We’re so excited to introduce the Donut FigJam widget, ushering in a new way for teams to tap into their creativity and build trust. This launch marks a lot of firsts: Donut’s expansion to a new platform, FigJam’s creation of a space for their community to build, and a new way to unlock creativity in brainstorms through rituals that engender deeper trust and connection.

We felt that this partnership was important because, let’s face it: things still don’t feel “back to normal.” While we’ve done a tremendous job adapting to our new work environments, there will always be things that are missing from the digital space. From the spark of working together, to the serendipity of encountering one another, to the collective buzz of a great idea, we wanted to find a way to bring some human moments to distributed teams’ meetings and empower better brainstorms.

Trust drives creativity

The human interactions that we miss most are often unexpected, which is difficult to recreate in the highly structured world of digital work. Studies show that small talk at the start of a meeting can make a huge difference in the level of trust and camaraderie in an organization,

“Small talk is important to us in other ways, putting us at ease and helping us transition to more serious topics like negotiations, job interviews, sales pitches, and performance evaluations. The tidbits we learn about our colleagues — for instance, that they play guitar or love dogs — build rapport and deepen trust.” (Methot, Gabriel, Downes, and Rosado- Solomon, 2021).

As our friends at Figma say, nothing great is made alone: you need great relationships in order to create the trust that drives creativity. In other words: if you want people to be more collaborative, you have to start with building trust.  We’ve talked a bit before about rituals that are tailor-made to create new opportunities for folks to randomly meet and build trust; that trust is especially foundational when seeking to foster creativity, for example within a brainstorm context.

There are endless think pieces about how to run a better brainstorm, but very little that focuses on how to get people open enough to share what they’re really thinking, especially in an unfamiliar group. As far as solutions go, there aren’t enough tangible ways to practice these trust-building and rapport-sparking best practices within a brainstorming or meeting environment. We’ve long heard from customers that our Watercooler topics have been invaluable for sparking unexpected conversations, creating bonds asynchronously, and fueling great new ideas, and we’re excited to bring that (and more!) to the Donut FigJam widget.

Donut + FigJam

When Figma told us they were introducing the ability for partners to build on the FigJam platform, we were immediately interested. Like Slack, FigJam is an energizing space for teams to come together that helps them do their best creative work, and we loved that they wanted to bring in builders from their community to make the platform even more extensible and valuable to customers.

Figma built FigJam for cross-functional and external teams to come together to brainstorm and interact. As the product of record for collaboration and community within teams, Donut brings cross-functional teams together in a way that’s typically hard to do remotely. With this new widget, we’re creating opportunities to deepen relationships within the context of work-related meetings.

Donut’s FigJam widget is launching with nine built-in exercises in the following three categories: Creative Warmups, Share & Tell, and Bring Your Own Topic.

Creative Warmups

Creative Warmup exercises focus on encouraging hare-brained schemes and wild connections, and set the tone that there’s no such thing as “wrong” in this setting. Exercises include:

• Alternative Uses
• Drawsome
• Wild Ideas Only

Share & Tell

Share & Tell exercises encourage participants to share something about themselves, building trust quickly among the group and helping people get to know unexpected things about each other. Exercises include:

• Favorite Things
• Social Standup
• Watercooler

Bring Your Own Topic

Bring Your Own Topic exercises are frameworks that can help structure a brainstorm, feedback session, design critique, or any meeting with multiple folks sharing ideas or feedback.:

• 8 Minutes 8 Ideas
• Round Robin
• Like, Wish, Wonder

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Interested in trying this out for your team? You can create an account and use the Donut FigJam widget for free! Learn more