and Tempo was 26-year-old Aleksandr Kalinin of St. Petersberg. Another, 29-year-old Dimitriy Smilianets of Moscow, is now in U. S. custody. Each of the six worked both independently and collaboratively. Sharing ideas and teaming up, the group bore no formal allegiance to one another. The baton of leadership was passed freely among the men as they realized that the best ideas, always shifting, should establish the only form of organizational hierarchy. The gang came from diverse backgrounds, ideologies, and training, yet collaborated to perpetrate the largest hacking scheme ever prosecuted in the United States.
In this case, hacker mindset #4 was the weapon of choice: Quantity Is a Force Multiplier.
Ones and zeroes aren’t the only numbers adored by hackers. In fact, there’s a core belief that bigger is better in nearly every aspect of the hacking process. A bigger target means not only more loot, but also a lower probability of being detected. A large quantity of small attacks (or ideas) generally beats a single attack (or idea), even if the latter is significantly better – more input from more people with more diversity of thought.
Let’s say you set out to open a new Italian restaurant. The traditional approach would involve carefully studying the market to select an ideal location. Next, you’d invest in kitchen equipment, décor, and permanent signage. A single chef would craft the menu of his or her choice, which would then be printed en masse and released with a sense of permanence. Marketing message crafted by you or your agency get printed in ads that will run for months. Big bets, decided upon in advance, with limited post-launch variation. If the veal parmesan isn’t selling, you may switch to chicken but your concept is mostly locked and loaded.
The hacker, on the other hand, would approach the problem in a very different way.
First, she’d embrace mindset #1 – Every Barrier Can Be Penetrated – and set out to not only open a moderately successful restaurant, but to crack the code and do something unique. Next, through mindset #2 – Compasses Over Maps – she would likely take a step back to consider if Italian was even the right cuisine to serve. She’d connect with her broader target, which may be to open a successful food company, and not assume that Italian is the right choice even if it was her first instinct. Knowing Nothing Is Static (mindset #3), she would learn as much as she could to enhance her knowledge and shun conventional approaches.
With the first three mindsets in play, Quantity Is a Force Multiplier can also contribute. “How can I quickly test dozens of variables before locking down a solution?” she might ask. Perhaps she negotiates with other restaurants to add one special dish – that she would prepare and deliver for free – to their menu for 30 days. In this way, she could test dozens of recipes, price points, and ingredient combinations against different times of day, locations, and clientele. Or she may strike a deal with a local food truck where she takes over for a couple weeks, providing the owner a vacation along with all the near-term profits, so she can use the truck as a real-world test kitchen. The hacker would want to leverage rapid experimentation to the extreme, so she may offer an online delivery service, a mobile app, a recipe blog, a make-your-own-food kit, or a subscription service instead of the obvious solution of a single physical restaurant. She would deconstruct every aspect and even question the geography by running simultaneous experiments in other markets. Rather than just her own recipes, she’d establish a loose coalition to offer diverse ideas. Instead of traditional business partners, she may seek advice from dozens or hundreds of people far outside the food industry. She’d want the marketing perspective not only from a creative agency, she might seek ideas from professionals in the musical arts, software, or accounting industries.
Multiple tests, multiple ideas, from multiple sources. Unlike typical R&D, market research, and B-school planning sessions, her hacker approach would be comparatively fast, low-cost, and fluid. The goal of her hacker mindset is not to produce a 70-page business plan, but to uncover an untapped opportunity. Once that crack in the wall is identified, she’d follow with a similar barrage of “attacks” to fully exploit the opening. The hacker would rather use a changeable chalkboard than a printed menu, a pop-up restaurant over a permanent structure. Anything to support the mindset of large quantities of little experiments.
The end result may not even be an end result. Instead, think of a series of interconnected hacks that follow this structure:
1 Test many variables, identify a solution that shows potential
2 Further test the promising ideas, quickly discard the others, and move on to new ones
3 Once an idea shows merit, isolate and exploit it
4 Test, measure
5 Re-hack (refine, adapt)
6 Evaluate results and look for next hack
Our enterprising restaurateur is far more likely to win big while mitigating risk through the hacker approach. Quantity, in all its forms, drive quality – because she has conducted so many experiments, she can be confident that she is offering the best food, from the best ingredients, in the best location, at the best prices.
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
Back at Not Impossible Labs, a new “impossible” challenge is being attacked. A jazz vocalist named Mandy Harvey was dealt an unimaginable setback at age 18. A rare disease attacked one of her primary tools – her ability to hear – putting her career and future in grave jeopardy. Within nine months, the disease took its toll; Mandy was completely deaf.
We can only imagine how Mandy must have felt. Hopeless, depressed, defeated. But somehow, she summoned the inner strength to continue her musical journey. Still possessing perfect pitch and timing, she decided to continue singing despite the fact she couldn’t hear a single note. “Hope must never be lost,” said Mandy. “In it we find strength. And it is our duty to show and give it to others. Hope keeps life moving because it pulls us out of any dark situation.” With this powerful sense of purpose and determination, Mandy has been performing professionally for the last seven years as the only completely deaf jazz singer in the world.
Mandy gave her message of hope to all of us, but who is proving hope to her? The hackers at Not Impossible Labs set out to develop a way for Mandy to “hear” her music once again. To discover the hack, Not Impossible Labs went wide. Instead of working insulated within their organization, they put the challenge to the entire hacker community. They enlisted the ideas of scientists, research geeks, artists, and of course...software hackers.
Since a core hacking tenet is that many minds are better than singular genius, they wanted to cast a wide net for ideas from a diverse set of thinkers. The answer emerged not as a single lightning bolt of inspiration, but as a small concept that was built upon by many minds over time. As they explored the concept of hearing altogether, these creative hackers wondered if they could help Mandy “hear” in a completely different way. Since her auditory capacity could not be restored, what if they tapped into one of her other senses to allow her to embrace the music?
Their ingenious solution was put to the test in November 2015. Mandy was outfitted with a series of small motors, attached to various parts of her body (wrists, ankles, waist). The motors created small vibrations, triggered by computer sensors that did the hearing for Mandy. They vibrated in different ways for different periods of time depending on a number of factors in the music, including tempo, pitch, and volume. For the first time in seven years, Mandy played with her band and “heard” the music in a rich, multi-sensory experience. Tears ran down her face, along with the cheeks of the camera crew and the Not Impossible team, as she connected with her music at a level she’d
