Conducting Hacking For Defense Presentations
Showcasing Hypothesis and Findings in a Series Sets Up What’s to Come
The following is an excerpt from the NEW textbook for Hacking for Defense, a graduate-level course focused on defense tech entrepreneurship taught at more than 70 colleges and universities across three continents. More than 2,000 students have successfully completed the intensive project-based program.
Presenting Team Insights
Unlike other classes, H4D presentations are premised on sharing the team’s progress, not about demonstrating the students’ expertise on a given topic by reporting facts they learned and opinions they developed. The H4D presentation is less about demonstrating your expertise of the subject matter and more about demonstrating your expertise of applying the H4D process to your problem statement.
In today's era of streaming content where complex plot-heavy series have become the norm, you can’t watch the latest episode without having an understanding of what happened in the previous seasons. Audiences watch shows in order and it is the norm for each episode to start with a “Previously on…” recap that reminds the viewer the important plot threads and end with a “Next time on…” that gives a preview of what’s to come.
That's the format for presenting at Hacking for Defense.
Why Teams Present Weekly?
The presentations are meant to benefit the Hacking for Defense team as much as indicate the team’s progress to instructors. Presentations force teams to synthesize their learning from week to week. The weekly synthesis forces teams to evaluate and track their progress in understanding the problem and the evolution of the team’s solutions. Many students don’t truly understand the value of their work until they spend time synthesizing their Beneficiary Discovery by creating a presentation with their team.
Team presentations focus on how teams are using the H4D process to tackle the challenges the Problem Statement poses by addressing four questions:
What were your hypotheses going into the week?
How did you test those hypotheses (e.g., people interviewed, MVPs that you used)?
What did you learn? Are there valuable quotes, direct data, or other evidence?
What are your next steps and how are you going to proceed over the next week?
The entirety of presentations should be based on digging into each of these core components. Points #2 and #3 make up the bulk of the presentation.
Teams must be upfront about what they don’t know
Learning is accelerated when students identify the unanswered questions they have and then seek to answer them. For this reason, H4D presentations offer students the opportunity to present (and celebrate) gaps in their understanding of their problem. Again, the presentation is about learning. Students capable of acknowledging a blind spot primes them for learning. Students might present these gaps in knowledge as “Next Steps” in the form of indicating to the audience what the students will focus on learning the following week. Stating that, “We learned that we don’t know X,” is excellent learning and demonstrates that students are actually going through the H4D process and solving the problem.
H4D is a team sport. Addressing the four questions in the presentation also provides students a structured way of asking for help. For example, if a team closes their presentation by presenting that the next steps it takes are to test Hypothesis X by interviewing people performing a certain job (e.g., F-35 pilot, Navy SEAL diver), then they are able to ask the audience and instructors for help by asking, “Could anyone introduce us to [specific type of person] so we can test Hypothesis X?” Remember that instructors, mentors and visitors in the classroom will likely have someone in their network they can introduce you to. Other students are also valuable because they, too, are conducting dozens of interviews and likely have contacts to share. Even though each team is working on different problems, the sheer number of interviews that each team conducts means that there is likely to be some overlap somewhere. It never hurts to ask.
The above slide is a strong example from Team Anthill, an H4D team from 2023. The following aspects can be valuable to incorporate in your slides as well:
Hypotheses are distilled down to concise, easy to understand phrases
Takeaways from the week are visually displayed through color coding
It’s easy to see which hypotheses the team came into the week with, how they tackled it, and where they’re going next. Note how the format follows the streaming format discussed earlier.
This slide should typically be second or third in your deck (following a title slide)
Do’s and Don’t’s of H4D Presentations
Do:
Follow a 4-step narrative. Presentation should explicitly answer four questions:
What were the hypotheses going into the week?
How did the students test those hypotheses (e.g., who was interviewed, how many people in a beneficiary group were interviewed, which MVPs were used)?
What was learned from testing the hypotheses?
What is the plan for next week (e.g., Which hypotheses will be tested, with whom, using which MVP)?
Mention the original Problem Statement each week. Students should show the original Problem Statement and the current operating Problem Statement as they understand it. Include a Problem Statement tracker as a supplemental slide which shows the evolution of the Problem Statement.
Relate learning each week to the Problem Statement. If you are validating or invalidating hypotheses core to the problem statement, you should present your altered problem statement at the end of your discussion of “What did you learn” section.
Explain hypothesis testing progress, even though it might be incomplete. Students should talk about what their research and interviews have shown, and the extent to which it has (or hasn’t) confirmed or disconfirmed the working hypotheses.
Present valuable information from both indirect and direct sources, from reading books/doing research, and conducting interviews. Interviews are critical, but students need background knowledge to gain context on the Problem Statement and the person being interviewed to ensure that the interview conducted will be meaningful.
Provide evidence. Students should present images of MVPs used, quotes that they’ve collected, pictures of them onsite, and quotes they’ve gathered as data supporting the conclusions they’ve drawn.
Don’t:
Don’t present the raw interview data. Put the raw data in your blog. Students should focus on only presenting their ah-ha moments and critical insights; that’s all they’ll have time for. Successful students prevent themselves from doing so by narrating a story about their learning. A good story never delves too deeply into inconsequential details. If the instructors want additional information, they’ll stop the presentation and ask for it. The following slide does a great job of distilling an abundance of interview data into main takeaways.
The goal of the presentation is to show how you solved the problem, how it benefits the beneficiaries, and inspires the audience with the solution.
To learn more about the H4D Textbook, visit h4dtextbook.com.