Trying out a different approach
The Occasion
About a month ago, I stumbled across an ad about an event that would take place in Hamburg at the end of January. What kind of event? Its name was “Business Hack Weekend”. I visited the event’s website and the whole concept seemed intriguing. To be honest, the name “hack” itself was compelling enough since I had never been to a hackathon or anything of that sort before. Long story short, I decided to go!
The main idea was that there were a few companies participating which would present one of their business problems. All these problems had to be solved in 54 hours by a team having two to three representatives from the company plus some other participants from various backgrounds, like me. At the end of the two days, each team had to pitch the idea with the best solution winning a prize.
I arrived at the event’s venue on a Friday afternoon. The atmosphere of the really nice, industrial style place had a strong sense of the startup culture. These last two words bring me to the most important observation of this weekend which was that…
Every Startuper that has a minimum self-esteem owns a MacBook. The place was full of them! Everyone was sitting in front of a Mac and I am pretty sure that there was an unofficial ongoing competition regarding the number of stickers that could possibly fit on a Mac. I really felt guilty when I had to get my humble Lenovo out of my bag! :)
The Initial Disappointment
The team I was in had to “help” Stage Entertainment, a global leader in live entertainment producing award-winning musicals attract more viewers to their shows.
I will start by telling you that the weekend did not include any programming at all, not even a single line of code. Boring you may say… That’s what I thought as well! What was I doing there with all these non-coders? I was ready to get down to code for two days straight drinking Red Bull like in the movies. You can perhaps imagine my disappointment.
The Surprise
But, to my surprise, it turned out to be actually refreshing. I had the opportunity to meet some really cool people from various backgrounds and see various approaches to the same problem, see things from a different perspective.
As I wrote earlier, the goal was to attract more people to their shows every year. Can you possibly guess what was the first idea of a software developer like me? I started asking about the online ticketing system, how intuitive it was and how much time was needed in order to purchase a ticket. There were two guys in the team working in the advertising industry. They immediately proposed a new advertising campaign.
The Conclusion
Everyone focuses on his area of expertise and tries to find a solution in this particular area. And this is perfectly normal. Nevertheless, I believe that it is worth trying to see things from a different point of view by meeting people who tackle the same problem in a completely different way. And I am certain that you will be surprised by the ideas that never crossed your mind.
Nowadays, we get often trapped in our area of expertise since this area itself is very dynamic and already hard to keep up with so there is no time or opportunity to try solve problems differently.
In programming for example, you might realize that you mostly code or solve problems the way you have learned or are used to using a standard technology. Why? Because you have invested time in learning it, you maybe think it is the best approach or because it is simply faster and, as we all know, time is money.
If you can’t try out a new approach on a professional level, you might just try it in your spare time by meeting people that already do it. And you can attempt all that without leaving your professional comfort zone. As mentioned earlier, you might be really surprised…