegant melding of minds, ideas that started out as atoms coalesce into tangible shapes. It’s this process of innovation that births new ideas and brings to the forefront the life-changing whispers that would otherwise be drowned out in a large organisation.
But everyone’s stuck at home.
With everyone miles away from each other, there’s no chance for shoulders to rub. No chance for heads to butt and no sticky notes going on and off a flipchart. But what if there was a way to replicate this experience in a virtual setting? That’s what Company A tasked People Potential with.
Together with Company A and their web services vendor, People Potential ran a 24-hour hackathon in the middle of an extended lockdown. A hackathon that birthed such good ideas that they are in the process of being implemented.
So the hackathon was well-received and it created the innovation that Company A craved. But, like the infamous TED Talks, as amazing and mind-blowing as the TED speeches are, they didn’t become amazing without some intervention. A lot of preparation and coaching goes into ensuring that every TED Talk is amazing. So like TED, Company A prepared their people with the skills that they needed prior to the hackathon. For 6 months before the hackathon, People Potential ran The Project Pitch training programme for the hackathon participants.
How We Prepared the Hackathon Participants
1) Structure
With The Project Pitch, we equipped the participants with the ability to structure their solutions in a way that’s compelling, clear, concise, yet comprehensive. And because we were right in the middle of a lockdown, we ran the training online using Zoom and Miro. Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard that allows us to mimic and improve upon the in-person experience of being in a fast-paced, don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it experience of an engaging training session.
With Miro, the participants saw how all the different pieces that made up their solution fell into place.
After the participants had gone through the process of structuring their ideas, a robust, well-packaged, and irresistible solution took shape. What started out as a tangled web of confusion morphed into a well-thought-out structure that served as a base for what came next – their visual aids.
2) Visual Aids
With their ideas arranged in a compelling structure, the participants conceptualised their PowerPoint slides with clarity. By constantly communicating with People Potential coaches, they worked on their PowerPoint drafts – including conceptualisation and layout to scripting and transitions. At this point, their pitches made logical sense and looked great. Now, to master delivery.
3) Delivery
With the hackathon competition just around the corner, we gathered the participants for the final stage of their pitch training. This time, it was to master the delivery of their pitches. They were taught the keys to delivering a captivating pitch and they learned to deliver with presence in a virtual environment – which was new to many back then and harder to do in a virtual setting.
They practiced, patted each other on the back (as much as they could pat each other on the back on Zoom), and they giggled as they made silly mistakes. Through this journey of learning, discovery and honing of skills, something amazing happened. During the hackathon itself, the judges, so wowed by the pitches that they were hearing, said to People Potential, “We thought that we’d be hearing ‘just another’ group presenting. Instead, we heard ‘world class’ presentations.”
And then, the Q&A’s came about, questions shot out from the judges one after another, a machine gun of sorts. But the participants were ready because handling Q&A’s was also taught in The Project Pitch.
Satisfied with their answers, the judges were ready to deliver their verdict.
What Happened After the Hackathon
Many of the pitches are now in various stages of being implemented within Company A. Many of the participants have gone on to make a tangible impact on the organisation. Imagine what the hackathon participants must have felt – to make a difference, to know that the work we do matters, is a basic human need. And to matter within a large organisation can be difficult – and therefore, priceless. To the naysayers that say you can’t change the world, perhaps they just haven’t learned how to pitch.
To the naysayers that say you can’t change the world, perhaps they just haven’t learned how to pitch.
– Ibrahim J. Mariwa, Master Trainer at People Potential
If you’re an HR or L&D professional reading this, perhaps a hackathon is a fun and creative way to get the most out of your people. Talk to us to learn more about how you too can run a hackathon in your organisation.
Interested to see what else People Potential can do for you? Click here to learn more: www.peoplepotential.com/solutions