‘Modular units’, I said. I took the tiny toy train carriage from the box and balanced it on top of the stack of cardboard cartons, toilet roll tubes and polystyrene blocks our team had put together. The stack was skirted by plastic action figures, a rubber Tyrannosaurus rex and a ring of tinsel. It looked like a bomb had gone off in a toy shop.

Mitch, who I’d met ten minutes earlier, traded a high five.

‘Modularity. I was thinking the same thing’, he said. ‘Let’s have a crane. People can design their units online and have them lifted into place on a modular stack.’

Bingo. The other team members sounded their assent. We were in a state of creative flow. Innovation was happening and everyone wanted to be part of it.

It was July 2014 and I was participating in the inaugural SOUP Mixer. There were about 100 of us gathered in the creative space on the top floor of the Central Park Plaza in Sydney. It was a large, open area, decked out with a low stage, several dozen wooden pallets, some tables, chairs and not much else. It would have been perfect for a high-tech barn dance.

Dr Joanne Jakovich, Founder of SOUP Labs and the organizer of the Mixer, ricocheted around the room from team to team. Jakovich had until recently worked in the School of Design and Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), where she cofounded the design-led innovation centre, uLab. At uLab, Jakovich and her team developed a co-design method known as 5×5. The 5×5 method involves small teams completing five design tasks, each task taking no longer than five minutes. The method enables teams to develop innovative solutions to design problems fast, supercharged by the spirit of play.

We were using 5×5 to co-design a solution to a problem we’d been briefed on at the start of the Mixer: housing affordability for Sydney youth. Sydney is great city. But housing is expensive and young people are by and large priced out of the market. As Jakovich pointed out, this is bad news for a creative city like Sydney. Young people are responsible for the greatest amount of creativity and innovation in a city. Exclude them from the action and the city and its economy suffer. We were trying to figure out ways to turn this situation around.

The mood in the room was playful and anarchic. Several people were in fancy dress. Mitch sported a set of red felt antlers on his head. An hour earlier, we’d worked ourselves into fits of laughter doing a clap dancing exercise. If you’d walked into the room without knowing what was going on, you might have thought you’d stumbled onto a group therapy session.

Now it was mid-morning and we were divided into a dozen teams working around low tables. The walls and pillars of the innovation space were covered with designs and illustrations. The floor was strewn with creative detritus.

Jakovich appeared at our table. We had just hit upon our modular housing idea and were throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the design. Andrea and Yoshi explained what we were up to. ‘Nice work’, Jakovich offered. She watched and listened as we debated whether the car share service we’d added to our design was necessary or feature creep.

Jakovich is a brilliant designer, a great facilitator and a visionary entrepreneur. She founded SOUP Labs (the acronym stands for ‘Strategic Open Urbanism Platform’) to combine her passion for design thinking and urban innovation. The goal of SOUP is to create urban innovation through multi-stakeholder collaborative design. By gathering a diverse range of people in collaborative design environments, SOUP seeks to forge alliances between three stakeholder groups: investors interested in urban innovation projects, designers passionate about urban innovation and the general public, the ‘willing and invested crowd’.

The SOUP Mixer was the inaugural session of a five-week beta program. The aim of the session was to get the general public (meaning people like myself) engaging with the SOUP Innovation Fellows and Project Partners to brainstorm solutions to the problem of youth housing affordability. In the coming weeks, the ideas generated at the Mixer would be tested and developed by the Innovation Fellows, then refined in conjunction with the Project Partners to produce ready-to-market solutions for investor review.

Jakovich had opened the Mixer by briefing us on the problem we were addressing. We’d watched a short film documenting fieldwork completed by the SOUP team, with vox pops of students discussing the challenges of paying the rent. No one was buying property. We’d also watched some YouTube clips featuring ideas that might usefully contribute to our designs. They included content on smart homes and high-tech communes.

By this point, we were ready to get creative. We split into small teams and started hacking.

The 5×5 method distils design thinking down to its basic elements. The first step of the process is to empathize with the end user. To this end, Jakovich had instructed us to profile an individual who was feeling the pinch of the Sydney housing market. My team was largely made up of students – a core demographic – so we had no problem relating to the kinds of challenges that people faced in this situation. Rather than profile one of our own, however, we decided to develop a fictional persona. It turned out to be easy to cobble together a convincing profile.

‘It’s a she’, Andrea offered. ‘She’s an artist. Works in a café to pay the rent.’

‘Where does she live?’ Tony wondered.

‘In Erskineville’, Yoshi proposed. ‘She’s a barista in that café on the corner of Rochford Street. Moonlights behind the bar at the Rose Hotel on Thursday nights.’

Mitch, meanwhile, was sketching this person, whom we decided to name Suzi. Within a couple of minutes, we’d determined that Suzi was a vegan artist who lived in a share house in Erskineville, who took care of her ailing mother while completing an arts degree at UTS. How Suzi managed to pay the rent was beyond me. But the rent was beyond Suzi too – this was the point. Ultimately, the objective was not to define a real character, but to devise a convincing persona that we could relate to and use as a guide in the ideation work to come.

It is necessary to empathize with the people for whom you are designing to get inside their problems and identify solutions. Knowing there were people like Suzi in the community gave us an emotional connection to the housing affordability crisis. It helped us to feel our way into the problems that people like Suzi confront every day. This emotional connection inspired us to try harder to come up with genuine solutions. It also gave us a benchmark for determining when and how a solution would satisfy: would Suzi like it?

Jakovich called time. Each team introduced their persona to the room. By now everyone was into the spirit of things. People spoke of the characters they’d created as if they were old friends. The artists on each team had sketched the characters on flip chart paper. Each portrait was framed with a cloud of words and images defining their passions and interests.

While this was going on, Jakovich and her assistants brought out the toys. Hidden in the back of the room were dozens of boxes full of cardboard, Lego, Play-Doh, clothes, dolls, disassembled gadgets, and bric-a-brac like tinsel, felt and streamers. Jakovich offered us a smile as wide as Western Australia, her home state, and told us to go to town using this material to create 3D models of housing solutions for the characters we’d imagined. It was a case of build-storming, rather than brainstorming – using our hands to create, play and figure things out all at once.

For a moment, our team sat in silence. None of us were architects. We knew zip about the practical and financial challenges of constructing cheap and innovative dwellings.

We did know people like Suzi, however. This was enough to get us started.

It seemed obvious that a share housing arrangement would appeal to someone like Suzi. Starting with this intuition, we began throwing together a model for a high-tech commune – a multi-level complex, with Lego brick rooms, toilet roll cylinder pillars and a toy dragster to symbolize an on-site car sharing service.

We worked fast. The time constraints of the 5×5 method ensure that people work as quickly as they can. There is little time for discussion and debate. When someone has an idea, they share it by adding it to the design, using a physical object to convey what they are proposing. If there is a problem or issue, the onus is on the rest of the team to point it out.

Our high-tech commune was sprouting features left, right and centre. I was watching, more than participating, trying to pull the concept together in my mind. I like to get clear on what I’m dealing with before I offer my thoughts. Suzi’s housing complex was coming together so fast, I couldn’t pin down precisely what it was that we were building.

My mind tends to wander when I get lost. I started thinking about a modular workshop program I was developing. Glancing down, I saw a toy train carriage sitting in the cardboard box. It seemed important, for some reason, that the carriage was part of a linked whole.

Then it hit me: modular housing. What if Suzi had a small apartment, the size of a train carriage, that she could design online and have fitted into place on a grid-like structure? While not everyone’s idea of a dream home, a modular housing solution would present students like Suzi with a cheap way of living in the city, offering customization and flexibility, and potentially the ability to build hives of connected rooms.

‘Modular units’, I said. I took the train carriage and nestled it on top of the design. Mitch high fived me and it was done. We had our concept. The concept might have died if Mitch hadn’t offered his support. If it had been a different group of people, or if we’d already settled on a concept to tie the design together, the idea might have gone nowhere. As it was, the modular housing idea resonated with the group and we went for it. We trusted our group genius. This is how decisions get made in the fast-paced, co-design environment.

This kind of raw, freewheeling creativity scares some people. It is unpredictable, impossible to manage and levelling. Traditional markers of professional success, like status and expertise, are not necessarily advantageous in this context. Status can get in your way, causing you to worry about how you appear to other people. Expertise can lock people into set ways of thinking and reduce their chance of generating breakthrough ideas.

The frantic pace and hands-on creativity of the 5×5 method is designed to prevent this happening. Fast-paced play dissolves people’s inhibitions and gets them out of their heads. It forces them to trust their intuitions and engage with the group dynamic. It works to promote collaborative creativity, the cross-pollination of ideas and rapid-fire innovation.

Co-design sessions, like hackathons and agile sprints, call for full-throttle, hands-on participation. They require people to pitch in and get involved, digging deep and throwing ideas into the pot, even when they’re not sure they are good ones. They require people to get out of their own way, to take a risk, stop being afraid of saying or doing something foolish, and to silence the voice in their head that tells them they’re wrong, stupid or no good. They call for open hearts and open minds. They require everyone to work at creating a safe and supportive environment for learning, discovery and a spirited exchange of gifts.

Participating in this kind of session is a lot of fun. What tops it is when you discover that you’ve contributed to a real innovation. I tasted this experience a couple of months after the Mixer, at SOUP Launchpad, a pitch event for the SOUP Innovation Fellows. In the intervening weeks, the Innovation Fellows had worked up the ideas we’d generated at the Mixer. After fine-tuning them with the help of the Project Partners, they were ready to present their design solutions to the wider community of SOUP stakeholders and the world.

SOUP Launchpad took place on a bright winter morning at Common Studios in Newtown. I turned up with a coffee in hand to find the large warehouse space heaving with people, ranging from students, architects and designers to councillors, policy workers, social entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. We settled in as the Innovation Fellows lined up to pitch their ideas. I was impressed by the intelligence and diversity of the material. One team had developed a financial model for tenants who were seeking to buy their rental property. Another team had expanded on the high-tech commune idea, fleshing it out with budgeting systems, shared services and community engagement initiatives.

It was the modular housing solutions that took my breath away. There were two variations on this theme. The first involved a public–private partnership with Transport for NSW. The team proposed that people could order their units online and have them rail freighted into place. The second variation was exactly what our team had imagined at SOUP Mixer: a customizable unit the size of a shipping crate that could be designed online, installed by crane into a modular stack of units and placed in storage while the tenant was overseas.

This solution wound up being the winning pitch of the day. The people I spoke to loved the idea. There were even positive noises from the venture capitalists.

I walked away from SOUP Launchpad feeling on top of the world. It wasn’t that I felt personally responsible for the modular housing idea, which was a collaborative creation. But I had helped lay the ground for a great social innovation with the potential to have a positive impact on the housing affordability crisis. The sense of achievement was its own reward. I had gifted something of my own to a collaborative project and made a difference.

This story from SOUP Mixer captures key elements of contemporary hacker innovation culture. It reflects the freewheeling creativity and unchecked optimism of the best hacker innovation sessions. It underscores the important role of method in this work, showing how a phased process of iterative co-creation can rapidly advance a team from being in the position of having no ideas to the point where someone can put a great idea on the table. It brings out the cheerful volunteerism that animates hacker culture, showing how a spirit of gifting not only helps teams create new solutions fast, but yields intrinsic rewards for participants, so that they walk away feeling like they’ve made a contribution.

I participated in SOUP Mixer knowing that everything I contributed to the session was a gift. I volunteered my time, talent, energy and ideas to the session, fully aware that, should anyone build a business based on my work, I would have no claim to it. Yet, when I reflect on the experience, I feel like I was the one who was rewarded.

I was rewarded in moral, rather than monetary terms. I volunteered something of my own to an important cause and I made a difference. I boosted my professional reputation in the process. I got a visceral sense of self-esteem – an ‘egoboo-st’ – from knowing that I’d done well and been recognized for my contributions. While few people at SOUP Launchpad were aware of my contributions at the Mixer, the team I’d worked with would recall them. Next time I ran into these people, they would remember me for the work we’d done together. I’d earned reputation capital, which I could cash out in various ways.

In the densely networked environments of the digital economy, reputation is more valuable than money. Reputation seeds relationships and opens doors. Reputation is the basis of trust, and trust is the condition of continuing collaboration.

None of this would have been possible without Jakovich’s contribution. In her design and facilitation work at SOUP, Jakovich exemplified hacker paradigm leadership. By trusting in people, leading with purpose, cultivating collaborative mindsets and promoting practical experiments focused on user value, Jakovich enabled 100 strangers to self-organize into high performing hacker teams. Her reward was the professional status she established through the venture. Jakovich was transitioning, at the time, from academic to entrepreneurial work. The professional relationships Jakovich developed and the recognition she earned through SOUP elevated her to the top tier of Sydney social entrepreneurs. Jakovich is currently a cofounder of Big World Homes, a tiny house startup with big ambitions, which promises to be ‘one of the most progressive, socially oriented, community driven housing projects Australia has ever seen’ (Big World Homes, 2017).

Jakovich’s talent for leadership is reflected in the way she made space for innovation at SOUP. Drawing on her experience at uLab, Jakovich created a generative environment for hacking and gifting. Jakovich hosted the Mixer in a large, open space, enabling participants to gather together and split up into teams as required. She created a fun, social environment, leaving lots of time for informal congregation and chit-chat, and boosting the mood with the spirit of play. By offering a clear, creative process (the 5×5 method), cuing people on appropriate behaviours and steering teams towards more effective ways of working, Jakovich established shared cultural mindsets in the room. She created a common sense of ‘how we get things done’, so that everyone embraced the hacker way.

Some people make this style of leadership look easy. But hacker paradigm leadership requires a tremendous amount of vision, intelligence, maturity and experience. Making space for innovation – be this in the context of a co-design session, a business modelling workshop or an agile sprint – is a complex task. Establishing a physical space is just the start. A physical space is just a space. It doesn’t help people discover tangible opportunities or derive intrinsic rewards from working together.

To transform a physical environment into an innovation space, leaders must integrate social and cultural elements into the space. They must create a sense of trust and ownership in the people working in the space, so that teams bond and people take risks. They must create a common cultural understanding of how work gets done, offering practical formats for action and seeding mindsets and values that promote collaboration and experiments.

Hacker paradigm leaders make space for innovation by weaving together the three elements of innovation space (Figure 5.1). All three elements – physical, social and cultural – are required to create a generative environment where creative people flourish and innovative projects thrive. While these elements can be distinguished analytically, in practice they form a single system, comprising a vibrant, fluid, emotionally rich environment for collaborative activity. Combined through the talent of a hacker paradigm leader, these three elements activate the hacker instinct in all of us, focusing thought, passion and behaviour on shared opportunities and motivating people to generate ideas, forge hypotheses and hack.

The power of how

The point of making space for innovation isn’t just to create a nice environment for people to work in. It is to create an environment that catalyses creative activity.

Setting up a physical space won’t achieve this. Physical space is an enabler, but it’s ultimately just a space. Building a thriving social environment within the space is a step in the right direction, but still, it won’t get you there. A social environment creates a platform of trust and solidarity, which facilitates engagement and helps to foster a shared sense of possibility. But the challenge is to transform this sense of possibility into tangible opportunities that people want to pursue.

To turn a social space into an environment that facilitates opportunities, leaders need to leverage the power of how. They need to establish a coherent innovation culture in the space, so that everyone has clear idea of ‘how we get things done’ to create innovation.

The power of how creates a context in which it makes sense for people to put ideas on the table. To say, ‘Modular units’, and indicate a solution. To say, ‘Let’s build it lean’, and create an opportunity the whole team wants to be part of. To say, ‘We can do this’, and crack open reality, revealing a possible future unlike anything your team has seen before.

Never underestimate the power of how. It is only when people have a shared sense of how they can work together that they see the through-line from idea to execution, and a smart idea becomes a mutual opportunity. It is only when people see how they could realistically achieve an innovation that a casual thought becomes a gift to the team, an opportunity for mutual benefit, to which people respond by offering gifts of their own, layering talent upon talent, skill upon skill, feeding the work with passion, intelligence and care. It is only when people see how innovation is possible that they commit to making it happen, drawing on their powers and giving everything they have to realize the dream.

Hacker culture offers a ‘how’. This ‘how’ breaks down into a broad set of elements, including practices, mindsets and values. Together, these elements form a loose and malleable but coherent perspective on how hackers like to get things done (Figure 5.2).

Hacker practices include agile development, lean startup method and design thinking. Teaching these practices is relatively straightforward. This work is a mainstay of design labs and consultancies that train corporate clients in how to innovate like startups.

Hacker mindsets are ways of thinking that facilitate the practices, guiding people into the work and helping them to understand how to operate as a team. Most of these mindsets relate to the pursuit of knowledge. Hackers’ fundamental task is to identify the salient unknowns in a project and to convert them into knowns. People who are new to hacking need to grasp this mindset for hacker innovation practices to make sense.

Hacker values hold teams together. We’ve seen how collaborative hacking requires continuous emotional work on the part of participants to sustain the inquiry. Unless people actively value collaboration and the team, everything falls apart. Hacker teams express a range of shared values, from the affirmation of learning and discovery to a profound belief in transparency and meritocracy. Hackers fundamentally value the team. There is an inclusive tenor on hacker teams that draws participants into the work and enables them to derive an intrinsic reward from contributing to it.

We have already explored the practices of agile development, lean startup method and design thinking. Here we look at the mindsets and values that complement these practices. The list in Figure 5.2 is not exhaustive. Nonetheless, these represent ways of thinking and feeling shared by agile developers, lean entrepreneurs and design thinkers, as well as hardware hackers, makers and other innovators influenced by the hacker tradition.

Hacker mindsets

Tackle the monkey first

Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X, Google’s research lab for ground-breaking innovation projects, has a saying that captures a core mindset of hacker innovation: ‘Tackle the monkey first’ (Teller, 2016). The maxim relates to a story that is shared around the lab. It goes something like this.

A boss calls an engineer into his office. ‘I’ve got a great idea for a new project’, he says. ‘Imagine a monkey, standing on a marble pedestal, reciting the works of Shakespeare. Brilliant, right? Can you make it?’

‘No problem, boss’, chimes the engineer and races off to get started.

The next week, the boss runs into the engineer. ‘How’s that new product coming along?’ he asks. ‘Steaming ahead, boss’, the engineer responds. ‘We’ve almost finished the pedestal.’

The moral of the story is: start by addressing the most difficult parts of the project. Focus on what is hardest to achieve and leave the easy stuff until later. The engineer in the story has assumed that creating a talking monkey is no harder than building a pedestal. He should have started by questioning this risky assumption. As it is, he’s wasted a week’s time.

In the early stages of a project, the most difficult tasks should be treated as risky unknowns with the potential to derail the project. To de-risk the work, tackle the monkey first. Identify the riskiest parts of the project and demonstrate that they’re doable.

This mindset is a mainstay of agile development and lean startup method. It is good practice in any kind of creative work.

Bias to action

The hands-on mentality is another classic hacker mindset. Hackers believe that the best way to solve problems is to try things out, rather than sitting around speculating about them. For software hackers, this means writing some code, building a prototype or stress testing a system to see where and when it breaks. For design thinkers, it means sketching ideas to communicate them to customers, or building models as provocations and thought starters. In agile development, a bias to action involves figuring out how the team can create the most value for a customer in the course of a sprint and leaping into the work. In lean startup method, a bias to action means spinning up an idea into an experiment and engaging with customers to check their responses.

Create better, together

The greatest achievements of the hacker tradition have all involved collaboration. The open source movement has a pivotal role in the hacker imagination, both as a reminder of what can be achieved when a diversely talented network of people collaborates, and as a provocation to future collaborations, with different communities and different problems. Hackers understand how creative action is enhanced when multiple agents pool their skills and knowledge and work together. While this mindset isn’t unique to hackers, it finds its most radical and forceful expression in the hacker tradition.

Move fast to mitigate risk

This mindset originated in agile programming and has become a governing precept in the lean startup scene. Innovation involves numerous risks. There is the risk the technology a team is working with might be outmoded by the time their product gets to market. There is the risk that a competitor may release a similar or superior product while yours is still in development. There is the risk that market trends may shift and customers may not be interested in the product. Every dollar a team spends and every hour they work on a project adds to their investment and the financial and technological risks they carry.

These risks can be mitigated by moving fast from ideation, through customer testing, into beta release. It is imperative to find out as quickly as possible whether a given idea will delight customers and achieve market traction. The mindset of moving fast to mitigate risk reflects a bias to action applied in the context of competitive market realities. It is a mainstay of contemporary hacker culture.

Get out of the building

Steve Blank coined the catchphrase ‘get out of the building’ as a precept of customer development method. The idea has become a key element of lean startup method. Initially, Blank claims, ‘the start-up is a faith-based enterprise built on its founders’ vision and a notable absence of facts … Facts live outside the building, where future customers … live and work, so that’s where you need to go’ (Blank and Dorf, 2014: 31).

While this mindset may be new for business entrepreneurs, it’s an old idea for hackers. Investing months of time and effort in building a complex product without testing it with users isn’t hacking, it’s stupidity. Hackers release software early and often, and engage other hackers as co-developers to ensure that their work is appropriately vetted and tested. They start testing ideas as early as possible in the development process, thereby mitigating the risk of wasting time on ideas that do not work, or that have already been actioned by other people.

Contribute to making a difference

From the early days of hacking at MIT, when computers were primarily used to plot the trajectory of missiles, hackers believed that computers could be vehicles for enlightenment and liberation. They took it upon themselves to bring this future about. The mindset that hacking can and should be a way of improving the world has prevailed through subsequent decades. It features in the hardware hacking scene and open source movement, and feeds into the startup scene and social entrepreneurship. This mindset is reflected in Facebook’s mission to make the world more open and connected. It is reflected in Google’s vision of organizing the world’s information and making it accessible, and in Telsa’s goal of accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels towards a global clean energy regime.

On a micro-level, the mindset of contributing to make a positive difference features in the ethos of competitive gifting that defines hacker culture. In high performing hacker teams, people go out of their way to make the biggest positive impact they can. In addition to being generous with their time and talent, they think carefully about how they can best engage the project to make an impact, seeking out the most significant problems they can solve.

Facebook embeds this mindset in its developer culture and ethos. In Zuckerberg’s ‘Letter to Investors’ on the hacker way, he explains:

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

(Zuckerberg, 2011)

Information should be free

This is another mindset that dates back to the MIT hackers. Sharing information facilitates collaboration. It makes it easy for people to come onboard projects and contribute to making a difference. This makes innovation more efficient. As Levy (2010: 29) relates, it prevents ‘the dreaded, time wasting ritual of reinventing the wheel: instead of everybody writing his own version of the same program, the best version [is] available to everyone, and everyone [is] free to delve into the code and improve on that.’

The free software movement canonized this principle and the open source movement applied it to distributed coding projects. While the commercial imperatives of business place de facto limits on how much a company can realistically share with its customers and competitors, hacker entrepreneurs continue to acknowledge this principle in various ways.

Tesla, for example, open sources all its patents aside from those pertaining to the battery technology that underpins its business model (Solomon, 2014). Google defaults to open source as a competitive strategy, harnessing the creative energies of hacker swarms to create platform-based products, like the Android operating system, that are both superior to, and cheaper to produce than, marketplace competitors (Schmidt et al., 2014: 85–90). Facebook (like other hacker generation companies) enables the free exchange of information within the company, while forbidding external leaks (Wagner, 2017).

Permanent beta

Hackers don’t believe that anything is truly finished. No matter how good a product may be, there is always the chance it could be iterated and improved. A technological product exists in a state of permanent beta, waiting to be hacked.

This mindset is reflected in the way software companies continuously release new versions of the same product, equipped with new features and functionality. A software product is never finished. It is permanent work in progress.

The permanent beta mindset doesn’t necessarily lead to better products. Unless it is complemented with radical and disruptive approaches, it encourages incremental innovation, which is a path of diminishing returns. But permanent beta is valuable as a cultural mindset nonetheless. A permanent beta mindset sustains the hacker spirit within an organization by licensing people to play around with old products and ideas and dream up new ways they could be changed and improved.

The future is unwritten

Hackers are fans of science fiction, not just because they love technology, but because they’re excited by the idea that the future is unknown, beyond the scope and limits of our present imagination. Hackers are fascinated by ‘unknown unknowns’, the space of possibilities we haven’t glimpsed yet, which science and technology only hint at.

This fascination with unknown unknowns is the source of hackers’ unrelenting optimism about the future and the ‘solutionist’ mindset that prevails in Silicon Valley (Morozov, 2013). Hackers don’t know that the future will be better than it is today, but they know it will be different. Their love of unknowns drives them on. They hack at the present to reveal the possibilities that lie beyond it. The present is encoded but the future is unwritten.

Hacker values

There are certain things that hackers believe are good and true. A distinct set of values informs the hacker way, shaping the hacker worldview. Old school software hackers like Richard Stallman stubbornly adhere to them as articles of faith. Entrepreneurs and design thinkers are more laissez-faire in their subscription to these values. But few would question that they define the rules of innovation in the contemporary startup industry.

Learning and discovery

Hackers, as noted, are fascinated by unknowns, both those that they are aware of and those that they are not. This is borne out in the premium value they place on learning and discovery. Hacking, as knowledge work, is a process of learning and discovery. The hacker way affirms the absolute right of individuals, working together or alone, to pursue their own path of learning and discovery, proceeding with a healthy disregard for authority through multiple hacks and experiments geared towards unpacking problems and defining solutions.

Openness

‘Open company, no bullshit.’ The fierce tone of Atlassian’s ‘root value’ reflects the supreme importance hackers place on sharing information. Hacker innovation thrives in open environments defined by trust and authenticity. When people hide their work and operate with hidden agendas, suspicion runs rampant and trust suffers as a result. Organizations that operate in a closed manner are breeding grounds for political machinations and abuses of power. This is not a conductive environment for innovation.

Transparency

To avoid this situation, hacker organizations insist on transparency. Dictators cannot survive the light of transparency, any more than vampires can survive in the sun. An open and transparent world is ultimately a freer and fairer world. For hackers, this is a core belief.

On a micro-level, hackers value transparency because it enables the creation of gift economies. Gift economies work when everyone can see what everyone else is putting on the table. An anonymous gift may assist the project, but it doesn’t contribute to the cultural dynamic that sustains the work. A transparent play of gifts is required to create and sustain the interpersonal dynamic that drives a reputation-based gift economy.

Autonomy

On a personal level, hackers value autonomy more than anything else. Autonomy, for hackers, means freedom to follow their curiosity and pursue their passion and interests. Hackers are suspicious of managers and anyone else who tries to tell them what to do. They love leaders who open up spaces of autonomy, and who help them to integrate their personal gifts into a collective project. Companies like Google and Atlassian leverage hackers’ love of autonomy by encouraging their employees to spend 20 per cent of their time working on whatever they want. Daniel Pink (2009: 94) claims that ‘in a typical year, more than half of Google’s new offerings are birthed during this period of pure autonomy’.

Mastery

Hackers love the opportunity to develop and demonstrate mastery over technical challenges. Unlike business professionals, they tend to be ambivalent about converting this mastery into formal status, power and influence. Hackers focus instead on achieving informal status in their communities by demonstrating their mastery through acts of hacking. Once they’ve mastered one thing, they move on. In the spirit of permanent beta, hackers are constantly learning, seeking to master new things.

The hacker’s ultimate objective is to learn to engage with problems in an agile way, trying this and that, opening up a range of possible solutions. The master hacker is a MacGyver-like figure, a multitalented generalist who thrives in crisis and is never short of a fix.

Purpose

Hackers feed on a sense of purpose. For hackers, a project with purpose is always preferable to a soulless commercial project, no matter how much money is involved. Notably, it doesn’t follow that hackers always have altruistic motivations. A project underpinned by a noble cause can be a considerable source of egoboo and a chance to earn serious reputation capital, as well as an opportunity to help other people.

Experimentation

Hackers value experiments as a means of practical research. In the same way as mathematicians expect to see the equations that went into solving a problem, hackers, presented with a solution, will ask: ‘What experiments did you run to find that out?’ If the experiments are flawed, the solution is probably flawed as well. Even if the solution is sound, thinking about the experiments that led to it may open up a range of new insights that could trigger new experiments and alternative solutions.

Elegance

Software hackers prize elegant solutions, even if the execution occasionally leaves something to be desired. The MIT hackers believed that it was possible ‘create art and beauty on a computer’ (Levy, 2010: 31). An elegant solution marries simplicity and effectiveness with mind-blowing ingenuity. Elegant solutions are a work of art.

Designers, developers and entrepreneurs today also value elegant solutions, and celebrate people and teams capable of creating them. Practically anyone, these days, can build an app or a website. It is much harder to create an elegant solution that solves a customer’s problem simply and effectively at a minimal cost. This kind of elegance is poetry in code.

Meritocracy

Hacker culture is a meritocracy, where individuals achieve status and authority by virtue of the contributions they make to projects and communities. This was one of the key tenets of MIT hacker culture. Levy recounts the tale of 12-year-old Peter Deutsch, who was accepted into the MIT hacker community for his computer skills alone. The MIT hackers believed that ‘hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position’ (Levy, 2010: 31). Hackers’ belief in the value of merit persists.

The principle of meritocracy is a key part of contemporary hacker culture. At Google, for instance, ‘who you are is immaterial; what matters is what you do’ (Schmidt et al., 2014: 41–42). The quality of an idea is what is important, not who proposed it. This means that hacker communities are radically open and inclusive in principle. Principles, however, don’t always play out in practice. In recent years, concerns have been raised about hacker meritocracy, making this one of the most contentious elements of hacker culture.

Tech companies like to promote meritocratic ideals. Championing the principle of non-discrimination, they claim that anyone can be a hacker, assuming they have the requisite skills and commitment for the task. Surveys reveal, however, that Caucasian and Asian males dominate the workforce in these companies, monopolizing technical and leadership roles in particular (Carson and Gould, 2017). Some companies argue, in their defence, that this is a ‘pipeline problem’ caused by the over-representation of males in high school technology and engineering courses. Still, many of these companies have been slow to address the exclusionary effects of ‘brogrammer’ culture, which fails to accommodate women and minorities. This frat house style culture exists even in companies that celebrate diversity and inclusion (Raja, 2012; Zetlin, 2016). It sits awkwardly with hacker meritocracy.

The challenge of diversity has created a crisis in the hacker value system. This crisis came into focus in 2014, when the open source hosting platform GitHub removed the circular mat it had famously displayed in its faux Oval Office waiting room emblazoned with the phrase, ‘United Meritocracy of GitHub’. The rug was removed in acknowledgement of the problematic nature of the meritocratic ideal. The indictment of brogrammer culture came to a head in 2017, when former US attorney general Eric Holder was employed to investigate allegations of sexism and mismanagement at the ride-sharing company Uber. The media frenzy that surrounded this event led to a shareholder revolt that resulted in Uber’s founder, Travis Kalanick, resigning from the position of CEO in June 2017.

Hackers have not rejected meritocracy. The idea that, in collaborative work, people should be judged solely on their ability to contribute remains a core hacker value. But, as hacker culture matures, people are acknowledging how structural injustice and patterns of exclusion limit the ability of certain social groups to participate in the culture. This problem is being addressed, but a great deal more work needs to be done.

Looking ahead towards a future shaped and defined by hacker innovation, we can only hope that social justice becomes a leading value in the hacker tradition. If it’s true that we create better together, we should work tirelessly to break down the barriers that block participation. We have a world full of problems to hack. We need everyone’s contribution.

INSIGHT: A shared culture brings an innovation space to life. Smart space design and a thriving social environment are enablers. But the magic happens when people have a shared understanding of how to work together to create innovation.

To create a cultural context for hacker innovation, leaders must teach people to think, feel and act like hackers. Start by introducing people to the practices of the startup triad. The most important mindsets and values of the hacker tradition are implicit in these practices, including the bias to action, the value of transparency and the emphasis on sharing, collaboration, experimentation and learning. Use the exploration of these practices to unpack the cognitive and emotional aspects of the hacker way. Foreground and discuss the core elements of hacker culture as you work through the methodologies.

Here are some strategies to help facilitate the process of cultural education:

• Hire cultural ambassadors. Find experienced hackers, employ them and encourage them to lead by example. You might hire a resident entrepreneur to lead innovation sessions, or enlist people with design or startup experience to work as coaches.

• Multiply small wins. Host a series of innovation challenges based around challenging, yet resolvable, problems. Encourage successful teams to review their work and tease out cultural insights to be blogged and shared.

• Run sharing circles: Create gifting games to enable people to reflect on hacker mindsets and values, and share their views on how they can be applied.

• Practice appreciative inquiry. Many of your employees (particularly digital natives) will be familiar with these mindsets and values, even if they don’t associate them with hacking. Run an appreciative inquiry session to identify what your employees are doing well and affirm it. Appreciative inquiry involves digging into the things that an organization does right and using them as a springboard to change (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005). Surfacing hacker mindsets and values in an organization is a good way of identifying internal hacker culture ambassadors who can head up culture hacking initiatives to transform the status quo.