Surface your real AI use cases — from the people already using AI in your business. One half-day. No consultants required.
Your email gets the playbook. That's it.
Check your inbox. Your Staff Hackathon Playbook is on the way.
Start with Part 1 — the five pre-conditions. If you can't pass the gut-check, the playbook tells you what to fix first. That honesty is the design.
Everyone on your team has been quietly experimenting with ChatGPT, Copilot, or Claude. Some have found real shortcuts. Most have no idea what their colleagues are doing. The knowledge is siloed, the experiments are scattered, and nobody has a framework to turn scattered experiments into prioritized, actionable projects.
In Not Murphy's Law, Chapter 6 calls this Shadow AI — the tools your staff are already using that you don't know about. Chapter 7 maps the Hate Drains — where your company bleeds time on repetitive, manual work nobody wants to own. This hackathon surfaces both in a single half-day session.
Shadow AI everywhere — your staff is already using AI tools you don't know about, with no shared standards or visibility
Leadership wants an "AI strategy" but nobody has surfaced what's actually possible from the people doing the work
Too many AI ideas, no framework to force-rank which ones to pilot first — sticky notes don't count
No safe space for staff to admit fears about AI — so the fears show up as quiet resistance instead
This is the first sentence in the playbook. If you can't say it honestly, don't run the hackathon. Run a different process to align leadership first. The playbook tells you how.
Five pre-conditions that must be true before you schedule anything. Executive air cover, the no-fire line, participant selection (8-12 cross-functional truth-tellers), workspace, and the 5-day synthesis commitment.
What you need: a conference room, sticky notes in four colors, Sharpies, and coffee. What you don't need: software licenses, IT approval, consultants, or pre-reading materials.
Four labeled whiteboard zones set up before participants arrive. Each captures a different category of signal — what's already happening, what's wished for, where time is lost, and what could go wrong.
Four hours, eight blocks. Frame & Inventory, Wishes & Frictions, Risks & Pattern Recognition, Champions & Commitments. Tight on purpose — momentum matters.
Six repeatable plays: The Opening Reframe, The Honest-Use Permission, The Wish-List Unlock, The Friction Elevation, The Fear Naming, and The Champion Conscription. Practice out loud before the event.
Days 1-5: synthesis report. Days 6-14: executive review and pilot selection. Days 15-45: 30-day pilots. Days 46-60: wrap and rollout decisions. Days 61-90: second wave and follow-up hackathon.
Honest guidance on when to push through internally (most of the time) versus when outside help is genuinely useful. Includes direct contact for Faction if the patterns point to a larger build.
Use Case Capture Card (print one per use case), Participant Invitation Template (send 7-10 days before), and the Synthesis Report Template (5 pages max — resist the urge to make slides).
Each whiteboard uses a different color sticky note. Participants write one idea per note. The visual residue is the artifact you photograph at the end.
Yellow sticky notes. One per use case. What AI tool? What task? How often? This is the shadow AI inventory — surfacing what's already happening that nobody talks about.
Green sticky notes. No constraints — encourage absurdity. The constraint-free framing is the point. You're not asking what to build, you're asking what to want.
Blue sticky notes. Company frictions, not personal ones. Where does work pile up? Where do handoffs break? This is the most valuable whiteboard for executives.
Pink sticky notes. The pressure-release valve. If fears have nowhere to go — job security, customer trust, regulatory — they manifest as quiet sabotage. Give them a wall.
Whiteboard 1 is the Shadow AI audit from Chapter 6 — surfacing what your staff is already doing that you don't know about. Whiteboard 3 is the Hate Drain inventory from Chapter 7 — mapping where your company bleeds time. The prioritization framework in Hour 4 borrows the read-the-financials discipline from Chapter 9. The hackathon is where the book's frameworks hit your actual org chart.
Read more about the book →The Hackathon Kit is Tier 2 of The Faction certification path. You've surfaced and prioritized — now decide: land the pilots or expand into builds.
Tier 3: Builder track. Take the use cases your champions surfaced and build them. Pre-Work through production readiness — the full deployment system.
Get the Vibecoding Kit →Office hours, deep dives, deployment support, and the certification path from Associate to MADE. $77/mo for the first 90 days.
Explore The Faction →Need an outside voice? Faction runs facilitated hackathons ($5K), Vibe Code Finisher builds ($8K), and executive briefings. Project-bounded, fixed-scope.
Visit Faction Group →Download the playbook, pass the five pre-conditions, pick a date, invite 8-12 truth-tellers. In four hours you'll walk out with a prioritized list of AI use cases, named champions, and 30-day pilot plans.
Your email gets the playbook. That's it.
Prerequisite kits: 30-Day AI Prescription → Bertha DIY Kit → Hackathon (you are here)
Check your inbox. Your Staff Hackathon Playbook is on the way.
Start with Part 1 — the five pre-conditions. The hackathon will fail in predictable ways if any of them aren't true. The playbook tells you exactly what to check.
Common questions
A facilitated half-day to full-day format that surfaces what your floor already knows about AI leverage. The Hackathon DIY Kit includes hour-by-hour methodology, gamification, the Love/Hate Map, and the Three-Bucket Sort—so leadership sees real opportunities, not slide-deck guesses.
Yes. Shadow AI—employees using unapproved AI tools—is addressed in the Hackathon DIY Kit and throughout Not Murphy's Law. For enterprise governance and detection in regulated contexts, Faction Group partners on Olakai deployments at gofactiongroup.com.
Use the kits when you or your team can execute with guidance. Hire Faction when you need production software shipped in modular slices—rapid MVP, R.A.P. automations, vibe-code finishing, or full-stack platforms—with demo cadence and fixed modules instead of open-ended backlogs.