Fail Fast, Serve Better: Why the Public Sector Needs a Hackathon Mindset

The electricity in the room was palpable. You could feel that surge of anticipation and excitement — the moment when your brain starts racing at 100 miles an hour and the ideas begin to spill out.

We were only ten minutes into our first ever Keystream Hackathon, and already the ideas were coming so fast that I’d leapt to my feet, the energy too strong to stay seated. Instinctively, I grabbed a pen and began writing on the flip chart, hearing the sonorous scrape of the nib as the ideas took shape on the paper.

This moment had been a long time in the making.

My career has been shaped by a desire to deliver public good. A deep Christian upbringing, combined with seeing rough sleeping and stark inequality while at university, set me on a path to find work where I could genuinely make a tangible difference in society and so “love thy neighbour”.

At university, I learned quickly that many of the challenges we see are symptoms of the systems they emerge from. If we don’t change the system, we are just treating the symptoms that play out in individual lives. That insight led me into local government and, more recently, into consultancy at Keystream – supporting the public sector to navigate the complex, fast-moving challenges it now faces.

Those challenges are evolving so rapidly that “best practice” often isn’t good enough anymore. The world of five years ago is not the world of today. We need new thinking, new tools, and new ways of working. That is what consultants are supposed to bring to the table – and I’m determined that we actually do.

When I joined Keystream a few months ago, one of my first tasks was simple and daunting:

“How could we do something genuinely innovative as a Keystream community that makes a real difference for our clients?”

That’s where the idea of our inaugural Keystream Hackathon was born.

Honestly, part of me didn’t want to do it. My plate was by now already full, like everyone else’s. An internal initiative like this can feel like a “nice to have” that’s easily pushed aside by urgent deadlines. That pressure is familiar to all of us, especially in these darker winter days.

But when I came back to my core motivation for being here – to think differently so we can help the public sector better – it became obvious. If I wasn’t willing to take a risk on a new way of working, then what was the point?

So we committed. And a few weeks later, I found myself in that room with my colleagues Rayna and Benson, feeling that crackle of energy as ideas began to bounce around.

We took one very specific public sector challenge and asked:
What if we approached this completely differently?
From there, we started sketching digital proofs of concept that could support a more human, more effective way of tackling it.

I’d proposed the hackathon, yet even I was surprised by the quality of thinking, the creativity and the excitement that emerged. An idea was born, and the next few hours disappeared as we built out the bones of something we genuinely believe could change how that problem is tackled.

Now, I know we all love a good cliff-hanger, and I’m not going to share the details of the solution just yet. We’re still developing and testing it.

What I do want to share is this: hackathons aren’t just for big tech firms or multi-million-pound transformation programmes.

They can belong to your team.
Your service.
Your directorate.

We all feel the grind of daily work. We are all busy. Blocking out hours to step away from the day job and “just think” can feel like a luxury at best and a waste of time at worst.

We all know that internal voice that says:

“That’s a good idea – but I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“I’ll step back and think differently… tomorrow.”

My challenge to you is simple: why not today?
You might be surprised by what your team can create when you give yourselves permission to experiment.

If we in the public sector – and those of us who work alongside it – don’t change how we think and work, we will continue to see the slow deterioration of services and worsening outcomes across society.

The same old solutions are not enough. “Best practice” is often just yesterday’s answers to today’s very different questions.

Our world is changing too quickly. We need innovation and new thinking at every level of our services.

What if you deliberately created space for that? What if you treated your time and ideas the way a venture capitalist treats capital – placing small, smart bets, learning quickly, and being willing to fail fast on the way to something better?

A hackathon is one way to do this. It’s a structured moment where you:

• Pick a real, painful problem.
• Bring together the people closest to it.
• Give them time, tools and permission to test ideas.
• Accept that some ideas will fail – and that’s the point.

The outcome isn’t just a prototype or concept. It’s a more hopeful, energised workforce – people who feel excited to come to work because they can see how their creativity might change things.

So my challenge to you – whether you are fire-fighting on the frontline of a service, or, like me, working as a consultant trying to support the sector – is this:

Don’t wait for tomorrow to think innovatively.
Step off the treadmill, even briefly.
Run your own hackathon.

Take a venture capital mindset: learn quickly, fail fast, improve relentlessly. You might be amazed at the solutions you create – and at the difference it makes to the people you serve.