Who out there was in a band growing up? Do you remember jamming it out in a friend’s garage and keeping the neighbors up? Even for those of us who weren’t cool enough to make the cut in a band (myself included), we know that a jam session is musicians coming together, harmonizing and improvising as they go.These days you don’t need musical talent to jam. The newest definition of jamming is an organized group who comes together online to share information and ideas about a topic or a series of related topics. Other ways to think of these events are crowdsourcing or virtual brainstorming, where people who might have never otherwise come into contact have the opportunity to build on each other’s innovations and collaborate. Two heads are better than one, right?IBM was the first known company to put a jam session down on the books in 2001. Their events caught on quickly, and IBM developed a jamming platform that would allow thousands of outsiders to weigh in on the discussions. Only five years later, IBM virtually hosted more than 150,000 participants from 104 countries and 67 companies. The ideas sparked from this one 72-hour “Innovation Jam” led to the launch of 10 new IBM businesses with seed investment totaling $100 million.While jam sessions have proven worthwhile for addressing real business needs, they’ve also been used by companies to get their employees collaborating on what they want to have a say in: internal topics. Some examples are, “How can we cultivate a better work environment and culture?,” “How can employees embrace the company’s core values more?” and “How can we create a greener office and produce less waste?”. Unless you’re opening up your jams to the public, you can host a private session on your intranet or an internal site, like a chat room or Yammer, that you’ve used for discussions where people are free to come and go. An important part of any jam session is for employees to read what others have said, react and build on those comments to create a true dialogue. Employees should feel like they’re working as a cohesive group to address a question or set of questions instead of filling out a static survey.A lot of governments and non-profit organizations have also kicked off their own dialogues without any fancy software. They hold online discussions using the resources they already own – employees who are eager to speak up about what matters to them and an intranet that captures their ideas and comments. What questions would you want to jam about? Give us a call, and we can help.

In the meantime, rock on.