In today’s hyper-dynamic economy, the biggest risk to sustained success is an overly-hierarchical, bureaucracy-infested management model that undermines resilience, stifles creativity and saps initiative. You’ve already re-engineered your operating model for efficiency, speed and responsiveness. Now it’s time to retool your management model for adaptability, innovation, engagement and customer centricity. We can help.
The Management Hackathon harnesses the power of open innovation to accelerate change and build tomorrow’s critical organizational capabilities today.
Hackathons can help to coalesce a broad commitment to solving the organization’s most pressing challenges and build critical new skills.
By involving new voices in the change process, and challenging participants to question conventional wisdom, hackathons bring bold new solutions to the fore.
The transparency of the hackathon methodology breeds commitment and increases the odds that recommended changes are positively embraced and rapidly implemented.
Throughout the Hackathon process, individuals are encouraged to learn from vanguard organizations and from the MLab’s experienced faculty and facilitators. As they engage with experts and peers, participants hone their skills as management innovators and become co-architects in the change process.
Many change programs are superficial, and the benefits fleeting, because they don’t address the core management processes that influence values, behaviors and choices. Hackathons focus explicitly on the core management processes (such as planning, budgeting and talent management) that are the key to building deep and durable advantages.
Cost-of-impact and speed-to-impact are critical in all change programs. By distributing the responsibility for systemic change across a broad range of internal constituents, Hackathons capture unexpected insights, foster real alignment, and generate rapid progress.
Top-down change programs, when rolled out, often produce unexpected consequences. Hackathons, by contrast, utilize low-cost prototyping, local experimentation, and rapid iteration to significantly reduce implementation risks.
The hackathon methodology is scalable. It can be used within a single business, function or geography, or across the entire enterprise. It’s the polar opposite of resource-heavy corporate change programs.
Tomorrow’s winners will be the organizations that migrate their management models faster than their competitors—in ways that make them more resilient, inventive, inspiring and customer-centric. Accomplishing this will require fundamental innovation in management practices—how organizations are structured, how they set direction, allocate resources, reward people, and more. The goal: a “post-bureaucratic” organization.
In the future, every change program, whether cultural, strategic or operational, will need to be open and participatory from the start. In an authority-phobic world, where everyone expects to have a voice, leaders can no longer think of change as an “alignment” exercise; instead, they must view it as an “involvement” exercise. To be effective, change can’t be “rolled out;” it has to be “rolled up.
Employees and stakeholders, rather than functional experts and traditional consultants, are often best placed to understand the limits of current management practices and to suggest alternatives. If invited, individuals at every level will eagerly contribute to a process that gives them the chance to “re-engineer” the core management processes that shape their work environment, shape the corporate culture, and determine economic performance.
It is possible to rapidly and effectively upgrade a company’s management model without taking undue risks. This can be accomplished by building a suite of focused management “experiments” that leave existing processes intact (for the time being), are designed and run by volunteers, and operate within tight time and cost parameters. The goal: revolutionary change through evolutionary steps.
A Hackathon is much more than a series of “brainstorming” sessions. Hackathons are highly facilitated, multi-stage, problem-solving efforts that involve learning, diagnosis, priority setting, idea generation and ranking, prototyping, experimentation and feedback. They represent the state-of-the-art in applying open innovation principles to complex, systemic change.
Most of us have grown up in and around organizations that fit a common template, and therefore often have difficulty in imaging dramatically new and more effective ways of leading, managing and organizing. Hackathons draw on the hundreds of detailed, “bleeding edge” case studies that have been assembled through the Management Lab’s Management Innovation eXchange. In every Hackathon, participants have the chance to learn from the most progressive companies on the planet.
While the design and execution of MLab’s management Hackathons are uniquely tailored to each organization’s situation and context, the typical approach follows four steps.
Designed to yield a portfolio of groundbreaking, yet highly actionable, management experiments.
Supported at each stage by facilitators from the MLab, along with client coaches, who supply expertise, encourage involvement and work to improve the quality of the management “hacks.”
Typically open to anyone in the organization who has an interest in contributing. This can range from a few hundred individuals to several thousand.
Designed to bring together “communities of passion” that work collaboratively around the most promising management hacks and take responsibility for their implementation.
A distinctive point of view about the future of management (key management challenges and their solutions)
An extended network of the world’s most progressive thought and business leaders
The ability to quickly tailor the hackathon platform and provide flexible solutions to solve a wide variety of management challenges
Leading-edge tools, processes, and facilitation skills to bring communities together in solving complex problems
An established track record of helping organizations practice “lean change,” leveraging the initiative and insights of all stakeholders
Professor Gary Hamel and the MLab team support hackathons and the sponsoring organizations in three ways:
In order to define the most effective hackathon, we start with short design phase to:
During the hackathon, Gary Hamel and the MLab team will remain involved to ensure effective execution. Support will likely include:
Once the hackathon produces the first wave of ideas and experiments, we can remain involved to scale the best ideas and helping execute additional hackathons. These include targeted workshops, regular check-ins, ongoing content support, ongoing web support, and access to a community of other organisations to share lessons.
The Management Lab works with leading-edge firms to help them create tomorrow’s new practices today. Our aim is to support these pioneering companies in creating genuine management innovation.
MLab brings together some of the world’s leading business thinkers, academics, executives, institutions and organizations to invent the management processes and practices that will define competitive success in the 21st century.
Gary is a world-renowned author, speaker, and thought leader on strategy and the future of management. Hamel’s landmark books, Competing for the Future, Leading the Revolution and The Future of Management have appeared on every management bestseller list and have been translated into more than 20 languages. Hamel’s most recent book, What Matters Now, was published in February 2012. As a consultant, Hamel has worked for companies as diverse as General Electric, Time Warner, Nestle, Shell, Procter & Gamble, 3M, IBM, Microsoft, and Chevron. His pioneering concepts such as “strategic intent,” “core competence,” “industry revolution,” and “management innovation” have changed the practice of management in companies around the world.
Prior to co-founding the MLab and the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange), Michele was an Associate Principal at McKinsey & Company, where he directed engagements focused on organization, strategy, and innovation for leading global institutions. He was a leader in McKinsey’s Organization and Strategy Practices, working on major research efforts at the intersection of organization and technology (most recently with a McKinsey Quarterly article on how to "crowdsource" strategy development). Michele also spent five years as a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he advised senior policymakers on national security issues such as global terrorism and NATO’s strategy. He also published widely on these topics.
As cofounder and editorial director of the MLAB and the MIX, Polly is putting her passion for making the realm of human endeavor more productive and more fulfilling to the test. Polly is the co-author of the bestselling book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win and was a member of the original team of Fast Company magazine (where she was senior editor for the better part of a decade). Polly’s blog, the Fresh MIX, is widely syndicated (on Harvard Business Review online and Fortune.com, among others). Polly has delivered hundreds of keynote addresses around the world and has served as business and innovation correspondent for CNN.
Prior to joining MLab, Bruce was the Director of the O'Reilly Network, one of the first sites providing technical online information for IT professionals. Bruce managed the editorial and technical teams there as well as helping support O'Reilly's conference business. Bruce is responsible for managing the technical aspects of the hackathon platform, from development to delivery and customization for specific projects. He received a BS in Computer Science from Sonoma State University back in the days when computer programs were written on punch cards and the Internet was accessed by Gopher, and he has remained actively involved in the technology sector throughout his career.
The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX): MLab initiatives include the Management Innovation eXchange—the world’s largest open innovation platform aimed at reinventing management
The MIX Mashup, an annual gathering of the Management innovation elite.
Do you want to make your organization nimble as change itself? Make innovation an all-the-time, everywhere capability? Are your change efforts hampered by incrementalism and lack of follow-though? Are you looking to leverage the the full potential of your employees and stakeholders?
Please reach out, we’d love to connect.
