Is there anything as exciting as a live drum roll? The music of Pat Powell and his band accompanied the party to celebrate the end of our company-wide competitive hackathon, Lightup, last week. But it wasn't just the drummer - ratta-tatta-tat - who was building the tension. The energy - at our first celebration as a whole team in a long time - was truly electric because of the innovative ideas we were exploring.
It was the environment my parents created for us as kids, and the way they taught us to think, that resulted in the contraption you see Shane driving in this photo - a rickety old wheelchair hooked up to our clunky lawn mower my family dubbed 'the Cherry Picker'. My siblings and I were raised in an environment where physical and attitudinal barriers were just challenges to be overcome with creativity and imagination. And it led us to some pretty wacky yet wonderful ideas!
I always show this photo to our new employees at induction as a way of explaining the sort of creative environment I was lucky enough to grow up in. However, as I mentioned to our team at last week’s event, I fear that sometimes its important meaning gets lost.
This photograph shows the glorious end-product - or output - of innovation, which in this instance was the contraption helping Shane to mow the lawn. But what I think is most essential to innovation is the inputs - the intangible, slow-building elements of an environment where someone has the permission to be imaginative and is supported to see out their ideas, no matter how far fetched they may seem.
Over the past few weeks of Lightup at Hireup, we’ve created a space where we encourage one another to be innovative. During our hackathon, our HQ cohort broke off into teams and came up with solutions to problems facing our community and the disability sector at large, some of which we've chosen to take forward in the business.
As a company, we learned a lot of lessons from this process - how to build out an idea at speed, not getting bogged down in practicalities early on and, perhaps most importantly, the importance of consultation with our community from word go.
One of our teams uncovered an urgent need to improve the way we communicate with all of our service users. While quizzing a group of our clients about an idea for a digital chat function, a woman who uses a communication device revealed that when she emails us, we sometimes respond by giving her father a phone call. We know we can do better than that!
I’m thrilled that we’ve gathered insights like these in a very short space of time and that we'll use them to innovate and improve. But while the output of our efforts has been impressive, what really excites me is the outpouring of energy, curiosity, creativity, enthusiasm and connection to our community that I've seen over recent weeks - the environment of innovation that buzzed, in a big way, during our celebrations last Friday.
If each and every one of our employees plays an active role in this culture - helping to build an environment of curiosity and creativity and permission to explore, there’ll be no limit to the challenges we can solve as our organisation grows. And, I hope, many more drum rolls to follow.
Jordan O'Reilly
Hireup co-founder and co-CEO.