Popping our Berry! Reflections on our experience as first-time Global Service Jam hosts.
Are you thinking about hosting a global service jam for the first time, but aren’t sure what’s involved or where to start? Don’t worry- we’re here to help! We’ve just completed our first Global Service Jam, and we have some thoughts to share.
First thing first, what is the Global Service Jam?
The Global Service Jam is an international event hosted annually by a network of volunteer jammers since 2011. A mystery theme is revealed on the first day of the jam, and jammers work together through the design process from problem discovery to prototype testing and business model development.
Jams are an opportunity for folks to flex their creative muscles using a design-based approach to problem solving.
What is the goal?
To provide a fun and safe environment for people to experiment with design methods and mindsets.
Why host?
There are so many reasons to host! For us, we wanted to start building a community of practice here in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It’s also a great opportunity to experiment with facilitation formats and design exercises.
What does a host have to do?
Jam hosts are responsible for creating the safe space for their jammers to connect, learn, and experiment with design methods. They have to design and facilitate activities to take teams from the mystery theme, through the design process from problem discovery to prototype testing and business model development.
Jam hosts decide the format, content, location, and duration of their jam (as long as it is within the jam dates and doesn’t exceed 48 hours).
How we did it
We’ve been fans of jams for a few years now, and this year we decided to take the leap and host a Fredericton (New Brunswick) edition of the Global Service Jam during the BIG JAM WEEK June 16–21. Because of fluctuating local COVID restrictions, we decided to host an online event rather than risk trying to hold something in person.
Since this jam was slated for June, we decided not to take up the weekend while the weather is finally enjoyable in New Brunswick (we have a loooooooong, cold winter). In our quest to protect people’s weekends, this meant we would have to work around a normal work week schedule that most people would have. We opted for the first three evenings of the Big Jam Week, and split our jam into 9 hours: 3-hour sessions running 6pm — 9pm, Wednesday — Friday. We had nine hours to pull this off (plus an hour each day for homework) — could we really do it?!
While each jam will be totally unique, here are some things to consider for what you’ll need to host your own jam.
Before the jam started
We used Miro (an online infinite whiteboard) to host our remote jam. Since we weren’t sure if everyone had a chance to work with Miro before the event, we included an orientation exercise with instructions two weeks before the jam, and offered a beginner walk-through so participants could get a feel for using the platform, we modified the excellent Welcome to Miro by Kim Howe too. We also offered the opportunity for coaching before the jam started so that we could troubleshoot any tech issues before we started the jam.
Using Miro to facilitate online teamwork
For most of our participants, this was their first opportunity or exposure to using this type of approach to explore the problem and solution spaces. Making sure the instructions were clear was vital. If people were unsure of what we were doing, they couldn’t fully participate. We set up an example of each activity, as well as a space for each team to complete the task. It is a lot of prep work to make sure activities run smoothly, but it is worth the effort. In addition to providing verbal introductions and examples for each activity, putting instructions on the Miro board beside each activity space provides participants with a reminder of what to do once the activity is under way (we forgot to do this, oops).
Designing the jam
Our first design task as a facilitation team was to determine how to take jammers from mystery theme reveal to business model development in 9 hours… eeek. After agreeing on the essential components of the jam, we distributed them across each session. The following sections walk through each session in detail.
Day 1: how might we move from an abstract, mystery theme to a challenge we want to explore?
- Welcome, Framing, and Flow: we welcomed everyone and started the event with a land acknowledgement, explained the purpose of the jam (framing) and provided a high level overview of what to expect during our time together (flow). We then did a check in where everybody introduced themselves, where they are from, what made them participate, and share a song that makes them feel good..
- Theme Reveal: We watched the mystery theme reveal video by Global Service Jam together through screen sharing. The mystery theme for this year was: <ex-tensions>.
- Warm Up: The goal of the warm up was twofold — (i) warm up together as a group, and (ii) get those creative juices flowing! We used a game of word association to expand on the idea of extensions. First person said ‘war’, the next ‘peace’, the following ‘bird’… , exes, tinder, apps, smartphone…you get the idea. We did two rounds, but if you have more than 9 hours for the whole jam, you might want to do more or supplement with an additional activity.
- Challenge Ideation: Now that we had warmed up, we created 3 prompts to ideate what challenges relating to <ex-tensions> could exist for:
- People: Indigenous, settler, individual, family, community;
- Animals: Big, small, domestic, wild, imaginary, and
- the Planet: Earth, wind, fire, water, space.
- Brainwriting: To encourage individual ideation, we asked participants to brainwrite (each person writes/draws their ideas in silence before sharing back with the team). During shareback, similar challenges were clustered into overarching challenge areas..
- Challenge Selection: Participants were given three votes (using the nifty voting feature in Miro, explained here) to identify which challenges they were most interested in exploring.
- Team Formation: Based on the number of participants and number of challenges we created three team boards and placed the most popular challenges on the team board. We then encouraged participants to “move” to the team challenge board that they were most interested in working on. Thankfully, we ended up with three relatively evenly spread teams. They were then given time to re-introduce themselves to their new team mates, share what motivated them to pick that challenge, and then carry out the very important task of picking a team name and mascot.
- Research Planning: Each team was asked to carry out an:
- Assumption dump of what they know (or think they know, or know they don’t know) about the who, what, where, and why of the challenge. They used their assumptions to create a
- Research protocol: assisted by a guerilla research cheat sheet that we created for them (come on… we’re not that cruel to ask them to start from scratch). For homework, each person was asked to interview at least one person on what the challenge means or carry out desktop research on the topic to fill in the blanks.
Day 2: How might we reflect on research findings to better define the problem?
With the exception of group check in and check out, most of day 2 was spent working within teams.
- Research Synthesis: Each team member shared their key learnings and insights from their research homework.
- Problem Identification: After sharing, the teams prioritised which pain point to focus on.
- Problem Statement: They then worked together to create a problem statement that defined the problem they would tackle from the perspective of the individual impacted..
- Solution Ideation: Following a similar format as the previous evening, starting with individual ideation before shareback and discussion, the teams were prompted with inspiring examples of solution “types” such as services, toolkits, policies, experiences, connections, campaigns, platforms, and asked to ideate potential solutions
- Solution Selection: Each team member was asked to indicate which solution they were most interested in developing. For this voting session, we shifted from the nifty voting feature in miro to the good old dotmocracy to facilitate concurrent voting sessions across three teams.
- Prototype Ideation: Prompted with inspiring examples of prototypes such as pamphlets, plays, storyboards, sketches, wireframes, (the possibilities are endless!), the teams began ideating potential prototypes.
- Prototype Selection: Teams were then encouraged to vote (using dotmocracy) on their prototypes to select the idea (or ideas) to move forward with.
- Prototype Development: Finally, the moment they had all been waiting for… the teams were then free to start building their prototypes! It was exciting to see each team’s ideas take shape: Team Climate Crusaders sketched a storyboard, Team Magical Realizers created a brochure in Canva, and Team Metamorphosis created a promotional video.!
- Test Planning: Assisted by a guerilla testing cheat sheet, the teams developed a plan to test their prototype.
- For homework: each team member agreed to test the prototype with at least one person.
Day 3: How might we incorporate feedback to adapt prototypes and build a business model to share this solution with the world?
- Test Result Analysis: Team members started their final session together by sharing key findings from the prototype tests they had carried out that day. We prompted them to share what test participants liked and disliked about the prototype, what surprised them, and what questions it raised.
- Prototype Refinement: They then refined their prototype to integrate some of the key learnings. Some made incremental changes to simplify their concept, or address concerns raised by test participants, others took their prototype in a completely new direction!
- Business Model Development: The final stage of the design process for our jammers was to create a business model for their innovative service offering. As a facilitation team we were a little concerned about ending on a dry note (no offense business folks)… so we converted the traditional business model canvas into a newspaper award announcement template.
- Showcase: To end, teams were asked to showcase their work to each other by reading the announcement of their award and demonstrating their refined prototypes.
- Celebration: Virtual high fives, hugs, and Most Valuable Berry Awards were presented to wrap up our inaugural Freddy Berry Jam.
Then… we slept!
Lessons Learned
To complete a jam in such a compressed timeline, we needed to be organized. This meant down to the minute planning of how long each activity could take. Check out our internal facilitation schedule on Google Drive… and feel free to use it for your jam!
This facilitation schedule was something the host team used to make sure we were using our time wisely and get to everything we needed to do each day. We utilized the timer feature in Miro to ensure everyone knew how much time we had for an activity regardless of which team they were on. This helped keep teams on track to be able to see the timer as they worked.
The downside to our compressed timeline was that the opportunity to have share backs between the teams were mostly cut out and left until the last day, so the teams were unable to get peer feedback while they ideated or worked on their prototypes. Having more time for the entire event would have allowed for more peer-to-peer review and feedback.
On the other hand, the benefit of a constrained timeline was talking through things and making decisions quickly. Once we agreed on something as a team, we didn’t have a lot of time to ponder other possibilities. The point of the jam is DOING so we had to keep it moving. It was fast-paced, so nobody had time to get bored! Every minute had something going on so it was important to stay on task and work though what was happening in the moment.
Despite the crazy timeline (or because of it?), participants threw themselves into every activity! In just 9 hours they took an abstract theme, formed teams around three distinct challenges, researched, built, tested and developed fabulous prototypes and business models.
Our inaugural Freddy Berry jammers were a joy to learn and play with, and we hope we see some seasoned berries at our next jam in November.
“Please keep hosting more jams -and even just coffee hours to catch up with this amazing bunch of people.”
“This was just the best experience- thank you!”
I had a blast. Thank you!
What will we do differently next time?
From our perspective as hosts, one thing that we realised we should have done quickly would be to clear our schedules so that we could focus fully on the jam… and get some rest between events rather than shifting gears back to the day jobs. Next time we host, we will declare the week jam week.
As we mentioned before, the biggest limitation of our time constraint was the limited time for sharebacks and feedback between teams. As much as we loved the challenge of hosting a 9 hour jam, we might add a few hours next time.
While it was originally intended to be a local event, having our Jam online meant that people from outside our region were able to join in as well. This added more voices at the table and gave us a much broader perspective than if we’d kept it local. While we’re definitely looking forward to hosting a jam in person, we’re currently debating whether we are brave enough to host a hybrid event so that we can continue to cultivate a local and global community of practice.
To find out more about Global Jams, you can check out the website: http://globaljams.org/
The next Global Jam will be in November — maybe see you there?!
We hope you found this useful. If you have any comments or questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re a friendly bunch! Badum ching… get it… a friendly bunch? A bunch of berries? Never mind…
Not sure where to find us? We’re on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
