I believe that inside the hacks lies one of our biggest potential for high-impact content. The way I see it, they represent our stories of the future. And when I refer to “our stories”, I mean that we have in our hands the opportunity to start telling our own stories as a community.

What normally occurs with MIX stories now is that they are the result of a single observation of a single experiment carried out in a single organization. Now, what if we take this to the next level?

Just imagine the impact a story might entail if it is based not just on a single experience as described above, but as the result of multiple observations of a single experiment (e.g. hack) carried out in parallel by a vast and diverse group of teams and organizations around the globe.

This could make a huge impact, don’t you think? It may give us (even) stronger stories with robust results and, perhaps, it may become our ultimate validation that management 2.0, the one we are co-building, produce beautiful and amazing results.   

Now, in order to let our hacks grow and turn them into massively-validated stories, I would like to bring to the table two raw ideas:

1 Hack the Hacks, too

Let’s put even more emphasis on the experimental and collaborative aspects of our hacks by focusing in building rough and easily replicable experiments first. Then, we can test them out as fast as we can, and finally reap what we have learned in the process by co-writing tested-hacks (or simply, stories)

This may imply a slightly different roadmap for crafting hacks, as follows:  

Phase 1 - Pitch a mini hack (as we did in Beyond Performance Management Hackathon)

Phase 2 - Form a team around that mini-hack and design a rough experiment to validate it

Phase 3 – Get your hacking teams bigger by enrolling fellow mixers interested in testing out the idea

Phase 4 – Run, in parallel, multiple tests of your hack

Phase 5 – Gather, analyze results

Phase 6 – Co-write the piece to be posted on the MIX and get a “tested” badge in your hack

 Phase 7 - Get the chance (maybe via a specific M-Prize Challenge) of your hack be included in the MIX Toolshed or in the MIX Academy

2 Let’s run challenges specifically tailored for hacks

It could be something like “test your hack” challenges, or challenges/hackathons sponsored by given organizations where the prize would be to implement those ideas in those organizations.

Bonus: Let’s open two categories for M-Prize challenges

One for stories and one for hacks, maybe with different types of recognitions or prizes for each of them.