The JLS Game: An Integrated Learning Tool for Development Professionals
The JLS Game is a dynamic and versatile learning tool that weaves together the key strands of JLS’s work – evaluation, communication, and capacity building – into a cohesive experience of insight, reflection, and action. Rooted in real-world development practice and designed with both creativity and rigour, the JLS Game offers professionals a pathway to think more deeply, critically, and contextually about the challenges they face and the decisions they make.
Belonging to the family of serious games, the JLS Game goes beyond entertainment: it is designed to provoke reflection, generate new understanding, and support transformative learning. It draws inspiration from developmental evaluation, an approach that supports learning in complex, adaptive environments by embedding evaluative thinking into ongoing action and decision-making. Developmental evaluation values emergence, feedback, iteration, and agility—principles that align perfectly with the flexible, multi-layered structure of the JLS Game.
It is a tool that invites players—whether individuals, teams, or organizations—to connect formal knowledge from evaluations with intuitive wisdom, cultural insight, and personal or collective experience. In doing so, it supports more resilient, inclusive, and grounded approaches to development and humanitarian work.
A Game in Four Levels
At its heart, the JLS Game is modular and expandable. It can be played simply, as a thought-provoking prompt, or more deeply, as a full-fledged coaching and capacity-building methodology. Its design is structured across four progressive levels of engagement:
At its simplest form, Level 0, the game consists of a set of cards drawn randomly from a digital platform integrated into the JLS website. Each card offers:
- a key insight drawn from a formal evaluation of a development programme,
- a proverb or saying rooted in popular wisdom, and
- an evocative image, symbolic or documentary, that helps place the message in context or perspective.
At Level 1, the game becomes an exploratory tool for critical thinking. It invites players to reflect on possible strategies for a given situation using different categories of cards—each representing a unique lens or type of developmental insight.
At Level 2, the same game offers guided reflection and coaching, structured along two complementary axes:
- Programmatic Development, supporting project design, evaluation, operational tacctics and strategic thinking. It emphasizes iterative adaptation, encouraging programme teams to regularly integrate learning from ongoing evaluation insights to refine and adjust their strategies and delivery models.
- Personal and Professional Development, helping users grow in self-awareness, career reflection, leadership practice, and emotional resilience.
Each axis provides contextual analysis, reflective questions, actionable suggestions, and access to additional resources, drawing on both JLS’s field experience and a wide body of academic and practitioner literature.
At Level 3, the JLS Game is used as a methodology for structured facilitation and coaching. It can be used to design and conduct:
- Team training workshops—focusing on adaptive strategy, communication, learning from failure, or inclusive planning.
- One-on-one coaching sessions—tailored to individual development professionals navigating leadership challenges, career transitions, or decision-making under uncertainty.
This level combines the intuitive power of the game with the structured depth of professional coaching, bringing out its full potential as a tool for transformational dialogue and action.
Later, the full product—including a printed deck and a companion interpretation guide—will be available for purchase online as a high-quality, meaningful object.
A Multiformat Learning Object
The JLS Game is designed to be accessible across platforms and contexts:
- Level 0 is available free of charge through the JLS website, offering an entry point for anyone to draw a card and begin a reflection.
- From Level 1 onwards, the game will also be available through a dedicated JLS mobile app, allowing for more interactive features, saved journeys, and guided learning paths.
- A printed edition of the game, including a printed deck and its interpretation guide, will be launched in a later phase. It will be available as a companion guide to carry around, use in workshops, or offer as a gift to fellow thinkers and practitioners.