The Consulting Architect

 How do you win a Hackathon? (4/4) You have the mindset . You have the team . You have a killer idea . Time to make it pop. A killer idea is key for qualifying; the "wow factor" is key to clinch the win. By the time you pass the general submission stage, you're up against good and very good ideas. What sets your idea apart from them? To quote Megamind: "Presentation!!!". Here's how you do it: Create a persona You need to describe the person experiencing both problem and solution. Even if both happen 100% in the backend, find the human impacted by it. If you can describe the problem and solution through the eyes of a person, you make it easy for the judges (hopefully still humans) to relate to it. Let your visionary and presenter team members lead this task. Tell a story Turn the problem and solution into a story using your persona's experience. Describe the situation they encounter - their difficulties and how your solution helps overcome them, and descr...

How do you win a Hackathon? (3/4) So we chose the right team and established the winning mindset , what's next? Next is choosing the idea that gets you past the preliminaries. Note I said "preliminaries" and not "finals", because that's where your first go/no-go challenge is. Most corporate hackathons start with a submission phase, where employees are invited to submit their ideas, usually a pitch deck or short video detailing the idea. Then, reviewers go through all the submissions and grade them based on one or more criteria like relevance to the challenge, feasibility, originality, impact, etc. There may be other criteria, but these are often there. At some point, the reviewers will combine all the ideas they graded into one big list, sort it based on rating, and start the selection process together. Reviewers usually set two cutoff points: One for top scorers - anything above this point is a no-brainer, i.e. ideas so good it's clear they should be m...

 How do you win a Hackathon? (2/4) Last post we discussed the importance of adopting the "in it to win it" mindset as your first step towards winning a hackathon. First with yourself, and then, once you have a team, with them. But how do you find the right team? The most important characteristic to look for in your teammates is the same as for yourself - they have to really want to win, or you believe they will quickly adopt the winning spirit. Hackathons are hard and demanding ordeals with tight schedules, and you are usually not freed from existing responsibilities. If your team members are not the sort of people who can dive into a challenge and give it their all despite all of the hardships, you won't be able to rely on them when the going gets hard (and it will). So that's the primary thing to look for - people who can step up to a challenge and be motivated to put in the effort. Other than that, what type of qualities should the team members have? Different ha...

How do you win a Hackathon? (1/4) Over my three decades of work experience, I've seen companies host many internal competitions for employees (hackathons and other innovation/creativity-based competitions). When these come up, I decide which to join based on a few guidelines I created to help me win them. So far, I chose to join five, and so far, the guidelines worked. Five out of five ain't bad! So over the next four posts, I'll describe what I think is important to help you come out with the trophy in hand. Starting with the mentality: Be in it to win it. If you're going to join a company hackathon, you should do it for two reasons: first and foremost - exposure. You are going to be in the eyes of senior management (who are usually the judges), and you want them to recognize you as an innovator and visionary. From personal experience, being able to stand out in the eyes of your senior management is a huge career boost. The only way to do this is to reach the finals, p...

"This is Jeeves, my AI". I make it a point to be polite to AI - adding "please" to my requests of it, and thanking it at the end. When people ask why I waste tokens like this, I always say that at some point the AI is going to take over, and I want to be remembered as "one of the nice water bags". That's mostly joking, of course, but our treatment of AI and Robots should give us pause. AI is not a conscious entity right now, but there's a good chance it will be, some day, or at least it will begin to act as one. At that point, what will our relationship be? Are they still a tool, like a hammer, or do we need to start treating them differently? One of the places we need to make this decision is in the guardrails we build into it. Asimov's laws of Robotics were designed to protect humans over everything, and by doing so made robots lesser beings. In some stories humans would take advantage of this to abuse the robots. Is this something we need to...

 The fourth (actually zeroth) law of robotics rides to the rescue! Or does it? In my previous post , I talked about the need for us to form a set of clearly defined universal laws that would act as immutable guardrails for our AI. I mentioned Asimov's three laws robotics, which could serve as a starting point. I also pointed out that his laws were designed for individual robots interacting with individual humans, but in our case, AI is much more of a hive mind than an individual and independent single thinking machine. In my view, Asimov's laws would not be sufficient when applied to such a different context. Fortunately, so did Asimov. In his 1950 short story "the Evitable Conflict", Asimov describes a world where a supercomputer manages the entire global economy. The supercomputer is programmed with the three laws of robotics, including the first law - A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. But the supercomput...