Hackathon's — Where you witness raw motivation

I have done my fair share of hackathon’s, some with corporate agendas, some with very little direction, and most recently one where I witnessed raw motivation.

I have recently attended the Agile Australia 2018 conference where the very first talk by a man called Jeff Smith, uttered a sentence that stuck.

“Your job is not to motivate, its to create conditions where motivation occurs naturally.” — Jeff Smith

Having been lead by ‘inspirational leaders’ and often impressed with the way I would leave feeling fired up I had never thought of the idea that an environment could be just as motivating as an inspirational speaker.

I am here to tell you it can, and for me the first time I saw this was in the shape of a hackathon.

We recently ran our bi-annual hackathon.
This is a summary of its events and how on reflection, was a show of pure motivation & engagement.

The event started with a call for projects. Quickly #hackathon-ideas Slack channels started popping up, ambitious ideas came and went and the murmurs that “some teams have already started!” were moving through the office.

At the company stand-up the day before kick off the conditions were laid out.

“If you can’t hack something, hack your job. The prizes will be associated with our company values. Everyone participates.”

A bunch of projects were up on the wall ranging from DevOps to a mission to a local hardware store to fix a door that had been annoying us for quite some time. The cards had clear articulation of the project that was about to kick off and the team required to deliver.

To ensure every member of staff had a team, all project leads stood up and did a 30 second sales pitch to clinch their final team make-up.

The day was upon us, it was set for 24hours from 12pm Thursday — 12pm Friday with presentations and awards following.

The gong was struck and the madness commenced. Teams broke up into co-working spaces, ideas were solidified, questions were raised and formulas were written. Over the course of the next 24 hours the rollercoaster of emotions that could be seen and heard was incredible.

Through the course of the hackathon there were two assigned team challenges. The first being The Marshmallow Challenge and the second a Harry Potter themed scavenger hunt.

These were aimed to get everyone away from their screens and operate on a non-technical level. However I must say, the most commonly heard phrase through my time facilitating the Marshmallow Challenge had to be “a triangle is the strongest shape”….

Teams were having high five moments, music was blaring and we were all tapping away furiously on our keyboards for what seemed like a couple hours but in reality was closer to 10. Then something happened.

I would like to set the scene.

It is 11pm. You have just been working tirelessly on your project for close to 11 hours straight and you are struggling to see why <Text></Tetx> has been causing you a problem for the last 30mins.

You look up from your computer and realise you have been in a haze of your own thought for the last 11 hours and notice a few of your team members have already left. This is that ‘zone’ engineers get.. its amazing.

You decide it might be time to head home for a nap. Before leaving you do a quick whip around the office to see who is still around…. And thats when you see it… everyone is still here… Towers of Red Bull, frustrations visible, people are visibly tired but not stopping. All and all…. raw motivation.

The motivation to get what your team wanted to get done, done.
One more story card.
one more feature,
one more hour…done.

The idea that this sense of motivation could be sustainable would be insane! But this was solid proof that in an environment given the right conditions, we can create an incredibly motivational workspace.

As proof to this I indeed did go home. Feeling guilty when others were still typing away in other teams. As I lay on my bed trying to sleep my mind is still buzzing on all the features I was yet to build. I set my alarm to go off in 5 hours as I can’t wait to get back into the office and continue what I set out to complete.

Lets think about that for a minute. This is my own time. This is unpaid. This is a project that isn’t going to go anywhere. But here I am, along with my colleagues, willing to get back to work after 5 hours sleep.

To boil it down, to what conditions I felt were made to encourage this type of behaviour is this.

• Self selection. Every individual was given the freedom to choose what they worked on and everyone had a clear understanding of in how their skills will help the teams success.
• Team pride. The sense that you didn’t want to let the team down. You said you would build something, and you will not be letting them down by not doing so.

Hackathon’s are events where people from all areas of the business can come together for a single purpose, “build something cool that your whole team is pushing for, and compete against other to win a prize.” Its a time where you see people get totally engrossed in what they are building and loose all aspect of time and life outside of that moment. Its motivation in a truly visible form and if your company is yet to experience the power it brings, I strongly urge you to give one a go.