To be effective, both research teams and teams that support them need a compelling purpose and sound structure for achieving it (Hackman & Wageman 2015). Grant proposals and unit mission statements rarely provide enough clarity; often teams must do more before they can decide what their purpose means in observable terms and which specific tasks coordinated by which team norms will likely accomplish this shared purpose. Previous work has shown that team chartering workshops like collaboration planning (Rolland et al 2021) can help teams clarify their purpose and working norms (Begerowski et al 2021). However, it is not clear how to reliably balance the amount of structure, content, and freedom given to teams in these workshops (Rolland et al 2021). There is thus an important need to understand principles for designing such workshops so that they reliably catalyze shared purpose and sound team structure. In the absence of such principles, team chartering workshops will continue to be difficult to plan and execute.

We posit that design thinking principles can fill this need (LaPensée & Doshi 2020). At the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR), we have developed workshops that include design thinking activities known as “Research Jams.” Our Ideation and Visioning Jams reliably focus and accelerate team creativity, generating excitement for working together (LaPensée et al 2021). Now, we are developing a new “flavor of Jam” known as a Strategy Jam to help teams convert their big idea into an actionable purpose, principles, and projects.

The Strategy Jam is based on the Strategy Sprint, a type of workshop developed by the consulting firm AJ&Smart to help their clients craft specific, actionable strategies for achieving measurable business goals. Strategy Sprints themselves are a variation on the more widely known Design Sprint model (Knapp et al 2016). While a Design Sprint creates a prototype of a product or intervention, a Strategy Sprint aligns the group on their purpose, challenges, strengths and limitations, and an action-oriented strategy (complete with roadmap). The Strategy Sprint differs from other team chartering workshops by emphasizing wisdom of the crowd logic (“working together alone”); scaffolding sentence starters and notetaking; and providing multiple modes of participation at every point.

At MICHR, we are piloting several versions of the Strategy Sprint as Strategy Jams to help both new and existing programs focus on the challenges their team faces. Initial prototyping has yielded important feedback to inform future iterations of the Strategy Jam model. These iterative results allow us to explore which features of the Strategy Jams are influencing which outcomes. Ultimately, we are surfacing the utility of design thinking principles for shaping team chartering workshops so they reliably accelerate team research.