Creating a Hacking for Defense Deployment Model

How to create a model for leveraging Advocates and Supporters to help lock down end-users, decision-makers and buyers

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.

Creating a Deployment Model is a crucial step in the Hacking for Defense process. For this task, a model will be created for leveraging Advocates and Supporters to help lock down end-users, decision-makers and buyers. 

In a previous blog post about Buy-In & Support, we discussed the importance of mapping buyers, champions and saboteurs, and determined how they can serve a team. Now it is time to understand how to deploy a solution to end-users.

Step 1: As an individual, create a sticky note diagram of organizations and connections to other organizations. Think about which individuals and organizations are the critical nodes. How do they relate to one another (e.g., does the support one offers tie to the support another can offer?)? Once you feel happy with it, share your diagram with your teammates. You will notice that even though you are all using your team’s interview notes and understanding of the problem to determine the most relevant individuals and organizations that can assist you in delivering your solution to end-users, each of you may have a different perspective. Some of you will focus on your solution, others will focus on leveraging a person or organization you know to be particularly helpful (or avoid saboteurs), others will take a more historical approach to depicting how previous solutions were delivered. Difference is good. 

Step 2: As a group, take turns explaining your diagram. Once an understanding of all the diagrams is made, begin integrating your diagrams. 

Step 3: Integrate your diagrams in silence. Practice has shown that talking slows things down. Do this for 10 mins. Expect it to be very messy at first. However, with each iteration, you will notice your model becoming clearer as your teammates build on each other’s ideas and disregard those ideas that no longer fit. What emerges is a unified delivery pathway that integrates everyone’s individual points of view. 

Step 4: Open up a discussion about any disagreements amongst the team. The point of these discussions is not to be right, but to figure out which individuals and organizations matter most to the delivery of your solution. Keep the good. Discard the bad. Synthesize your individual models to create a comprehensive delivery model for leveraging these groups to help you locking down end-users, decision-makers and buyers

These tasks require iteration. Learn more about your advocates and supporters’ perspective on the problem, what they need, and how they can assist you, and then amend your delivery plan. In the beginning, learning about these groups will inform which value propositions you deliver to which beneficiaries, and which advocates and supporters are needed to deliver your solution. Thus, it is critical to incorporate needs into your solution. After you determine which advocates and supporters you are leveraging, you’ll then develop an actionable plan for delivering your solution. This part hinges on the connections between advocates and supporters and your beneficiaries and leaders. 

In summary, use org charts and workflow diagrams to determine your support network. Once validated, begin drawing the organizations/individuals you can leverage to deliver your solution. Connect them by pairing the opportunities each offers and transitions. Drawing this out individually will help you understand the relationships between each organization with respect to deployment. Using post-its to represent the organizations and individuals in your network and explain your understanding of your team’s support network, and then integrating those networks as a team, will produce a comprehensive model. 

The subsequent conversations your team will have about your support network are actually more important than the model itself. It will create alignment between your team on what you need to do to move forward with defining what you deliver to whom and how to deliver that solution to them. Teams that do these steps create a more comprehensive model that synthesizes the best of each individual model.  

Now that you’ve defined your deployment goals, you can now begin determining which indivuals and processes are helpful to you. As you will soon learn, this is a HUGE step. You just took the first step to reducing the deployment ecosystem down to only those connections relevant to your deployment. 

To learn more about the H4D Textbook, visit h4dtextbook.com.