It sounds like an especially tasteless joke, but it happened. I was invited to lead a hackathon at Auschwitz, which then led to another innovation sprint at Villa Wannsee, where the Nazi leadership set out the Final Solution in 1942.
A hackathon is a short, energetic, and time-framed attempt to break through a persistent problem. It was born in the hi-tech industries in the late 1990s, when engineers gathered and brainstormed to crack technical challenges.
It was then adapted to a more general use, and now, when people try to find new solutions to problems – the essence of entrepreneurship – they assemble the right people, define challenges, set the ideal structure, and roll out a hackathon.
The hackathons in Auschwitz and Wannsee confronted an appropriate and massive challenge: to rethink Holocaust education, remembrance, and lessons in a time of radical changes.
Which changes? Social media, new forms of antisemitism and hatred, the situation in the Middle East, and leadership crises in Europe and the US, to name just a few.
Why a hackathon? There is a growing understanding that the old answers no longer work, if they ever did, and new remedies, techniques, methodologies, and tools are needed.
The initial results were intriguing: from using Google Maps and digital tools to preserve memory and track historical paths, to pandemic-tested viral methodologies to combat hatred, to running similar hackathons with defined challenges for policy and decision-makers.
Often, hope lies in taking answers from one field and applying them to the allegedly unfixable problems and to do what innovation does best: look at the same reality we all see, yet identify different patterns and combinations, causes and possibilities.
More such radical solutions are still in the making, and we hope for such funky impossible connections like the following: Formula One pit-crew engineers who now help surgeons work better (in a harmonious and orchestrated way), or the scientists who discovered that mixing coffee waste in the cement could make the concrete 30% stronger.
Why do this at locations synonymous with human evil and destruction? At first thought, it sounds a bit crazy: Auschwitz as a source of innovation; Villa Wannsee as a locus for growth and renewal.
But then, on reflection, isn’t that the way change often happens? Isn’t disaster the best impetus to create a sense of urgency and willingness to look beyond how we have operated to date?
Innovating against racism a few meters away from the crematorium at the Nazi death factory adds a new sense of urgency and importance. Fighting hatred at a pastoral villa outside Berlin doesn’t let you ignore the banality of evil – as well as its everyday impact– and the urgent need to use past tragic events to prevent new ones.
Could reimagining human rights at South Africa’s Robben Island or hackathon-ing ecological balance close to Ukraine’s Chernobyl yield similar breakthroughs?
Isn’t calamity usually followed by an almost instinctive effort to rebuild, reform, rethink, and recreate?
In Jewish history, this is definitely the case. After every big disaster – and there have been many through thousands of years – comes a wave of innovation and correction, aimed at keeping the collective and its individuals alive and at returning them to security and well-being.
The destruction of the Temple led to the creation of the first synagogues. The harsh economic limitations of the Middle Ages pushed Jews toward new professions and frontiers – in financial services and medicine. Scarcity of resources, traumatic histories, and differences in experience led to agreed new forms of communal living like the kibbutz.
The causes of invention
No fixes are needed when things are not broken; necessity is the mother of invention – and trauma births many a new and practical hope. So when life gives you a load of lemons, you ought to become the world expert in producing (kosher) lemonade, whether in Europe of the 15th century, North America of the 19th, or the Middle East, then and now.
History might be winking at us again. With so many disruptions around us – and we haven’t even mentioned the climate, the economy, and AI yet – fresh thinking is needed. Not only new solutions but also new ways of producing them.
Some “back to the future” moves might help: ways of understanding the mechanisms and rules which allowed for successful transformations and renaissances in the past to adapt them to the current malaise while also recognizing that not all change and solutions are good.
We need adaptive innovation that draws from a rich tradition of creativity and pivoting in order to arrive at very untraditional conclusions that drive positive and united actions.
Confronting catastrophes to drive drastic shifts, learning from colossal failures how to do things dramatically differently, are encoded in our DNA – whether we are talking about biology or society. Now we only have to draw on these genes to birth new positive mutations that will make life, organizations, and communities better.
It is easier than we think. There are tried-and-true ways to do so.
The history of civilization and progress is paved with such precedents and turning points. It is definitely more constructive and optimistic than watching the news and lamenting. Rescuing hope from despair with urgent, shared, and focused practical action. Right now.