H³ is a safe, repeatable rhythm for turning lived AI experience into adoptions your organization actually uses. Two working days. A 3–6 month gap of real work. Then it repeats. Each cycle compounds the last.
Harvest · Hack · Harness
You probably recognize at least one of these. Most organizations live in all three at once.
Procurement queues, security committees, year-long approvals. By the time AI ships, the experiment has gone cold and the people who cared have moved on.
Everyone uses their own tools, in their own way, with no shared learning loop. A thousand private wins, zero organizational uptake.
Workshops produce decisions. Decisions produce slides. Slides do not produce changed work. The Monday after, nothing visible is different.
McKinsey finds 65% of organizations use generative AI regularly, yet only a small subset can point to enterprise-level EBIT impact. DORA's 2026 ROI report calls AI an amplifier: it magnifies the strengths of well-run teams and exacerbates the dysfunctions of the rest. Localised gains, in DORA's own words, are lost to downstream chaos. METR's 2025 randomized trial found experienced developers using AI tools were 19% slower than without, even though they felt 20% faster. Adoption is not a tooling problem. It is a rhythm problem. H³ is the rhythm.
H³ combines the engagement engine of Open Space Agility with a hackathon at the centre and outcome-driven follow-through. The shape stays the same every cycle.
Surface what people have already lived.
In Open Space format, participants share what they've actually tried with AI: the good, the bad, the ugly. Live demos welcome, no slides. A Facilitator captures themes onto a shared wall in the speakers' own words. The room then self-organizes into deeper conversations.
Output
A Themes Wall: real questions and opportunities pulled from lived experience, ready for Hack day.
Build, prototype, document, decide.
Teams self-organize around Harvest themes and fresh proposals. They build code, draft prompts and configs, tune workflows, run experiments, propose guideline changes. Outputs are deliberately heterogeneous. What matters is that each team can show what they did and propose what should happen with it.
Output
Concrete, demoable outputs ready to be proposed for a real destination.
Turn outputs into commitments, with names attached.
Each team presents and proposes one of three destinations: a guideline update, an adopt-now decision the room agrees on the spot, or a continue-exploring thread. A Promoter steps up to own each adoption beyond the event. The Sponsor is in the room and confirms air cover live, per decision.
Output
Guideline updates, adopt-now decisions with Promoters, and exploration threads that survive the gap.
Across all phases: the Coach circulates with AI expertise on tap. Tips and prompt patterns at Hack day, hands-on support to Promoters across the Gap.
H³ is not a workshop. It is a cycle. Promoters carry adoptions and explorations through the gap. The next Harvest inspects how far each one actually reached.
Harvest
½ day
Hack
full day
Harness
½ day
The Gap
3–6 months in real work, then it repeats
Participants are genuinely invited. "No" carries no consequence. Promoters self-select at Harness, never appointed.
Adopt-now decisions get live confirmation in the room: procurement help, security fast-track, time, budget, whatever the Promoter needs.
Each new Harvest opens with honest status checks on prior adoptions. Not "do we still use it?" but "how far did it actually reach?"
Most "AI transformation" pitches collapse into one of these. H³ takes the opposite position on each.
Not a maturity model.
No stage gates. Bottom-up starts are permitted and often preferable. Work with the willing first; pull authority in as evidence accumulates.
Not a one-off workshop.
A cycle. The event is two days. The work is the months that follow. Then the next cycle inspects what actually changed.
Not consensus theatre.
Real challenge happens at Harness. Rubber-stamping is a named failure mode the Facilitator prevents.
Not expert-imposed.
The Coach brings AI expertise on tap, not on throne. The capability stays in your organisation. Accelerated, not imported.
Not a deployment framework.
H³ is agnostic to which tools or practices you adopt. It is the rhythm for how adoption conversations happen and stick.
Not volunteer-dependent.
Promoters are self-selected, but the Sponsor commits air cover in the room. Owners get unblocked, not abandoned.
Frequently asked
The six that come up most. Each opens with one tap.
Two working days of attendance per Participant, not three. Day 1 is a Harvest half-day, Day 2 a Hack full day, Day 3 a Harness half-day: roughly 16 hours per cycle, twice a year. Less than annual compliance training, less than the fortnightly meeting drag those same people already absorb.
No, and any consultant who guarantees a pre-committed ROI before Cycle 1 starts is overselling. H³ converts that question into a verifiable bet. Cycle 1 is a fixed price. Cycle 2 only happens if Cycle 1 produces evidence in the tracker that beats its own cost. Skin in the game lives on both sides.
Then you don't fund Cycle 2. That isn't a contingency clause, it is the contract. The bet stays structurally small and the cadence stays honest. A Sponsor burned by year-long transformation programmes is buying one cycle at a time, not a multi-year commitment. DORA's 2026 research calls AI an amplifier of organisational design; H³ is the rhythm that determines what gets amplified.
Four things. A refined AI usage guideline document. A set of adopt-now decisions with named Promoters owning the rollout. A set of explorations being kept alive between cycles. And a tracker the Sponsor can watch compound, or stall. At Harvest 2 you look at what stuck, what failed, what evolved. The output is not a deck.
H³ contains both. Harvest is Open Space mechanics applied to AI questions. Hack is a timeboxed prototyping push. The difference is the bridge: Harness, the Promoter, and the tracker make sure the work doesn't die in a drawer after the room clears. Hackathons produce demos. H³ produces adoption.
Two variants. Single-org runs inside one organisation under one Sponsor. Cross-org runs across several organisations sharing a hub, with a host Sponsor and per-organisation Participant agreements. Same cycle shape, different contract. This site covers the single-org variant; cross-org is offered on request.
Start small. Start with the willing. A discovery conversation maps your current state to the three phases, identifies whether you have a Sponsor and a willing team, and leaves you with a concrete next step, even if that step is "not yet."
One cycle, fixed price. If Cycle 1 doesn't produce evidence in the tracker that beats the cycle cost, you don't fund the next one. The bet is small; the cadence is real.
Discovery calls run by
