It’s beneficial, cost effective and brings home what every business desires:
a wise investment yielding a solid return (ROI).

We are talking about PMC’s teambuilding exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine team building exercise. Its value lies within its proven ability to:

  • increase collaboration and communications
  • improve strategic planning
  • create alignment to missions and goals
  • enhance employee experience
  • strengthen leadership and organizational performance

For 25 years, Dutchman has been appreciated by all kinds of worldwide organizations thanks to its bombproof use in aligning with desired results and in creating awareness of how behaviors impact overall organizational outcomes. And through it all, participants enjoy it for its fun framework, its strengthening of camaraderie and its valuable learning they take back to their workplace.

Dutchman is a tabletop board-game simulation set in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona with players sent on a mission to mine gold from The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine and return with as much gold as they can.

What ensues is an energetic, solidly-designed learning experience paired with a highly acclaimed, flexible debriefing session combining to leave participants with a clear understanding as to how their behaviors during play link to real workplace issues and attitudes and how these impact overall personal and organizational performance.

Essential Reasons and Outcomes for Using Dutchman:

Proactively Initiating the Change that Needs to Occur: Every organization has reasons for wanting their people to be more aware of changes, ideas and behaviors that need to happen but knowing how to create the “ah-ha’s” that support the reasons and efforts for doing so is where progress forward often stumbles.
  • The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine elegantly works to showcase organizational issues and behaviors that tend to sub-optimize overall performance and outcome and provides a hands-on learning activity that is really an excuse to set-up a powerful Debriefing session that links the play and behaviors within the game to real and actionable issues within the organization.

Ensuring a Collaborative Environment : It’s crucial to the success of an organization that everyone, management and employees alike, understands that a collaborative mindset creates better productivity and more overall success than competing for the same cause.

  • Even though teams playing Dutchman are told that the goal of the exercise is to “Mine as Much Gold as WE can,” thousands of deliveries demonstrate that the tendency to compete most often occurs causing less than optimal game results. During the Debriefing session, teams will recognize the folly of competing over collaborating when they are shown how their behaviors caused them to mine less gold than if they had worked together. The facts are presented and discussed with “ah-ha!” moments happening!

Strategic Planning: Strategic planning is necessary to successful organizations but many people are uncomfortable asking for help or feel too much pressure to just get the job done. Therefore, they move ahead without considering all available options with end results usually being less than optimal.

  • In Dutchman, teams will be faced with decisions and choices that will impact their game performance and during the debriefing it will become clear as to why planning is imperative to achieving the best results possible.

Alignment to Missions and Visions: Are your teams aligned to your organizational core values?

  • Through the play of Dutchman there will be active involvement and teamwork, a focus on a shared mission and vision with appropriate expectations and basic leadership at the front lines. Teams will understand how all of this comes together (or doesn’t!) and affects the bottom line.

Improve Employee Experience: Decades of research shows that most employees in most workplaces are experiencing low levels of motivation, alignment and engagement. They are disgruntled with their bosses, disengaged and uninspired and often have one foot out the door, be it in reality or an on the job mindset.

  • When your people play Dutchman, they’ll not only enjoy being part of a fun and energizing program, they’ll also learn through the play of the game that they are a crucial part of the overall organization.
  • Communications, teamwork and leadership are all vital to organizational success and the exercise sets up scenarios that showcase how all of these behaviors work together to benefit the individual, the team, leadership and the organization as a whole.

Connections with Leadership: A crucial part of leadership is to help teams be successful but too often, teams neither ask their leadership for advice nor involve leadership in decision-making around a task or project. The links to themes such as Selfless Leadership are truly excellent.

  • Dutchman’s Expedition Leader is put in the supportive role of  “helping teams be successful,” and in doing so, models good leadership skills that emphasize working together for the benefit of all and being easily available for assistance and advice.
  • Participants will come away recognizing the benefits of supportive leadership and inclusion which can lead to modifying future workplace behaviors for a more positive interplay between leaders and employees.

The Price is VERY Reasonable: Unlike so many team building exercises or consultant-led deliveries, Dutchman is easy to deliver and is sold a one-time cost with no participant fees, annual licenses or certification costs. It is designed for unlimited use and comes in several versions (and can also be rented).

  • For most organizations, one of our versions supporting 24 or 36 people should make solid economic sense. The cost is the total cost, there are no other costs involved.
    • LD-4 is $1695 for up to 24 players;
    • LD-6 is $2895 for up to 36 players.
    • The Professional Version is $9995 for unlimited players and unlimited deliveries.
    • Rental starts at $1200.
  • Dutchman does NOT require outside facilitation nor the involvement of organizational training staff. (And you can see the obvious advantages of developing ownership involvement.)
  • The very most senior leadership might have a team building program for all of their direct reports. Issues of communications, collaboration and alignment to missions and visions would be made clear. PLUS, this would be fun.
  • The above-mentioned players would then be able to run the game with their staffs. The transfer of training is straightforward and the desired outcomes for their debriefings can directly result from the top management team and their discussions.
  • The exercise is packaged with extensive training and orientation materials with so much included that very few purchasers ever bother to contact us for the free coaching that is available to support the delivery. New users tell us that about 2 hours of preparation is needed for their first delivery.
  • This is a very inexpensive, high impact organizational tool that translates neatly and effectively into any organizational improvement and communications / alignment process. Coaching support for delivery is freely available and our 25 years of experience with supporting organizations globally have made Dutchman a bombproof exercise.
  • Your satisfaction is guaranteed or your money back!

What else might you need to know to be convinced that Dutchman will make an advantageous difference for your organization?

You can email me or call (864-292-8700) and I will gladly answer any questions.

Or, just purchase the game here to start making positive cultural changes for your organization!

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For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott SimmermanDr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement products. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant who designs simple, powerful learning tools.

See the powerful new teambuilding game, The Collaboration Journey Challenge

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
 See his poems and performance haiku poems at www.poemsontheworkplace.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

(apologies to Medium readers because of formatting – my wordpress blog does not port neatly to the Medium page format with issues of fonts and spacing.)

 

Also published on Medium.