Brainstorming use-cases for Jamit.
From this we can create a short-list and then narrow down the ones we should create demos for in the MVP.
Story Jams
We have an awful lot of material to choose from (check out our previous Jamcasts). We’ve done so many of these but should figure out which ones do the best job of showcasing our goals as well as attracting jammers.
Here are some highlights from our prototyping sessions:
- Logline Jams (Logline Char Conflict, Crisis Complications, Basic Logline)
- Character Jams (Vincent )
- Short Story Jams 15mins (focus on a single element) (Issue / Dramatic Question / Logline)
- Long Story Jams 30mins - 1hr (aka ‘Gansamacher Game’) (Deep Fake, Sink Hole, Disaster Magnate, Memory Laundering, Imaginary Friend, Off the Backs of the Underclass )
- Story Message Jam (Moral Argument)
I would like to work on the Character Jams more because I think these would have a lot of applications beyond the obvious and we have also developed a really nice proprietary framework involving archetypes and enneagram mappings that help make jammers more productive.
Scenario Planning
Our initial attempts didn’t go so well because we weren’t as well versed in scenario planning techniques nor did we have a clear enough goal at the outset. Nevertheless, I think scenario planning is such a powerful concept that leads to so much good knowledge-sharing and team preparedness that I’d like to spend some more time on this. For those who would like to torture themselves by watching our first attempt using a four-quadrant technique, here it is (Future of Work).
Someone I am talking to in the medtech space has suggested that Jams could be used for crisis preparedness and prevention as well as disaster planning when dealing with future epidemics because you need to have many different agencies and stakeholders involved in sorting out their responses. Also, once a pandemic has occurred, Jams can be used to coordinate the ongoing response, tracing / tracking, education, etc.
Guided Learning
Education in the USA is an industry ripe for disruption because it is increasingly expensive while decreasing (or static) in quality. Remote learning is more important than ever before and good teachers in short supply. I think that there is room for Jams that facilitate learning while testing a student’s ability at critical reasoning and domain knowledge. I see this as a ‘guided learning’ exercise that could be a replacement for exams in that it tests a student’s grasp of the material but also captures (and can be used to guide) their thinking process. So often, I have found that learning how to learn is more important than the material, itself, since the material changes over time as domain expertise evolves whereas learning frameworks and methodologies that can be used to learn many different things are invaluable and stand the test of time.
The results of each guided learning jam can be shared with other students in the class in order to become a knowledge-base that is built up over time, eventually becoming a useful resource for future students. In fact, there are some good examples out there of schools that use an approach where classmates teach one another in the course of completing a project rather than always having the teacher do the teaching. I’m thinking of Gever Tulley’s experimental schools where a group defines a project that involves many disciplines and then the members of the group teach one another to get the whole group up to the same level of understanding along the way. Learning from your peers is sometimes more powerful than learning from teachers because they are closer to your cognitive development level.
We don’t have any examples of this yet. To do!
Another version of guided learning could be “How I Solved…” by mentors to mentees, or a Jam in which one or more people solve a problem together which is recorded for posterity. The idea is that the student / mentee can see how someone else solved the problem by going through their process / methodology in order to arrive at the solution rather than just being told the solution, itself. The purpose, then, is to teach someone how to solve novel problems by applying some kind of framework or methodology. Also, you can see mistakes, false starts, and course corrections which can be very valuable. I found that vicariously learning through someone else’s mistakes could help prevent me from making the same ones, myself.
User Story Mapping
This is low-hanging fruit. There are lots of Jamboard style options out there for software developers. Jira comes to mind but it’s by no means the only one; it’s a crowded space. Nevertheless, our version could make it easier for variations to be worked out, by different teams even, and knowledge could be shared between different collab groups.
I also think it would be interesting to find a way to invite customers / users themselves to participate in the user story mapping project, if we could make it more approachable and delightful, so that it could be a 360 degree process involving companies and their customers.
More to come…
