4 The hack and the gift
In 2013, David Wall was contracting to AMP, Australia’s oldest financial services company, helping to build its Hub intranet. Wall, a UX designer, was tasked with creating an engaging online environment to enable AMP staff to exchange information. Privately, he felt sure that the real potential of the intranet lay in fostering human connection and face-to-face collaboration. When AMP launched an Innovation Challenge, asking employees to come up with internally or externally focused innovations for the company, Wall decided to pursue this intuition. He proposed the idea of a company-wide knowledge-sharing community that used the intranet. Wall called the project ‘Gifter’.
The value of an intranet, from management’s point of view, is to enable employees to share work-related content, such as insights into external challenges the organization faces and tacit knowledge on workplace challenges and workarounds. Wall’s idea for Gifter was different. Gifter would enable people to share content on topics that inspired them personally, whether useful at work at not. The idea was to create an environment where people could open up and be themselves, freely expressing their passions, knowledge, talents and skills – in a word, their gifts.
Wall made a strong case for Gifter. ‘We are not appreciating people’s true value and tapping it’, he argued in his pitch. This was bad for productivity and staff morale. From AMP’s perspective, it meant that the company tapped only a fraction of its employees’ potential. From the employees’ perspective, it meant that people were recognized only for those talents and skills they were paid to bring to work, not for their whole person and full set of gifts.
This is a mistake, Wall argued. When people can apply themselves authentically at work, they feel valued for who they are. Engaging workplace challenges becomes intrinsically rewarding, since it enables people to express themselves and unleash their gifts. This increases workplace engagement and creates space for innovation. Instead of feeling the need to stick to the requirements of their job descriptions, people look for opportunities to extend themselves. They lay claim to autonomy, becoming proactive and creative and adding value as they can, surprising their managers, peers and even themselves by coming up with new ways to tackle tasks and challenges.
‘When people have a gifting mindset’, Wall concluded, ‘they work from passion. They collaborate, work becomes more efficient and all the effort put into management can be directed to making the best products, services and experiences.’ The panel of judges was convinced. In April 2013, AMP gave Wall a budget of AUD10,000 to culture hack the company by building and testing an internal Gifter prototype.
Octavia Maddox, a service designer at AMP, also submitted a proposal for the Innovation Challenge. Maddox’s idea (a database that enabled external contractors to put themselves forward for work at AMP) made it through to the final round. Wall and Maddox had similar ideas and complementary skills, so they teamed up to work on Gifter.
The two intrapreneurs wanted to experiment with their ideas before developing Gifter. AMP’s biannual AMPlify Festival was coming up, so they decided to host an event to explore how people responded to gift culture in a corporate environment.
Wall and Maddox thought carefully about how to engage people at AMPlify. They settled on the idea of hosting an Art Space at the event and asking participants to help them create a hand painted mural. Wall and Maddox secured the use of a large, glass-walled room in the festival Hub, reflecting the values of openness and transparency in their project. They arranged tins of paint, paintbrushes and stacks of A5-sized foamcore tiles on a large table in the centre of the room. The tiles were canvases for participants to paint on. Each A5-sized contribution would be a gift to the event, adding something unique to the collaborative mural. It would be fun to discover what magic came out of the mix.
The Art Space turned out to be a popular side event to the panels and seminars at AMPlify. Attendees would wander into the room between talks and gather around the table, chatting with one another as they painted their tiles. When an attendee completed a tile, Wall, Maddox or a Gifter volunteer would add it to the evolving collage on the wall. The mural spread across the wall in a splash of pixilated colour as the event proceeded.
On a second wall of the room, a flat-screen TV looped interviews with gift economy author, Charles Eisenstein. On a third wall, Wall and Maddox posted the following questions:
The collaborative mural was bait. The questions were the crux of the experiment.
Everyone who contributed to the mural was given two blank cards. On the first card, they were asked to write a personal hobby, talent or skill that they were particularly proud of, with the caveat that this should be something they’d happily tell other people about. These were people’s ‘gifts’. On the second card, participants were asked to write something they would like to learn about, with the caveat that these should be things they might legitimately hope to learn from their peers. These were people’s ‘asks’.
Once participants had completed their cards, the team pasted them under the questions on the wall. This created two clusters, one containing ‘gifts’, the other containing ‘asks’.
Wall, meanwhile, was monitoring people’s responses to the ‘gifts’ and ‘asks’ experiment. Most people, he observed, were happy adding ‘asks’ to the wall. Fewer people seemed comfortable sharing their ‘gifts’. Asking around, Wall found that some people felt awkward about disclosing their gifts. Curiously, the problem wasn’t so much because they were afraid of opening up and sharing as it was their concern that their passions and hobbies wouldn’t interest other people. The default view seemed to be: I’m a little boring!
When Wall encountered this view, he asked people to reflect on the topics in the ‘ask’ cluster on the wall. Often as not, people were able to identify an ‘ask’ for more or less the same topic they’d worried about sharing. This boosted their confidence to post their gifts and expose their skills to the fledgling community.
The Art Space was a success. By the end of the festival, the Gifter team had a brightly coloured mural and dozens of ‘asks’ and ‘gifts’. Some attendees didn’t get it. But most people appreciated the chance to creatively engage with one another and publicly share their gifts. The culture hack had kindled a sense of collective possibility. It had fostered a spirit of openness and authenticity among participants, inspiring confidence in people who had previously been reluctant to speak out and share. Many people reported feeling a sense of quiet satisfaction in knowing that their passions and gifts had value to others in the AMP community, value they might contribute as a gift. They were thinking differently about themselves as creative agents. They were reflecting on how enjoyable it was to break out of their organizational personas and engage with one another in a genuine way, as peers.
Encouraged by these results, Wall and Maddox turned to their main experiment: Gifter. They created a Gifter page on the Hub intranet, which enabled people to propose topics for lunchtime talks. Building on the ‘gifts and asks’ experiment, they suggested people use the talks to discuss hobbies, talents and skills they found particularly rewarding, which might have value for others. The copy on the page explained the thinking behind the project:
Gifter is about connecting the people that would like to share a particular skill, interest, or talent with those who would like to learn more about them. We encourage this type of sharing to be done in the spirit of a gift – a gift to the community of people working at AMP.
The first people to propose talks were seasoned presenters. But soon other people were offering topics as well. Visitors to the Gifter page were encouraged to signal their interest in attending the talks by liking and commenting on them. Once enough people had signalled interest in a topic, Wall and Maddox, acting as community managers, booked a room for the talk and spread the word. The organization of Gifter was as simple as that.
The Gifter prototype ran through August 2013. Thanks to the success of the AMPlify event, there was a healthy buzz about the program from the start. Through August, fourteen courageous souls delivered lunchtime talks to showcase their gifts. New employees took the opportunity to introduce themselves in light of their passions. Senior employees surprised their workmates by revealing a whole other side to themselves. Many of the sessions had a professional focus, reflecting perhaps people’s lingering concerns about boring their workmates with their obsessions. Nonetheless, it was an excellent display of gifts. There were sessions on coding, discovering your Myers-Briggs personality type, executive coaching and massive open online courses (MOOCs). All of the sessions were well attended and received.
For Wall, the standout session had nothing to do with professional life. It concerned ham (or amateur) radio – a topic he knew nothing about. It turned out that an IT engineer at AMP was a closet ham radio enthusiast. He brought in his ham radio set and gave the room a demo. Wall had assumed that ham radio died out in the seventies. He was amazed to learn that ham radio is a thriving subculture with over three million participants worldwide.
The presenter thought that only geeks would be interested in ham radio. The level of interest his talk received surprised him. He presented on his topic with intelligence and aplomb. His confidence grew until the whole room resonated with his passion.
Gifter itself grew in popularity as the schedule of events proceeded. By the end of August, Gifter was more than just a lunchtime event, but a living community that spanned the company, triggering conversations in foyers, elevators and hallways that dissolved the corporate hierarchy and cut across departments on the diagonal.
Afterwards, the team analysed data from the experiment. Wall and Maddox were thrilled to learn that 80 per cent of presenters believed that the experience of sharing their gifts had made them feel more positive about working at AMP. Management was impressed by the high Net Promoter Score for the program. Over 75 per cent of respondents either ‘agreed’ or ‘completely agreed’ that Gifter made them more likely to recommend AMP as an employer. Almost no one disagreed with this statement. It was a remarkable result for an experimental program that didn’t focus on work-based activities.
Far from distracting people from their work, Gifter made people feel better about work. Opening a window to life outside the company, it let in a breath of fresh air, revitalizing the corporate culture with a healthy dose of passion, trust, generosity and authenticity.
Gifter is an example of a culture hack – a scrappy, timeboxed experiment, geared towards group learning and dedicated to exploring collaborative forms of work. Leaders who want to transform traditionally structured organizations into agile enterprises fit for hacker culture should seek to replicate this kind of initiative many times over.
Importantly, the initiative was led from the bottom up, through the creative agency of intrapreneurs, who self-organized to design and run the hack. Hacker culture can’t be introduced through a top-down change management strategy. It must be seeded and grown from the grassroots, through voluntary initiatives and experiments. Leaders must loosen their grip on the reins, leading with vision and purpose, while empowering workplace intrapreneurs to create new cultural norms, expressing them through inventive hacks.
Some managers, I find, are sceptical about culture hacking. When I ask why, they cite organizational inertia and complain about an uninspired workforce. Isn’t it unrealistic to suppose that ordinary employees will have the courage, time, motivation and wherewithal to run culture hacks? At the end of the day, people are employed to perform specific roles and hacking the company culture isn’t on anyone’s job description. What would motivate people to engage in this activity, given the time constraints and apprehension about the risks involved? A culture hacking campaign is a sexy idea, but how do you get it started?
The campaign must start with hacker paradigm leadership. Nothing will happen unless the CEO is passionate about creating an innovation culture. The CEO must be a Chief Experimenter, an advocate of organizational experimentation and change, known for forging ahead with new ideas and experiments and challenging the company to keep up. The CEO must inspire everyone in the company, from senior managers to office juniors, with a profound sense of mission and purpose. He must make it clear that he believes in the capacity of people at all levels of the organization to effect positive change, so they believe it too.
It helps to create an inspiring frame for understanding a culture hacking campaign. Companies that employ digital natives should make it an issue of generational change. Digital natives are instinctively familiar with hacker culture, even if people are unfamiliar with the concept. They experience hacker cultural norms and dynamics on a regular basis, every time they go online.
Step back for a moment and consider the vast array of websites, apps and online services that digital natives use every day. These include social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat and Reddit. They include user-generated video and streaming media platforms like YouTube, Vine and Periscope, and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. These sites and services sit at the virtual end of a continuum of collaborative economy businesses extending into the real world, including ridesharing services like Uber, Lyft and Juno, peer accommodation services like Airbnb and CouchSurfing, gig economy platforms like TaskRabbit and AirTasker, coworking spaces like Hub, WeWork and Hive, and co-living ventures like WeLive, Common and The Collective.
For older leaders – the Xers and Boomers, who remember life before the internet – these collaborative companies seem to have come out of nowhere. For digital natives, they are reality. There is nothing strange for members of the digital generation about the idea of a loose network of people gathering together and throwing ideas around to create something with mutual value. This is how the internet works. For people who enjoy the social web and collaborative economy, it is how the world works too.
Until they come to work, that is. For many digital natives, the stark contrast between the open, collaborative environments they enjoy online and the closed, competitive cultures they experience at work is a major source of discontent they’d happily seek to resolve. As Gary Hamel observes, on the social web:
• No one can kill a good idea• Everyone can pitch in• Anyone can lead• No one can dictate• You get to choose your cause• You can easily build on top of what others have done• Excellence usually wins (and mediocrity doesn’t)• Great contributions get recognized and celebrated.(Hamel, 2012: 176–177)
Point for point, these are hacker mindsets and behaviours. Digital natives grew up using online systems built by hackers. They engage in foundational practices of hacker culture, like collaborative ideation and reputation-based gifting, every time they go online.
Embedded in this insight is the key to inspiring a company-wide culture hacking campaign. Leaders who are serious about culture hacking their companies should empower their digital natives to take the lead. These employees are already in the headspace the company needs to occupy. They may be positioned at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, but they should be at the front line of the forces hacking it.
This chapter discusses how to begin. Your first wave of culture hacks should target the way that people share and exchange goods and ideas in the workplace. Like the Gifter experiment, it should focus on cultivating gifting mindsets and behaviours. Hacker culture is a gift culture, in which participants earn status and prestige by giving things away. In a flourishing gift culture, exchanges are driven by implicit reputational dynamics. The first aim of a cultural hacking campaign is to create these dynamics among the members of your teams, with a view to catalysing continuing processes of sharing and exchange.
Gift culture is fundamental to the new hacker paradigm that is emerging around us. To embrace hacker innovation practices, it is vital that companies learn to integrate gifting mindsets and behaviours into the competitive environments of profit-driven business. This challenge is not as hard as it seems. To establish this point, let us start by considering the role of reputation-based gifting in hackathon environments. This will clarify the reward structure of hacker gift economics and help us to understand the kinds of strategies that hacker generation companies use to integrate gifting behaviours into the workplace.
The egoboo economy
The Australian software company Atlassian is built on hacker culture. Founded in 2002 by Sydney hackers Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, Atlassian is the rare example of a startup that scaled to success without sacrificing the culture that initially made it awesome.
Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar were computer science students at the University of New South Wales when they launched Atlassian. The dot.com crash had gutted the tech startup scene and no one was investing in online businesses. Fortunately, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar’s first product, a bug tracking software called JIRA, brought in plenty of sales to get the company started. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar bootstrapped Atlassian on a credit card with AUD10,000, reinvested the profits in the business and grew the company organically.
In 2004, Atlassian added Confluence, a team management system, to its product portfolio. It was the start of a series of innovations that kept on coming. Atlassian was so successful that it didn’t take venture capital money until 2010, when it raised USD60 million from Accel Partners. In 2015, Atlassian went public on the US stock exchange with a market capitalization of USD4.3 billion.
Today, Atlassian is a global leader in collaboration software for teams. The company’s products include JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, Stash and Trello. Atlassian’s success is predicated on its culture of collaborative teams. Because Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar managed to build Atlassian independently, without investors making demands and pulling strings, they had total control over the way the company worked. They chose to bake hacker culture into Atlassian’s DNA. It was a winning decision. It made Atlassian a magnet for talent and a great place to work, full of passionate people who love what they are doing.
Atlassian celebrates hacker culture at its ShipIt hackathon events. Once a quarter, Atlassian gives its entire workforce, consisting of thousands of employees spread across five continents, 24 hours to design and build a product or service that is ready to launch, or ‘ship’. In the weeks preceding each event, Atlassian’s employees try to come up with the craziest, most ambitious, ideas to pitch at ShipIt. On the day, they assemble into teams around the best ideas and figure out how to develop them.
The teams at ShipIt compete fiercely against each other. There is a great sense of camaraderie on the teams, which tend to be comprised of people from different parts of the company who don’t usually get to work together. Everyone pitches in and tries to add value. Time is tight, so team members turn cartwheels ideating, refining, iterating and pivoting their ideas. Ingenuity and practical knowledge are highly prized. Teams look for clever hacks and workarounds to get where they need to go fast. They draw on the full resources of the startup triad, working lean and agile, and finessing ideas through design thinking.
The teams whip their prototypes into shape at the end of the day. In the closing hours of ShipIt, they pitch their concepts in three-minute lightning talks that are live streamed to all branches of the company. The winning team gets a shiny trophy and bragging rights. The trophy is just a token. The real prize at ShipIt is peer recognition and a licence to brag.
Take a moment to reflect on this point. Once a quarter, Atlassian whips itself into a frenzy of creation so that one team can boast to the rest of the company about what it has achieved. No one is paid extra for their work. There is no end-of-year bonus for participating in the event. People participate for the fun of it and the licence to brag. Since winning is a team achievement, bragging is an act of collective self-affirmation, the swagger of a Stage 4 mindset, as opposed to the selfish boasting of a Stage 3 individual. Bragging rights are an opportunity for a team to stand up and say: ‘We’re great’, meaning not just ‘look at this thing we’ve built’ but ‘look what we achieved by working together and combining our gifts’.
ShipIt is a great example of a reputation-based gift economy. Participants at the event give everything they have to their teams, cognitively, emotionally and behaviourally. Cooperation on each team is inflected with a competitive spirit. Everyone does their best work, trying to stand out on the team. The designers wrack their brains to come up with elegant solutions to the challenges they face. The engineers pull all-nighters to deliver works of technical wizardry. But everyone works for the team. Everyone takes turns at being a hacker paradigm leader, leading with purpose and making space for innovation, so that everyone can leverage their gifts and contribute them to the work. The goal is to excel as a collaborative unit, expressing the Atlassian company value, ‘Play, as a Team.’
When Atlassian started ShipIt, all the entries were software development projects. These days, about 25–30 per cent of ShipIt projects are non-technical in nature. Dom Price, Head of R&D at Atlassian, shares a story about a team who used ShipIt to redesign Atlassian’s 90-day onboarding process:
‘They were all relatively new starters, so they figured they were the best people to rebuild the process. They systematized it with our HR team and with Confluence. Now, the first 30 days [of the process] are quite prescribed, days 31–60 are loosely prescribed, and days 61–90 are “build your own adventure”.
When I saw the team doing this, I said: “You know we’ve already got a 90-day onboarding plan?” They said: “Yeah, we’ve just been through it. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
They didn’t wait for the onboarding plan to be broken. They had just gone through onboarding and decided: “It could be better.” In other organizations, you’d get arm folding, with people saying: “That’s not my job”, but here it’s like: “I’ve just been through that, and I know we’re going to hire more people, so let’s get on and improve it”.’
The only real payment people expect for their work is peer recognition. For hackers, peer recognition is more valuable than cash. Hackers derive numerous benefits from peer recognition. It feels great to be acknowledged for one’s talents, for a start. It bolsters one’s confidence and inspires one to strive for greater things. In a company like Atlassian, where work is transparent and team structures are constantly changing, an excellent effort at ShipIt can elevate the profile of employees, shining a light on their skills and marking them out as great people to have on teams. From a career perspective, a great reputation opens doors. The history of hacker culture is full of stories of hackers who have been tapped on the shoulder by corporate recruiters impressed by their work, who have been offered a high-paying startup position or the opportunity to work on an exciting team.
These insights from ShipIt shine a light on the informal economy of gifts and rewards that motivates the hacker community. Hacker culture is not a transactional economy in which individuals expend effort with the expectation of being paid for work. Hacker culture is a gift economy, ‘in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation among one’s peers’ (Raymond, 2001: 81).
In his seminal account of the Linux community, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (2001), Raymond distinguishes three different kinds of reputational reward that hackers earn from gifting: self-esteem, social prestige and professional status.
Raymond’s account of hacker gift culture takes us deep inside the hacker mindset and value system. By clarifying the kinds of things that motivate hackers (self-esteem, social prestige and professional status), Raymond reveals the structures and systems that leaders must try to establish in their organizations to inspire their teams to do consistently excellent work. These structures and systems tend to emerge naturally in startup companies founded and run by hackers. This is not the case for companies based in command hierarchies, bureaucratic permissions systems, individualized performance controls and Stage 3 mindsets. These companies must build these structures and systems from scratch. To start, they need to tear down the systems they have in place.
This is why culture hacking is so important. In traditionally structured companies, culture hacking is a prerequisite for creating a hacker innovation culture. Fortunately, culture hacking is not as frightening or disruptive as it sounds. A good culture hack is fun and engaging. It enables people to express themselves in empowering, liberating ways. The best culture hacks offer reputational rewards that make them intrinsically attractive for people.
ShipIt is a fine example. Many large companies run hackathons today. Generally, employees love the opportunity to take a break from their standard roles and duties and collaborate with teams in a creative, energetic environment. The benefits of running a hackathon include problem solving, producing valuable innovations, promoting the company and (assuming the hackathon is an open event) attracting external talent. But the real benefit of a hackathon for a company that wants to improve its innovation performance lies in the way that it enables people to experience hacker culture first hand.
Given the right framing, a hackathon is a culture hack. As a culture hack, it works to shake up established views of ‘how we get things done around here’ by enabling people to engage in real-time hacking. The time constraints of the event force people to move fast and break things. People forego a planning mindset and throw ideas out there to see what works. Teams take an experimental approach to collaborative work, questioning their assumptions and building lightweight models and testing them. The collaborative dynamic forces people to lead with their gifts, seeking to make excellent contributions.
By restricting the prize at ShipIt to a trophy and bragging rights, Atlassian hacks its employees’ attitudes towards value and success. At ShipIt, team members are 100 per cent focused on doing great work so they can legitimately say at the end of the event: ‘Look what we achieved together. We’re great!’ ShipIt stimulates employees’ gifting instincts, giving them the opportunity to collaborate in a competitive environment for the sake of egoboo, social prestige and professional status. This is precisely what leaders need to achieve to turn bureaucratic organizations into hacker generation companies.
A leader’s guide to gifting
Gift culture is the mise en scène in which hacker innovation comes to life. Agile development, lean startup method and design thinking flourish in the rich soil of a competitive gift culture, where everyone is competing to make a mighty contribution to the work and everyone derives an intrinsic reward from the effort.
Making space for hacking and gifting in traditional work environments is not an easy task. While most people are familiar with gift exchanges in friendships and love relationships, we typically have a different set of expectations for the workplace. Most workplaces are transactional, exchange economies. People contribute to work in the expectation of receiving payment in the form of salary, bonuses and benefits. These rewards are extrinsic to the work, in the sense that they follow from work, rather than inhering in it. If people derive intrinsic rewards from work, it’s an added bonus.
Companies that want to create innovation cultures must work to change this situation. To lay the foundations for hacking and gifting, leaders must create environments that enable people to enjoy the intrinsic rewards that flow from these activities. This requires a trenchant and extended culture hacking campaign, geared to generate Stage 4 mindsets and hacker sensibilities, so that everyone feels excited about pitching in and making a difference. It involves creating visibility around contributions, so that people can earn egoboo and social prestige and build professional reputations through gifts.
None of this can be forced on employees. A culture hacking campaign is not the kind of initiative that can be planned and implemented from above. Leaders must proceed as Chief Experimenters, challenging, encouraging and enabling employees to propose short, focused hacks to transform the organizational culture. Leaders must build a campaign that rises from below – a campaign led by employees themselves, who learn about hacker culture by running experiments, while creating the conditions for hacking and gifting to flourish.
To start, leaders should offer employees a clear vision of where the organization is headed. Employees need a vision to aspire to, and they need to believe that change is really possible. Additionally, employees need clarity around the kinds of hacks that are required to transition the organization from a transactional economy to a gift economy. Broadly speaking, there are three steps required to achieve this transition:
Silo busters
Openness is a core value at Atlassian. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar knew from the start that they needed to embed openness at the heart of their company to create a high performing hacker organization. In closed cultures, teams have little or no idea what people in other parts of the organization are doing. The knowledge and insights they develop rarely escape their contexts of work and feed into the work of other teams. Consequently, there is considerable duplication of work and not much organizational learning. There is little opportunity for individuals and teams to earn peer recognition for their work, since the only people who are aware of what they are doing are their managers and team members.
Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar have always worked in an open way. From their earliest collaborations, they made a practice of documenting work on a wiki, so they could easily keep track of how things were proceeding. When they founded Atlassian, they turned the wiki into Confluence, a project management tool, which became one of the company’s most successful products. Today, Atlassian’s employees use Confluence to document their daily work and more. This gathers everything that is happening in the company in a single location where it is accessible to everyone.
In companies where employees exchange information using email, Word files and Google Docs, the responsibility to additionally add content to a wiki is a considerable burden. Atlassian avoids this problem by instructing employees to share everything on the wiki. Instead of emailing information person to person, employees post their communications on the wiki where everyone can see them. Instead of working in document files that people store on their workstations, employees add information directly to the wiki, so the content can be viewed by anyone with an internet connection.
One payoff of the central wiki is that new employees can access and review all the information they need to get started on day one. This includes business plans, product plans, technical documentation and a full range of discussion and critique concerning these items. For managers who routinely take responsibility for partitioning information flows and feeding knowledge to employees on a need-to-know basis, this seems like setting recruits adrift on a sea of data without a map. At Atlassian, it reflects a core principle: ‘Open company, no bullshit.’ This value is proudly emblazoned on the wall in the reception area of Atlassian’s Sydney head office. It is not a ‘corporate edict’. It was ‘documented by staff as describing the actual company culture’ (Rotenstein, 2011).
Buffer, a social media management company founded by UK expats Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich, takes openness to an extreme. Buffer defaults to transparency internally and externally. Externally, Buffer shares on its website an extraordinary range of information about its finances and activities, including the salaries of every person in the company and the formulas behind them, its equity structure and distribution of shares, its monthly revenue reports and metrics, and information on its funding rounds. Gascoigne (2014) admits there are risks associated with this level of transparency, but insists the benefits outweigh the downsides. Over the years, Buffer has built a powerful reputation for fairness and justice, and earned huge respect in the industry for its commitment to the open ideal.
Internally, Buffer defaults to transparency. This creates a platform for hacking and innovation. Buffer’s employees have unmediated access to the company’s financial records, enabling them to make strategy and costing decisions that would normally need to be handled by the CEO. When employees want to run an experiment, or make any decision that affects the company, they have the hard data on hand to do it. For some people, it seems crazy to give hackers the decision-making powers of the CEO. Gascoigne (2014) counters that ‘transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork’. With transparent finances, everyone can behave like a leader. Buffer is the epitome of a flat, agile organization, where innovation is everyone’s job and managers make space for hacking.
Buffer hasn’t always been an open company. Its founders experimented with openness in incremental steps, revealing the company’s finances bit by bit, moving a little further outside their comfort zone with every experiment. This is the best approach to introducing openness and transparency into workplaces unaccustomed to them. Here are a few suggestions for getting started:
The second problem with email is that it tends to reduce communications to functional, task-oriented exchanges. To avoid inbox bloat, people keep their emails short and to the point, which means exchanges lack the friendliness, informality and flexibility of face-to-face conversations. To create an open environment where ideas can be freely shared, discussed and debated, it is important to find ways of enabling more expressive modes of communication. This entails normalizing social chat about non-work-related topics in the workplace.
Instead of seeing social chat as something that gets in the way of work, leaders should see it as a valuable contribution to creating an inclusive social culture. Social chat bonds people together, cultivating a community sensibility in the organization. It helps to create an open, transparent environment for wide-ranging discussions that can yield important insights on topics such as new technologies and other external conditions the company must contend with.
Companies that are new to this style of workplace communication might experiment with hacking their email silos using enterprise social media. There are several workplace messaging apps on the market that enable employees to chat on any topic at any point. These apps (including Slack and Atlassian’s HipChat) enable users to engage in conversations on multiple Facebook-style channels, each devoted to a different topic. This enables users to separate out discussions, distinguishing conversations about team projects from general work discussion and chit-chat.
Users can create private threads for direct messages, but most messaging apps are designed to encourage open conversations that large groups of people can engage with. These tools bring visibility to workplace conversations, enabling everyone to share knowledge and ideas and stay posted on the progress of projects. On open channels, everyone can see who is posting content and making regular, positive contributions. People can express their interest and enthusiasm about conversations with comments, likes and emojis, so that everyone contributes in a small way and gets to enjoy a sense of adding value to the evolving discussion.
This is how leaders should approach culture hacking in the workplace generally. The leader’s role, as Chief Experimenter, is to facilitate and enable workplace experiments, not prescribe and direct them. The leader might put ideas on the table, but it should be up to employees to decide if they want to pick them up. Those employees who do head up culture hacking initiatives should be given time and support to run experiments before reporting back to an entrepreneurial manager to discuss outcomes and next steps.
It is important to make culture hacks visible to the whole company. This way, insights and learnings from the experiments are circulated throughout the company, enabling other teams to build on them by running experiments of their own. Culture hackers should be commended for their work, even when experiments fail to produce a positive result. Indeed, leaders should make a point of celebrating those individuals who keep experimenting despite having failed to produce a positive result, and encourage other employees to do the same. People with the courage to try and fail in a transparent environment are precisely the kind of people an innovative organization requires. They should be rewarded and promoted.
Sharing games
Transparent environments enable individuals to earn reputation capital for the contributions they make and the knowledge they share. This, of course, implies that people do contribute and share. Transparency is just a platform. To realize the value of transparent environments, human input is required. People need to contribute their gifts.
The following pages present some collaborative games designed to encourage people to open up and share their gifts. The first game – the sharing circle – is a simple exercise for small to medium groups. The second game – the Open Space event – is a more elaborate exercise for larger groups. Like Gifter, these games should be voluntary and non-coercive. No one should feel forced to engage in and contribute to them. Fortunately, these games are fun to play and intrinsically rewarding for participants. Their function of revealing the intrinsic rewards of sharing and gifting is what makes them culture hacks.
Sharing game #1: the sharing circle
Sharing circles are used in therapeutic group work to create inclusive environments defined by trust and community. Participants stand in a circle and pass an item between them, such as a ball or a talking stick. The person who holds the item has the right to speak to the group. The rest of the group, meanwhile, must listen without interrupting. Once the person has said his piece, he passes the item to another person, transferring the speaker’s rights with it. This process continues until every member of the circle has had a chance to speak.
In therapeutic settings, speakers are encouraged to reflect aloud on unresolved personal problems that they share with other members of the group. But sharing circles can be used to enable people to share any kind of content, from observations on their day to deep reflections about their passion and purpose. An agile standup meeting is a kind of sharing circle. In a standup meeting, speakers’ rights move clockwise around the circle, with each person sharing an update on what they did yesterday, what they are working on today and any difficulties, obstacles or risks that are blocking or interfering with their work.
Sharing circles are a great way of enabling people to reveal their personal gifts. They can be used to enable groups of people to introduce themselves to one another, or to enable people who know one another in a certain capacity to share aspects of themselves that they might not otherwise reveal in this context. The value of a sharing circle as a culture hack lies in the way it encourages people who are used to hiding behind professional personas to reveal a more authentic side to themselves. This promotes honesty and trust in an organization, while enabling individuals to experience the rewards of gifting in a transparent environment.
A group facilitator is required to lead the sharing circle. The facilitator leads by posing a question for the circle to discuss, and ensures that everyone has the opportunity to speak. Good examples of questions include:
These questions encourage people to open up and express themselves in authentic ways. The facilitator should encourage the group to affirm and support raw, unfiltered self-expression, thanking those people who ‘go deep’ and expose themselves to the group and offering support to those who feel uncomfortable about sharing.
Run regularly as a group exercise, a sharing circle helps to increase people’s receptivity to sharing, teaching shy and reticent individuals to trust their coworkers and open up to them. It creates a communal sensibility in a group and brings people closer together. The exercise distinguishes those people who like to share details about themselves from those people who are private and prefer to keep their own counsel. If there are personality problems in a group, such as hostility and aggressive behaviour, a sharing circle is a good way of surfacing these problems and working through them in an open and transparent way.
Sharing game #2: the Open Space event
Open Space Technology is a method for hosting meetings, conferences and symposium-style events without a pre-prepared agenda. Since Harrison Owen developed the technology in the early 1980s, it has since become a staple tool for hackers and other communities inspired by open, democratic ideals (Owen, 2008).
Open Space events (sometimes called ‘unconferences’) are a great way of enabling large groups of people to contribute a wide range of ideas and insights on a theme. The format can be used for medium-sized groups of twelve or more people, or large groups of hundreds of people, who host sessions over the course of a day or weekend.
Here’s how you organize and run an Open Space event.
STEP 1. Find a suitable space for the event. This space should include a large room where participants can gather together to determine the agenda for the event and set of smaller rooms for sessions.
STEP 2. Prior to the event, draw a large grid on a whiteboard, or wall. This is where you’ll compile the agenda for the event. You’ll need to decide beforehand how many multi-session streams you want to run simultaneously at the event and how long each session will be. Your answers to these questions will depend on how many people you expect to attend the event and how much time you have available to run the event respectively.
STEP 3. Display, in a prominent location, the four principles of Open Space. These are:
Write, below these principles, the one law of Open Space:
STEP 4. Write the theme for the event in large letters above the agenda. The theme should be something straightforward and compelling that can be discussed from multiple angles. It helps to phrase the theme as a question, such as: ‘How can we promote sharing in the community?’ or ‘How can we enable hacking and agility?’
STEP 5. Welcome the participants as they arrive. Brief them on the theme of the event. Explain how Open Space events work, for people who haven’t attended one before. Review the four principles and the one law of Open Space. It is important that everyone understands how to participate in the event, because from this point they are in charge.
STEP 6. Invite the participants to volunteer to host talks related to the theme of the event. Anyone who has an insight or useful perspective that is relevant to the theme should be free to lead a discussion.
The session titles should clearly express the topic. Ideally, they will be phrased as provocative questions to inspire curiosity and reflection. If a speaker wants to discuss how to create an intrapreneurship program, for example, she might call her session: ‘How can we inspire workplace entrepreneurship?’
STEP 7. The Open Space event begins! Tell participants to select a topic that interests them and move to the relevant location. From this point until the end of the first session, the people who volunteered to host the sessions are in charge. Their job is to deliver a talk or workshop to share their knowledge and ideas, and open the floor to discussion. Remind participants that if at any point in the session they feel they are not getting value, they may apply the Law of Two Feet by getting up and moving to another session.
STEP 8. Mark the conclusion of Session 1 with a whistle or bell. Participants now have five minutes to reconvene in a new group for Session 2. Repeat this process at the end of Session 2 and reconvene for Session 3. Continue the process until the end of the event, allowing an hour’s break for lunch and time for morning and afternoon tea.
An Open Space event is a great way of unlocking the latent knowledge and wisdom in a group. If someone in each session takes notes and shares them with the event organizer, it is possible to gather a wealth of pertinent material on each topic. For the sake of transparency, it is good practice to collate this material and share it with the participants.
As a culture hack, an Open Space event serves as a practical introduction to the open, participatory, knowledge-driven nature of hacker culture. The cultural dynamics of Open Space map the participatory dynamics of a hacker team on a larger scale. The way people self-organize on hacker teams, stepping up to lead aspects of the project and contributing their knowledge and skills to drive the work forward, is mirrored in the structure of Open Space. Running an Open Space event is a good way of introducing large groups of people to the principles and norms of gift culture, where individuals earn reputation capital for their contributions to a common project or cause.
The virtuous competition
Reputation is the currency of a hacker gift culture. To create environments where people feel intrinsically motivated to contribute to work, it is necessary that people appreciate the reputational rewards they could earn from sharing and gifting and set out to achieve them.
Hackers did not invent reputation-based gift culture. The model has a long heritage in indigenous cultures around the world, where it serves to hold tribes and communities together and enables people to enhance their social status through gifts. The potlatch ceremony, a traditional celebration and feast of the indigenous tribes of the US Pacific Northwest coast, is a powerful example. The potlatch was a festival of giving, the formal expression of a reputation-based gift culture that played out at all levels of society.
The potlatch was central to the lives of the native people for centuries prior to the European incursion. Chiefs would host a potlatch by gathering their tribe together and presenting them with a massive gift of food, skins, blankets, weapons, crafts and more. The gift was dispensed at the end of a long and elaborate festival involving speeches, songs and spirit dances that sometimes lasted for days. Everyone waited patiently to see what the chief would give. The chief was obliged to give generously to sustain his authority (Mauss, 1990: 50). Any sign of frugality and meanness counted against him. Consequently, the tribe turned up expecting a show. The chief gave as if his reputation depended on it, because it did.
A noble chief rose to the challenge of the event. Determined to impress his tribe, he would prepare for the potlatch months if not years in advance, stockpiling hides and furs, weapons, carvings and kilos of cured salmon. Gifting at scale was how chiefs established a legendary reputation. Sometimes at tribal gatherings, multiple chiefs would engage in competitive gifting, each seeking to cast the others in their shadow. The more the chiefs gave at these events, the more their tribes benefited and the more the chiefs were rewarded in terms of personal reputation, chiefly status and loyalty from their warriors.
Hacker communities operate on similar principles. In the Linux community, for instance, hackers set out to tackle major problems and share their solutions, seeking to advance the project and establish status in the eyes of their peers. In small startups, where work is transparent and everyone is struggling to make the venture succeed, it is easy for individuals to earn status in the eyes of their team by securing a new sales channel or hacking a bottleneck that previously slowed the company’s growth. Reputation capital is easily accrued because gifts are transparent and every contribution counts.
The following reputation games are designed to help organizations transitioning to hacker culture to build internal reputation economies. These hacks can be applied in various contexts, in various ways. They serve to impress on employees the supreme importance of adding value to projects in whatever ways they can. They encourage people to congratulate individuals who help advance projects in baby steps, and to heroize individuals who contribute major value, driving projects forth in giant leaps.
The first game is a straightforward gifting game with a reputational overlay. It can be played as a standalone game or woven into the context of team work. The second game has broader scope and the potential for greater impact. It involves establishing a ‘pay it forward’ culture in the workplace, creating an interpersonal dynamic to promote a continuing exchange of gifts.
Reputation game #1: leaderful innovation
Michel Bauwens is the Founder and Director of the P2P Foundation and an international authority on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and movements. Bauwens has published numerous reports, articles and books on P2P and commons-based practices, and is in hot demand as a speaker at international conferences and events. Bauwens is renowned for his intelligence and humility. Despite his achievements, he insists that he is simply one of many leaders pioneering the P2P movement. He contributes what he can while tirelessly affirming the contributions of others around the world who are working in a similar direction.
Bauwens’ attitude reflects his philosophy of P2P leadership. Distributed movements are often said to be ‘leaderless’ on account that there is no single authority in charge. Bauwens prefers to speak of ‘leaderful’ movements to underscore that anyone can be a leader in a P2P environment. To play a leadership role, all that people need to do is step up and lead.
This point applies to hacker innovation. The open and unstructured nature of hacker innovation work enables anyone to step up at any point and say: ‘I’ll lead this part of the project.’ This is how people earn reputation capital in these contexts. They see an opportunity to advance the project and seize the chance by volunteering their gifts. If an intervention is on target and adds value, the individual is rewarded through egoboo and an enhanced reputation. Sometimes people earn a small amount of reputation capital just for making the effort. When multiple people on a team compete to out give one another, each contributing in their own unique way, the combined dynamic produces incredible results.
This is how gift economies pick up speed. A remarkable gift issues a challenge to other participants to up the ante and follow up with an even better gift. Thriving gift economies are inherently competitive; yet this is a virtuous competition that creates mutual value and brings participants closer together.1 Over time, the competition cultivates a generative mindset in participants. It fosters an attitude of abundance, whereby people see themselves as ripe with potential, overflowing with gifts, and search for the chance to contribute them.
Here is a simple game inspired by Bauwens’ insight. I call it the leaderful innovation game. Like Open Space Technology, this game is based on four principles and one law. Before playing the game, it is worth posting the principles and law in a prominent location, gathering the team around them and leading a critical discussion on what they mean.
The four principles of the leaderful innovation game are:
The one law of leaderful innovation is:
The leaderful innovation game requires a group of people who are tackling a project as a team. If the game is being run as an exercise outside normal work, give the team a problem to solve and a limited time to solve it. The problem should be difficult enough to require team members to pull together and pitch in to solve it, but not so difficult that the team cannot make headway on a solution in a single session.
The game requires a facilitator to coach the team through the session. The facilitator’s task is to encourage people to lead with their gifts. Prior to starting, the facilitator should advise people to think carefully about how they can best contribute to the session. Instead of trying to contribute to all the work, team members should zero in on those parts of the work where they can really add value. The facilitator should point out that sometimes, stepping back to play a supporting role may be the most valuable way people can contribute. Emotional work, like empathizing and cheerleading (not to mention going on coffee runs), are contributions too. Comporting oneself with sensitivity, intelligence and maturity are valuable contributions throughout.
Once the session gets underway, the facilitator should encourage team members to heroize the people who are contributing to the work. Heroizing givers is a core part of the leaderful innovation game. Team members should make a point of noting the positive contributions that others are making and affirm the value they add to the work. When someone makes a great contribution, the team should say: ‘Thanks! That’s made a difference.’ When someone steps back, aware they can’t add anything at this point, and focuses instead on sustaining the team through encouraging and supportive comments, the others should say: ‘We appreciate how you’re holding space here. It really helps!’
The gifts that people contribute to the work should be an ongoing topic of conversation on the team. The exchange of thanks and compliments keeps everyone happy, enjoying their hit of egoboo, while cultivating positive team etiquette.
The continuous exchange of compliments during the game helps team members to develop a shared recollection of who added value at what points of the work and how. This feeds into the post-work activity: celebrating the creative chiefs. Once the session is over, gather the team together and ask them to tell the story of their work, focusing on people’s contributions. You might run this session as a sharing circle. Each person should have the opportunity to present their own account of the creative chiefs who drove the project forward. Who was the star player? Who turned things around when the project hit a wall? Who kept things ticking when the team’s motivation levels ran low?
Keep the stories brief but make the content epic. This is a chance for people to give back to the people who gave their best, buffing up their reputations until they shine.
The leaderful innovation game makes the reputational rewards of gifting explicit. It creates a pantheon of Gifter-chiefs in your organization, whose behaviour serves as an example for others. Over time, as employees become familiar with the principles of the reputation game, you’ll notice a self-sustaining dynamic emerge that enhances the organizational culture and makes people feel better about work. Inspired by the status and esteem accorded to the most generous and engaged members of the organization, individuals set out to improve their reputations by adding value in unexpected ways. When other individuals, concerned not to be left behind, start making an effort too, it creates an upwards spiralling dynamic that feeds off itself and grows.
Reputation game #2: build a ‘pay it forward’ culture
At Karma Kitchen, a volunteer-run restaurant in San Francisco, customers literally feed off the gift economy. When you eat at Karma Kitchen, your meal is free because a previous customer has paid for it. Once you’ve finished your meal, you receive a bill of $0.00 with a note that says: ‘Your meal was a gift from someone who came before you. To keep the chain of gifts alive, we invite you to pay it forward for those who dine after you.’ In the spirit of the gift economy, you can make a donation, which goes to cover the next person’s meal.
While you can eat for free at Karma Kitchen, most customers choose not to. They wind up paying for a meal, just not their own. For regular customers, ‘paying it forward’ adds value to the experience. They get a delicious meal, for which they pay an equitable sum. In addition, they get to enjoy a sense of social solidarity and self-esteem by donating something to the kitty. The simple pleasure of ‘paying it forward’ is an intrinsic reward that adds value to the meal. The more that customers give, the greater their intrinsic reward.
Paying it forward is what generative agents do. It is the expression of a mature gift culture, in which individuals intuitively appreciate the reputational rewards of gifting and seek to earn egoboo, prestige and professional status as a matter of course.2 Creating a pay it forward culture in the workplace should be the ultimate objective of leaders who want to prepare the ground for hacker innovation. The aim is to create a generative environment in the workplace, where individuals habitually share knowledge and ideas, apply the resources of their whole person, invest emotional labour and put their shoulder to the wheel of collaborative projects with a view to moving them forward.
There are many ways that leaders can set up pay it forward environments. Following Karma Kitchen’s example, you might implement a pay it forward system in your cafeteria. Keep a quiet eye on the people who regularly contribute cash to the kitty. While some people will act out of a sense of obligation, the most generous contributors are those who savour the spirit of the gift.
Another way of building a pay it forward culture in the workplace is to set up a mentorship program. Invite your senior employees to donate some time each week to providing help and guidance to new recruits. Presumably, someone back along the line helped them out. Now is their chance to pay it forward by helping out members of the next generation. Their gift of a few hours each week will provide an incredible benefit to these employees. As mentors, they will enjoy the experience of having made a difference to young people’s lives and careers. Perhaps one day they’ll see an equitable return as these employees rise to senior roles and seek out opportunities to thank them for their help.
A more forceful way of cementing a pay it forward culture is to ban informal transactions in the workplace. This interventionist strategy shouldn’t be implemented without employees’ consent. Ideally, employees will recommend it as a culture hack themselves.
Transactional economies (like markets and barter economies) are based in the principle of quid pro quo. When Person A provides a service to Person B, Person B is obliged to reciprocate by paying Person A back, whether through formal payment, reciprocation in kind, a return item of equivalent value or a notice of debt. This quid pro quo dynamic shapes the nature of many informal exchanges in the workplace. When one employee helps another, the second employee feels indebted to the first and looks for a way to pay him back. While this may appear to be an exchange of gifts, it is an implicit transaction insofar as the second employee feels indebted to the first. Often, the first employee will expect the transaction to be completed in some way and feels put out if he doesn’t see a return.
To break the circuit of transactional exchange, leaders should instruct employees to say, when assisting workmates in some way: ‘Don’t thank me, or pay me back. Pay it forward instead. I want you to spend the same amount of time and effort helping someone else.’ This strategy serves to hack the mindset that gift exchanges are implicit transactions between individuals. It establishes that a gift is a contribution to the whole organization. When individuals gift to one another, they shouldn’t expect to be paid back for it. Their reward should be the sense of self-esteem and status they get from contributing to a worthy cause, advancing a project or the organization as a whole.
A nice, timeboxed culture hack is to institute a pay it forward rule for a week. Run the hack as an experiment, restricting the intervention to a small group of people and gathering data on their responses and reactions. Depending on the results, you may choose to expand the experiment in the second week, or tweak it to improve the outcome. Once people have got used to the idea of passing on favours rather than returning them in a transactional way, you’ll see a string of contributions run around the office – a sharing circle that feeds off its own momentum, enlivening the workplace with generosity and goodwill.
A pay it forward culture becomes a gift economy when participants grasp the social value of paying it forward and actively contribute to sustaining the cycle of gifts. The Silicon Valley startup ecosystem illustrates how powerful this culture can become. Visitors to the Valley often marvel at the generosity and support they receive from local entrepreneurs, which can be at odds with the closed, competitive attitudes of entrepreneurs back home. In Silicon Valley, paying it forward has reputational stakes, which incentivizes people to contribute gifts.
Steve Blank claims that an unspoken principle in Silicon Valley is: ‘I was helped when I started out and now it’s my turn to help others’ (Blank, 2011). This attitude reflects an abundance mindset: ‘I am someone with a lot to give and I’ll happily share it around.’ The act of paying it forward, in Silicon Valley, is a way that entrepreneurs establish their noble bearing and consolidate their professional standing. It indicates that the entrepreneur has a wealth of knowledge, experience and other resources, accumulated over time and numerous struggles. It signifies their status as a tribal chief.
Companies around the world are learning from Silicon Valley, adopting its entrepreneurial verve, its ‘fail fast’ mindsets and its design and innovation practices. Many companies, however, try to adopt these practices without adopting the gift economic principles that underpin them. Consequently, the practices fail to bear fruit or produce middling results. Participants find them tiring, time-consuming and unrewarding. Everyone is focused on the extrinsic rewards that will presumably flow from the work. No one enjoys the intrinsic rewards that are (or should be) generated by the work itself.
Companies that maintain transactional cultures will never get these innovation practices right. Hacker culture is a gift culture, and gift culture must be built through the creative energies and passion of people who care about co-creation and community. Companies that are serious about adopting hacker practices need to look beyond these practices themselves to understand the human element of hacker culture. They must devote themselves to hacking the outmoded values and mindsets embedded in their organizational cultures through gifting games that establish a different way of working and getting things done.
Notes
1Gift exchanges between opposing tribes are exceptions to this rule. Without a common project uniting parties, competitive gifting can be a sublimated act of war. In the ‘big man’ culture of Papua New Guinea, for example, participants set out to shame and diminish their opponents through the scale of their gifts, ‘defeating’ them through the power of their generosity. The 1974 Granada Television documentary film Ongka’s Big Moka depicts this culture in action (Royal Anthropological Institute, 2017).
2There are many reasons why people donate to a community kitty beyond the desire to be perceived as a generous participant. Some people are motivated by altruism or guilt. Some people follow a faith that instructs them to give to others. These subjective motivations do not lead to the creation of a continuing gift exchange. I focus on reputational drivers because these are required to create a virtuous, competitive exchange between parties, which is the foundation of hacker innovation culture.
References
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Royal Anthropological Institute (2017). ‘The Kawelka: Ongka’s Big Moka’ (online). Available at: www.therai.org.uk/film/the-series-of-disappearing-world/the-kawelka-ongkas-big-moka. Accessed: 05/09/2017.