The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a powerful tool for organizational development, an exercise you can purchase as a board game or something you can now run online, focused on teambuilding with remote teams.
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Workplace behaviors can be contagious, which can be a highly useful thing as we try to change organizational cultures. And this can be directly emphasized and supported when the leadership aligns those desired behaviors to the organization’s goals and objectives in an exercise such as The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. A survey […]
The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a team building exercise where tabletops of people should align to the shared goal of optimization of results and mining as much gold as we can. And we are now focusing on how to more tightly link the play of the game with the teaching and […]
Collaboration offers big benefits to organizations. It directly impacts motivation and engagement and innovation. Yet teams will often not collaborate, and often simply because they choose not to. The reality (and most people’s experience) shows there is more competition than collaboration in most organizations, which is a double edge sword. What I wanted to do […]
One of my newer customers just asked me to send him, “the debriefing that works with schools,” since my writings in the support materials for our team building exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, has been used very successfully in that context over the years. But, THE debriefing does not exist in […]
Complex, convoluted and risky. That is today’s workplace for most people. Nothing seems simple today and, frankly, the more complex and detailed the design, the more opportunities there are for failure and non-compliance, two words not totally appreciated in the workspace of today’s managers. Avoiding risk is a key issue and many a good training […]
We designed and sell The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, a team building exercise focused on planning and collaboration, among other key outcomes. A recent purchaser sent me an email this morning with a simple question but one that I thought merited some elaboration, since there are any number of design features and […]
Here are some issues and statistics and framework around the issue of employee workplace sabotage, which can take many forms, and some relatively straightforward solutions. Overall, the issues of teamwork and peer pressure can work for you, ideally, or can work against you as we frame up below. The Situation: Research says people are uninvolved […]
I got an email flyer on workforce development from ASTD this afternoon and thought to paste a reaction to some of their thinking, which I think tracks reality pretty well in this case. The point that they made was that there are these Millennials in the workforce and they should be getting a lot of […]
There is that old joke about when you are up to your axles in alligators, it is hard to remember that your job was to drain the swamp. Sometimes the tasks at hand simply overwhelm the possible improvements. Organizational improvement is a lot like that, it seems. Mud has been a most useful metaphor for […]
People and Performance — Here are some simple poems and frameworks to get people thinking about issues and opportunities. The goal is to generate one good thought or insight into doing things differently. Let’s start this with a simple poem to embellish the theme with a bit of my thinking about how things often work. […]
The lyrics of Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” are somewhat about teamwork and leadership — I love the tune (still humming it!). And I have used this cartoon of US being built up full of THEM for 20 years. In Lost Dutchman, a tabletop of people will choose to work together on the shared goal […]
We often think of disagreement as negative, which it can sometimes be. On the other hand, having some good discussions because we cannot agree can be quite useful, since the issues raised can be important ones that have not been considered. If we’re not talking about “issues,” how can we discuss “opportunities?” Plus, research shows […]