Give your hack a short title - preferably one that reflects the essence of the innovation you're advocating.
Here’s your chance to catch your fellow MIXers—and the world’s—attention. Inject some personality into your title—the more concrete, colorful, and clever, the better—but don’t forget to communicate the impact of your story. An example: Glass House: Radically Transparent Email.
Describe the hack in 50 words or less, emphasizing the key feature(s) that make it new or distinctive.
This is what your fellow MIXers will see when exploring the Hacks. Grab their attention by describing your hack as boldly and directly as possible. An example: Implement a “transparent” corporate email system which enables anyone in the organization to search the content of any published email.
What specific problem(s) is your hack designed to overcome? Why do you believe this is an important problem to address (vis-a-vis the moonshots)?
Describe the problem your hack addresses—and all of its implications for working life and organizational performance—as colorfully as possible. An example: In far too many organizations, the process used to set strategy and arrive at key decisions resembles the election of a Pope. That is, the average employee has little to no understanding of, and input to, the process, and is instead reduced to waiting for the output of the process (“ the white smoke up the chimney”) This tends to disempower the employee base, but perhaps most importantly, robs decision-makers of the useful “push back” that the broader organization (particularly those working at the “front line”) can provide.
What are the core components of your solution and how are they interrelated? (Provide as much detail here as possible). What, exactly, are you proposing that organizations change in their management processes and practices?
The more depth and concrete detail the better. An example: Schedule a regular (say monthly) question and answer session, where any individual in the organization can pose a question to the organization’s leadership and the leadership is compelled to answer. To avoid “packaged” or “spun” answers, the questioning would occur real-time, and the selection of the questions (of the questioner) would occur via random drawing.
Try to describe how your hack might work in practice - how would it change attitudes, actions and outcomes? In other words, how would it actually address the problem you outlined above?
Here’s an example: Improved quality of decisions, by virtue of increased availability of critical information. Greater cooperation and cross-functional collaboration within organization, as information serves as the incentive Reduction in unnecessary communication (due to ability for seekers of information to retrieve needed information on their own)
What practical problems would organizations face in implementing this hack? What suggestions do you have (if any) for how they might overcome these challenges?
Don’t hesitate to get granular when describing the related challenges and solutions. An example: Challenge: Employees might view open system as a “fig leaf” for management to track their behavior/productivity (although such capability often already exists in conventional email systems). Suggestion: Continually communicate that the visibility is two-way (i.e. front-line employees can view the emails of the CEO as easily as their own)
If an organization wanted to test your hack, what would it need to do first? How might it run a quick & dirty experiment?
From baby steps to an audacious experiments, what are two to five first moves an organization could take to test your hack? Launch the concept gradually, in a virtual environment, and with middle management taking the initial set of question. Distribute a transcript of these early sessions to senior executives and conduct a brief training in appropriate response styles.
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