Category: Change Page 1 of 10

Can you IMPROVE a Square Wheel?

On January 17, 2022

In Change, employee motivation, Engagement, manager as motivator

A casual note in Slack to me from our marketing guy Amit got me thinking, so I responded and then felt I should write a blog about it. I had shared an old LEGO style, “Too Busy to Improve“ image with him with a note that we want to change this to our new Divya illustration style.

Amit said, “…most times it’s only because we don’t know how to work them smoothly.” (referring to the Square Wheels on the wagon)

And my immediate response was, “Nah. The Square Wheels always need to be replaced with better ones. BUT, sometimes we see organizations implement Triangular Wheels because they can measure the improvement — “one less bump per revolution.” Square Wheels cannot be made into round ones. Yet the Round Wheels really are everywhere. Customers have them, workers have them, supervisors have them, consultants should get them from the three previous groups. Senior Leadership seldom has really good ones…”

So, my response got me thinking: maybe I might clarify my thinking about improvement and engagement and innovation.

Square Wheels® are simply things that do not work smoothly. We show the image of the wagon and ask people for their thoughts on how this might represent how things work in most organizations. Results from asking are simply amazing. People project their beliefs on to this “Organization Ink Blot Test*” and you get a pretty amazing number of thoughts about issues of systems and processes, innovation, leadership, culture and similar. A few people make funny comments like, “We’re not like that. We push our wagon uphill in the mud!”

Then, the next phase of the engagement is to ask the participants, “What are some Square Wheels that we might want to address” and let them discuss the things that do not work smoothly from their perceptions. These discussions are amazing, in that some of the ideas represent really good organizational improvement ideas and some represent only minor and easy to implement changes. Some are systems and process improvement thoughts and many are problems that have already been solved by top performers, the Best Practice kinds of things.

People have real and well-considered ideas in many cases. And everyone engages and offers their thoughts. A few things are seen as problems by an individual or two but those do not generate traction and the lack of consensus peer support for them tends to make them go away in the proposer’s mind (which can be really helpful to the team!).

And because the ideas are generated in group discussion, the active involvement serves to generate engagement and the cognitive dissonance that because there are Square Wheels, there must be some ROUND Wheels out there to address them. Too often, they start solving a Square Wheel problem before they have even finished the discussion of possibilities.

As to “fixing” a Square Wheel, I think that is not a functional possibility. Square Wheels can generate new ideas for implementing improvement but trying to fix an existing problem is not as effective as looking at a variety of possible solutions. Too often, we jump in to fix something without considering other possibilities.

Let me complete this post with another relevant thought. In a John LeCarre novel, he wrote, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” And I think that is right. The people who have hands-on experience generally have a good sense of reality. While they view things from the back of the wagon and they may not have great overall perspective, they DO have a sense of what is happening in reality. I contrast this with the reality of isolation of the more senior managers, who may see things from the Big Picture much better, but they do NOT know the specifics and the details of how things work. Two things happen:

One is the reality of the long rope:

And another is that they may measure their impacts without considering all of the ramifications of their solution. I call that basic problem two different things, “The Cost of Human Capital” and “One Less Bump per Revolution.” We can easily make changes that have significant negative impacts on people and we can always measure the wrong thing…

I hope that you have found this interesting and I am looking forward to updating this post with our new illustrations, which are powerful tools that can be used in zoom conversations to generate more active involvement, engagement and motivation to address some of the things that can be changed and improved in most organizations.

—

For the FUN of It!

Scott Simmerman, Ph.D., CPF, CPT – “The Square Wheels Guy”
Managing Partner, Performance Management Company – 864-292-8700
1520 S McElhaney Road, Greer SC 29651 USA
Scott@SquareWheels.com
SquareWheelsGuy (Skype)

Our new VIRTUAL version of our team building game is now available for demonstrations and developmental partnerships.

See a 2-minute video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE6gDtZymwk

* This is also know as a Rorschach Test, more formally…

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company.
© – All illustrations copyright Performance Management Company, 1993 – 2022

Square Wheels Tools for Managing and Leading Remote Workers

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 17, 2020

In Business Haiku, Change, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, innovation, manager as motivator

There are massive shifts happening right now, some are trends that are simply continuing and some are having significant impacts on people and performance. In millions of workplaces, people who have had desks are not expected to continue to contribute by working remotely. That transition is going to be unbelievably painful for millions of workers and their supervisors.

My network of consultants and trainers are now discussing how we can help people better handle these changing conditions by providing some very simple tools and some very simple training to impact communications. We think that our Square Wheels® themes can be made into simple webcasted interactive discussions.

So, we are just beginning to pull a wide variety of resources together to share ideas about what we can do and what we can implement. My current view is to package things like the old “brown bag luncheon” tools, with images and animations to help jumpstart discussions on various issues, present and future.

Impacts should be on worker (and manager) motivation, dealing with change, innovation and designing better workplace systems and processes, implementing improvement, team building and collaboration and other issues that are being faced by managers. And the tools will be simple, like this haiku I did a while back…

If you are interested in playing with us as we develop these things, please let me know by email. I may see comments but may also be slow to react to them.

These tools will strongly align with my “Manager as Motivator” thinking, whereby we support people managing people with simple engagement processes and implementation tools and ideas.

Scott Simmerman – scott@squarewheels.com

Decreasing Resistance to Change — The Finger, Arm and Leg Exercise for facilitating discussion

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On February 1, 2020

In Brain and Behavior, Change, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, experiential learning, Facilitation, manager as motivator

In The Dilbert Principles, Dilbert said, “Change is good. You go first.”

That one little quip captures the essence of trying to do something differently. Change is commonly resisted and often actively resisted, combined with a variety of reasons and excuses. People tend to rationalize the many reasons why something cannot be changed. Let me use a simple example of teaching someone to play pool.

In pool, one holds a cue stick and attempts to hit the cue ball into an object ball and then into a pocket. It is a fun and simple game and everyone can play. The balls are stationary until you hit one into another. Obviously, how and where one hits on the cue ball influences the level of success; striking the cue ball consistently and accurately hitting the object ball allows one to pocket more balls than hitting randomly.

So, there are skills around holding and swinging the cue stick related to the position of the head and eyes and arm and what is called “a bridge,” which is the placement of the hand closest to the cue ball which holds the cue stick for aiming. HOW one forms the bridge influences how stable the bridge is and how accurately and consistently one can then strike the cue ball. Some bridges are MUCH more stable than others and experienced players do this little thing MUCH better than people starting to learn the game.

But, the reality is that once people get comfortable with their bridge, they become resistant to changing / improving their hand position. One would think changing a hand position would be a simple thing; but repetition and habit generally make the newer player actively resistant to learning a newer or better way of doing this. This is generally a consistent kind of resistance to learning. So, in teaching pool, bridging is one of the first things to be addressed. And the active resistance is clear.

There is a simple exercise that works great to expose those things that underpin this active resistance and to increase the probability of change. So, I start by holding both hands up, fingers apart and wiggling and then fold my hands together, interlocking my fingers. When I do this, my left thumb is on top but the other person (or people) will do theirs randomly; it does not seem to be related to handedness, in my experience. Some people simply do it with their right thumbs winding up on top. So, ask them which thumb they put on top.

Then, unfold your fingers and wiggle them again and interlock them the other way, so your other thumb is on top. Ask the other person to do this. And observe the process. Most people will fumble with this a bit. Some might even have to try it again. ALL will feel uncomfortable. Why?

Because they probably have never before interlocked their fingers this new way.

Many will need to actually concentrate on doing this differently. They will actually study their hands and fingers and carefully look (probably for the very first time) how they have their fingers interlocked.

But do not stop here. What you then do is fold your arms across your chest. Ask them to fold their arms. Then, after they are comfortable with this, you will fold your arms exactly the opposite, so that things are not like they were at first. (I encourage you to practice this a few times before you demonstrate because it IS difficult to do for many people!) If your left hand is under your right upper arm and your right hand is over your left biceps, for example, reverse it so your right hand is under and your left hand is over. (If you try this right now, you will see why some practice is necessary, so practice it a few times so you can appear to do this easily.)

You will see, in all likelihood, the other person flounder around with this. Ask them why and they will probably give you some reason or other but the reality is that things are more difficult and uncomfortable when you have never done them differently than you normally do. (The phenomenon can be termed behavioral flexibility — note that there are a dozen ways one can make a bridge in pool, each used in different circumstances so being comfortable with doing a bridge differently is a real skill!)

The third part of this is optional to do but easily demonstrated, or even discussed. When people cross their legs (and there are a few different ways to do this like at the ankle or over the knee), they will “naturally and normally” change leg positions because staying in one position cuts off the blood flow and becomes painful. People learn to cross their legs differently because of this and they do not ever consider leg position and reversal an issue. (Pain / discomfort is a good motivator for change!)

Okay, so, it you have actually DONE the above exercises and interlocked your fingers and arms differently, you will have undoubtedly felt the discomfort associated with doing things differently. Perfect! And you now understand clearly that dealing with discomfort is always associated with change and that being less uncomfortable being uncomfortable is a really good learning point, something that can help you better deal with change in the future.

Now, in the example above, I went through how all this related to teaching someone how to improve their pool game. I hope it helps you with your game, too!

But the ideas underlying sharing these simple exercises are that you can use them with others in your efforts to improve workplace performance, to help decrease active resistance to new ideas and to the feelings common when one implements new ideas. Do this with others and have some fun making people re-assess their thoughts and reactions. Apply this to your leadership efforts.

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant. He is a CPF and CPT and holds a doctorate in behavioral neuropsychology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Scott is co-Founder of The Square Wheels Project and currently working on being retired in Cuenca, Ecuador while still supporting a variety of business improvement projects.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

What is Performance Management Company? (We do corporate teambuilding!)

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 15, 2019

In Change, Corporate Team Building Games, Icebreakers, performance management company, Team work

What is PMC – who are those people? (And note that they now operate as Performance Management Company LLC.)

Founded in 1984, WE ARE FOCUSED ON BRING SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE TOOLS TO IMPACT PEOPLE AND PERFORMANCE THROUGH ENGAGEMENT AND COLLABORATION SINCE 1993.

Performance Management Company was founded in 1984 by Scott J. Simmerman, Ph.D., who is its Managing Partner. Through the years, the company’s base has evolved from consulting to creating and selling products supporting management and organizational development to organizations and individuals worldwide. PMC was dedicated to collaborating with a network of trainers and consultants to help create new ideas and applications for products. Since 2019, Scott transferred its operations to Joan Simmerman, working as PMC LLC with son Jeff.

Combining his work experience in business consulting and retail management with a doctoral degree in psychology and university teaching from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Scott initially created Performance Management as an organizational consulting business. However, the focus of the business changed to designing and selling resources because of a single cartoon called simply, “Square Wheels One” and the subsequent development of a team building exercise that same year.

From that beginning, Scott created the interactive Square Wheels® illustration series in 1993, consisting of over 300 cartoons now packaged in many different toolkits and in different versions. These are available as complete turnkey training packages focusing on engagement and innovation. We also develop Square Wheels-based team building exercises.

One of Scott’s premises is that if people enjoy a learning experience they will more readily retain key points.

Our flagship product remains the fun and fast-paced teambuilding exercise, “The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine.” It is soon to be released in a virtual form for team development with remote teams. PMC will continue to sell its board game version of the exercise, a worldwide success since 1993.

Dutchman was created to be a world-class organizational development tool, with clear links to strategy implementation, organizational alignment, inter-organizational collaboration and change management interventions. Serious learning points such as collaboration, communication and quality are entwined with participants having a good time. It has, hence, become one of the leading teambuilding experiential simulations in the world. Below is a short video from SimuRise, one of our colleagues:

The main websites www.SquareWheels.com and www.PerformanceManagementCompany.com are the training and development websites for Performance Management Company where Square Wheels toolkits and our teambuilding games are sold and various exercises and links to other products are shared.

Scott and Joan Simmerman operated PMC as a home-based business for over 35 years, which kept our costs low. With Scott trying to retire in Ecuador (and still working more than 2 years later!), the ownership of the business went to Joan and their son Jeff, operating as Performance Management Company LLC.

All products sold and presentations come with a satisfaction guarantee or monies are returned. PMC works enthusiastically with purchasers of its products to help support their success and satisfaction.

Users of PMC products include a global mix of Fortune 100 companies and multi-national organizations as well as small businesses, schools, universities and independent consultants. Clients include AlliedSignal, EDS, Hongkong Bank, Maybank, IBM, Michelin, Milliken, Lucent Technologies, BellSouth, First Union, Hughes, Duty Free Shoppes, Nokia, First Chicago, Chase Manhattan, Burlington Industries, MCI, University of Wisconsin, AT&T, Compaq, Torrington, Emerson Electric and hundreds of others. Please refer to our client list elsewhere on this website for a more detailed account.

Scott also is available to do speaking engagements and facilitations for keynotes, conferences, workshops and retreats. People remember his presentations because they are unique, interactive and engaging. This adds up to his consistently being a top-ranked and internationally recognized presenter. His topics include themes of Change, Team Building, Motivation, Productivity, Innovation and Communications, all within a general framework of leadership.

Since Scott began sharing Square Wheels and his other products, he’s delivered workshops, retreats and seminars in India, South Africa, Egypt, England, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, The Philippines, Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Mexico, Canada, Mauritius, New Zealand, Dubai, Japan, South Korea and all around the U.S — 47 countries in all thus far.

Have FUN out there!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant who tried to retire two years ago!

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Note that we are soon to release our VIRTUAL version of Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, one that plays with online teams and focuses on teamwork, communications and planning. Contact Jeff Simmerman for more details.

Click here to see basic information about the virtual version of the simulation, one designed for remote workers and remote teams.

Square Wheels Cartoons and Quotes Supporting a Gratitude Attitude

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On November 20, 2018

In Change, employee motivation, Engagement, improve organizational performance, Managing and leading change, people and performance

Joan generated her illustrated annual Thanksgiving Message to our newsletter subscribers so I thought to share it here for a more general audience. We wish all of you the best for these days and the whole year. So, here we go:

As Thanksgiving approaches, we’ve added our Square Wheels cartoons to some insightful quotes that support the idea that continually expressing gratitude and being thankful can lead to a happier, more productive and improved workplace.

Square Wheels One representing “How Most Organizations Really Work” is shown below, but if you’ll read further, you’ll find some inspiring thoughts for how gratitude and thankfulness can create a smoother journey forward for everyone:

“Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.” ― William Arthur Ward

“We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.” — John F. Kennedy

“The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.” ― Norman Vincent Peale

“A moment of gratitude makes a difference in your attitude.”
― Bruce Wilkinson

“The real gift of gratitude is that the more grateful you are, the more present you become.” ― Robert Holden

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” ― Ernest Hemingway

And, a couple of other well-known characters have this to say:

“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.”
― Willie Nelson

“What if today, we were just grateful for everything?”
― Charlie Brown

Enjoy your Thanksgiving! And enjoy the remaining year,

—

For the FUN of It!

Dr. 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.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO® Group®

Business Haiku on Supervisors, Training and Facitation

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On November 7, 2018

In Business Haiku, Change, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, experiential learning, Facilitation, innovation

Here is a business haiku (5, 7 and 5 syllables) that is congruent with my thinking of the issue of supervisors and the critical need for some disruptive, bottoms-up thinking from the workplace. Are we giving our supervisors the skills needed to involve and engage their people in workplace improvement? Are we allowing them to coach performance improvement and generate the intrinsic motivation needed for long-term personal growth and success?

All I can read from dozens of sources says that the answer is NO. Supervisors are bombed with responsibilities and few of them seem able to focus time with their people to actively involve and engage them.

Does this make any real sense in the long-term?

So, here is a simple Haiku and supporting images.

Consider.

The Square Wheels Project is an online facilitation skills training program for supervisors and team leaders interested in gaining some new skills to better involve and engage their people for the continuous continuous improvement of workplace practices. It is simple and straightforward,

—

For the FUN of It!

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.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO® Group®

The Square Wheels Controversy – LEGO or Line-Art?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On September 21, 2018

In Change, employee motivation, Engagement, executive team building exercises, experiential learning, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Metaphors for business improvement

Since 1993, I have been presenting workshops internationally using a series of line-art images around the concept of Square Wheels. They can represent things that work but that do not work smoothly and they beg the question about what round wheels can replace them. Users and audiences consistently tell us that this is the best metaphor for organizational improvement or personal growth that exists anywhere.

Generating the understanding that Square Wheels represent how things really work is incredibly easy and people get the concept readily. Cognitive dissonance then becomes one of the driving forces underlying the subsequent generation of Round Wheel Ideas for Improvement. The gap between the impact of the SWs provides motivation to decrease dissonance and improve the idea.

The controversy exists between our use of the old line-art drawings by Roy Sabean and the newer LEGO scenes, as you can see below:

We did a short online survey of users and the reactions were split as to which image was preferred. We asked our LinkedIn network as to their reactions and the feedback was also split. Some people prefer the old image and some prefer the new one, and there are a number of factors that underly this split.

People who prefer hands-on kinds of experiential exercises might prefer the LEGO, since they can bring the metaphor into connection with other elements or frameworks like LEGO Serious Play®. Others prefer the line art for its elegant simplicity. Other people’s reactions are mixed.

I do not think that there would be actual differences in application and usages, which can include facilitating innovation and creativity, aligning goals and values, generating active involvement and for coaching workplace improvements. We have extensive experience with both and they work seamlessly.

Facilitating discussions of issues and opportunities can also function as a team bonding or even a team building process if one then uses the discussions as an impetus for planning and then implementing new ideas.

The LEGO versions make generating stop-motion animations an easy and interesting process and we have a workshop design to use phones and inexpensive animation software to capture storylines around process improvement. The LEGO scenes make for more colorful posters and worksheets.

We would love to have your comments on the different approaches and we will send you one of our LEGO animations in exchange for a comment and signing up to our blog. Your input would be valuable and useful,

—

For the FUN of It!

See the powerful new Square Wheels-based 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.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO® Group®

I’ll bet you can’t identify even HALF of the Key Learning Points!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 23, 2018

In Change, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, experiential learning, improve organizational performance, Square Wheels LEGO images, The Square Wheels Project

We’ve been playing with a metaphor of Square Wheels for 25 years, starting with a simple line-art drawing by Roy Sabean and eventually winding up using LEGO® to represent, “How things really work in most organizations…”

From the original line art below left, I actually captured 250 unique comments, thoughts and ideas about the illustration. This included some one liners like, “We are not like that; we push our wagon uphill” and

a) “The Square Wheels were invented by a woman!” (man)
b) “but the men are stupid enough to do things that way.” (woman)

Joan, Chris and I put together a stop-motion video that was great fun. And we recently used that at the top of the homepage for our newly revised website, one that was first on the internet in 1998. (It was in dire need of updating!)

Some of my Facebook friends pointed out some of the key learning points and I added some others. Then, I had the thought of putting it up here and asking people to comment on what they see, what metaphors are included, and how this relates to how organizations really work. The video is 39 seconds. So take a look and tell us what you see.

Hint: A Spectator Sheep appears at the 35 second mark. Spectator Sheep are those that have nothing to really contribute to things and who stand far away, voicing their opinion about things: Naaaaaaaaa Baaaaaaaaaa !! Some people say that there are Spectator Sheep in their workgroup or among the management team…

This is the first upload I have done of one of our stop-motion videos. We have a dozen or so of them that we have been playing with. It is one of the benefits of using the LEGO bricks to create scenes. If you like this, we can share some others.

In the comments section, we would love to see your thoughts on the bullet points, the key concepts that we play with around people and motivation and continuous continuous improvement.

Note for background about the main scenario: The wagon puller has been pulling and the wagon pushers have been pushing and the view at the front has been much different than the view from the back for the duration they have been working together. They have been using the Square Wheels because they work and their challenge was to deliver the round wheels to their customer. For some reason, they are taking a break from things…

—

For the FUN of It!

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.

Performance Management Company (PMC) has no affiliation with the LEGO® Group nor does it use materials or methodology from LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® or other related organizations. None of our images knowingly reflect any copyrighted or trademarked materials of any other organization.
The LEGO Group does not sponsor, authorize or endorse any of these materials.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
and all materials produced by PMC remain the intellectual property of PMC.

LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO® Group®

Our new website is at www.SquareWheels.com

Branding, Change, Marketing and Square Wheels

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 25, 2017

In business team building exercises, Change, Change Facilitation, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, Icebreakers, improve organizational performance, innovation, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, Metaphors for business improvement, Organizational Development Tools, The Square Wheels Project

We sell simple tools for communications and engagement and have been doing it now for 25 years. We had a consistent brand image for 20+ but then decided to shift and now we are faced with the perplexing problem of shifting again. I am guessing that this is a common problem but also asking for some perspective and dialog, since what we do is about communications and engagement. (Can you see the paradox there?)

Stay tuned if you want to receive a free engagement toolkit!

My trademark is Square Wheels^®. And started out using this image as an engagement and development tool in the context of,

“How might this illustration represent
how organizations really work?”

The original image, with so little context, works wonderfully as a Rorschach test, in that people projected their beliefs onto it and the responses from a group of people were pretty amazingly diverse and creative. It always worked to generate great ideas about issues of the things that did not work smoothly and the Round Wheels that already existed and could be implemented. The year was 1993 and the image looked like this:

This wagon rolled forward for a LOT of years and lots of miles, with me presenting sessions in almost 40 countries and initially selling transparency-based books and then powerpoint illustrations as toolkits for change, motivation, etc. It got me to be known as, The Square Wheels Guy.

But more recently, things happened and we started shifting over to using LEGO^® blocks and Technics people to represent the themes and ideas, creating various scenes and frameworks that continues today and have moved into our other product designs and toolkits that continue to evolve.

Those images and scenes anchor to the same metaphor but represent themselves this way:

And we think this is a big improvement. The goal of showing the image is to generate active involvement and diverse thinking about how things work and what things might be done differently. The key points are quite obvious and people project their thoughts about their workplaces onto the visual.

These conversations around what it might represent as an organizational reality tend to focus on people, engagement, active involvement, innovation, leadership, motivation and similar. They are about issues, opportunities and implementation. They are about innovation and best practices and collaborative dis-un-engagement.

And we package a number of very simple toolkits as well as an online course so that supervisors and team leaders can learn facilitation skills. We have also used the LEGO scenes to create some stop-motion videos, which are easy to do and which would be much harder with line art.

This is NOT rocket science, to show an image and generate a discussion. It is a powerful but elegantly simple tool to generate real discussions about perceived workplace issues.

In our efforts to broaden exposure, we engaged with an organization to sell an Icebreaker toolkit around this theme to their customer base, which is different than mine but very congruent. It is a framework for collaboration and co-marketing that seems to have no downside.

As the two companies discussed this Icebreaker possibility, her staff came up with the idea of using a different representation of the Square Wheels® theme and suggested using an image that looked like this:

So, I am faced with a marketing decision with a variety of factors.

Does the above image represent an improvement or is it simply a dilution of my intellectual property?
Is the image itself going to generate better discussions about organizational reality and issues and opportunities, since it IS a very different scenario and has different features.
Is the last image going to get the positive reactions from discussion participants like the first two does?

And another set of questions:

If you were to change the latter image, how would you change it to improve its effect in generating engagement and ideas?
Which image do you personally prefer and why?

Your thoughts on the above would be most appreciated, and if you share a useful informative considered opinion or idea as a comment, I will send you a free toolkit to play with,

For the FUN of It!

Scott and Dan Stones built The Square Wheels Project as an LMS, sharing tools and training to support Disruptive Engagement in the workplace.

Visit The Square Wheels Project at www.TheSquareWheelsProject.com

Connect with Scott on Google+

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO® Group®

© Performance Management Company, 1993 – 2017. All Rights Reserved.
PMC has no affiliation or relationship with The LEGO® Group®

Please Note: The offer of a free Square Wheels Toolkit is limited to the first twenty (20) people who share a relevant and useful comment about the image dilemma and its resolution.

Facilitation, Learning and Motivation: The Supervisor

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 3, 2017

In Change, Change Facilitation, Disruptive Engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, improve organizational performance, manager as motivator, motivational team building exercises, people and performance

Networking and Idea Sharing are keys to generating considered alternatives and there are a LOT of ideas about impacting people and performance when people start thinking together and sharing perspectives and support. My thought was to write about workplace applications of this idea.

A couple of good email conversations got me moving again on this issue of Supervisor as Facilitator and how little downside there seems to be to that concept of them being idea encouragers or coaches. This is really a main part of their jobs, yet one where we do not seem to be supporting them with skill training or with tools.

Who but the Supervisor can motivate the workers?

One of the email threads developed the idea that people hate training, which a bunch of us jumped on pretty hard in the conversation. There does not seem to be any data to support this idea that I could find, but it is true that a lot of training is wasted in training that has no visible impact or result. And a lot of people do not want to GO to training simply because there is no ROI for it in their view. Not a lot of training is something that people really want to just jump into, for a lot of reasons. “You are going to a training program” is often met with the comment, “Why? What did I do wrong?”

Some of the training is off-target and irrelevant or totally boring, done by people with good intentions but who are not SMEs (subject matter experts) or who do not have hands-on experience in the issues (it would be like me doing time management training or sales training or teaching people how to speak English!).

A lot of trainees either see little relevance of that training to their work or career or that the new things learned will not be supported in the workplace. Past experience can be tough to overcome. And the reality is that the work generally piles up when people are gone.

And sometimes training might cause people to feel like they are being appraised and tested, or that they will be potentially embarrassed when trying to put those new behaviors into real play in their workplace. I think the phrase might be “fear of constructive criticism” or some such thing.

And is it really a training need? Can they do it if you gave them $500 or put a gun to their head? So, are supervisors the trainers or simply the coaches and the people doing the followup to install the desired behaviors?

So, it should be obvious that supervisors should be trainers but also coaches and supporters, especially as training through LMS and smartphones becomes more and more the norm. Supervisors should be mentors and performance coaches, supporting the small changes in behavior that result in more small changes in behavior, something we call incremental improvement (or reality!).

Who but the Supervisor can implement training?

Supervisors can also address The Fear Factor that so commonly affects workers and workplaces. My colleague Dan Stones has addressed that here, for example. Fear is the Mindkiller, and supervisors are absolutely the best people to address those issues and impact their workplaces. We need to do things differently!

But what about the fear within the supervisor for doing something differently? Who but their manager is going to support them as they try new things and do things differently? Human Resources? And who supports them if they make a mistake?

So who is going to do this serious human resource development (training, facilitation and engagement) in the workplaces and what outcomes do we expect? What tasks and commitments do we remove or eliminate to free up the time to do the coaching and mentoring? What current systems and processes are we going to have to disrupt to make new behaviors appear both on the shop floor and among the management team?

So, the question you need to ask is what needs to be done differently to really impact people and performance in your organization? Our management team generally has a good perspective in how organizational change is accomplished. For many based on what people report about their experiences, it looks something like this:

We can make the choices to really do things differently. Will We?

PMC has some simple tools that can support your improvement initiatives. Check out The Square Wheels Project or investigate our team building simulation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. But more than anything else, look at what needs to fundamentally change within your management team to allow people to make improvements,

For the FUN of It!

One of the best teambuilding exercises in the world, as rated by his users, is The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, which focuses on leadership, collaboration, alignment and focuses on implementing the collective performance optimization ideas.

Connect with Scott on Google+

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
Twitter @scottsimmerman

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Radical Candor and Disruptive Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 19, 2017

In Change, Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation

Reading a review by Ted Kinni on Kim Scott’s book, Radical Candor, pushed me to publish this short post on impacting workplace performance through conversation and engagement. Her book is well grounded in the nightmare of many typical workplaces and how a lack of good conversations causes such harm.

As Ted writes, “Radical candor stems from Scott’s conviction that interpersonal relationships are the currency of management. “They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively,” she writes.”

To deliver that radical candor, a manager must care personally and challenge directly; it is about giving a damn and caring about impacts. It is about coaching for improved workplace performance and sharing observations and feedback.

And this meshes with my thinking in other posts about the issues around issues of personal accountability and action (see “If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN?“ here). People need to step up, and this needs to happen at the worker / manager interface, not just at some middle-management level or by one of the executives. The real work of involvement and motivation and performance improvement gets done at the bottom of the organization, not from some tops-down kind of communication. And a failure to execute at the bottom will not be corrected with another million dollars spent on some organizational attitude survey.

The real work gets done at the bottom of the organization, face to face, and not tops-down.

Tops-down, Big Corporate Solutions simply do not work to improve much. Sure, for implementing radical organization-wide changes, some percentage of tops-down strategy improvement initiatives are eventually successful (maybe 40% after 3 years of focus). But with my 34 years in the people and performance business, nothing seems to have worked over the years in actually improving active involvement and engagement of the front-line workers, who continue to be about 1/3 engaged. And this after corporations have spent billions on surveys and other tops-down tools and consultants and messaging.

What is needed is some chaos. What is needed is some Disruptive Engagement* at the front lines. Why not allow the people who know what they could be doing differently to involve themselves in conversations with their manager about issues and opportunities. Sure, some of those ideas might clang, or they might need some support from other departments or above to implement.

But if we are not looking for solutions or challenging the way we are doing things, we are simply dying a slow death, one that makes a workplace an insufferable environment and one that stifles innovation and creativity. Let people’s ideas count for something!

The Round Wheels are already in the wagon!

So, encourage your managers and those around you to have some candid conversations around issues and opportunities. Let people suggest ideas for improvement. ALLOW them to be more involved and to work together to make things better, even though there may be some disruption of existing systems and processes.

You can find some simple tools and elegant instruction at The Square Wheels Project.

For the FUN of It!

 Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

* Disruptive Engagement can be loosely defined as allowing people to take a look at the issues and opportunities for identifying and implementing ideas for workplace improvement done at the very bottom of an organization, without the “helpful” control systems of HR or T&D or other more senior, bureaucratic groups. It is somewhat analogous to Disruptive Innovation.

Links:

Review by Ted Kinni is here: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Why-Managers-Cant-Skimp-on-Radical-Candor

Book by Kim Scott is here: http://us.macmillan.com/radicalcandor/kimscott/9781250103505/

If not you, WHO? If not now, WHEN?

Engagement – Think Local, Act Local

WHAM! The Square Wheels Guy sees a Round Wheel

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 19, 2016

In Change, experiential learning, innovation, Managing and leading change, Metaphors for business improvement, productivity improvement, The Square Wheels Project

I shared this story with a couple of associates last night and both said I should blog about it. The situation is where some guy (me) who deals in Square Wheels and Round Wheels finally makes an improvement because he finally sees something as a Square Wheel, something operating that way for almost a year. Seriously…

My house has one room set up as an image production area and we got some green screen cloth and used a 5 foot by 3 foot table as the base on which to set up our various Square Wheels scenarios and images. We have good lighting sources and a tripod for using my iPhone to take pictures. We even have a remote control so we can keep the camera still while we do some stop-motion movies. (We will start publishing some animations in January – an amazing fun way to be creative and get some key learning points across.)

Anyway, I thought that we had production down to what was a science. Simple set up, hit some light switches and get out the iPhone, with auto upload to the cloud and downloading to my computers. Neat!

But there were small problems. In some shots where we had wider images, like with Santa and the reindeer plus some elves at the back, we were getting the sides of the screen to come into view at the back. That resulted in me having to move LEGO more toward the back to control the angles and image quality.

On Thursday, Joan and I were shooting Santa shots (new poem will be published) and I sat there and heard voices in my head saying, “Why don’t we rotate the table so that it changes from 3′ wide and 5′ long to being a more usable 5′ wide and 3′ long?”

Why was it 3 x 5? Because the table fit neatly along the 5 foot wall to the left and we had a light box sitting on the table when we first started. But then we moved the table away from the wall when we went from shooting within the box to a back-screen open arrangement. We kept changing backgrounds, raised the height of the table and did other things but we never bothered to rotate the table. It worked as it was, but it did not work smoothly. It took 5 minutes to make a really useful fix…

My own Square Wheels metaphor winds up whacking me in the side of the head. A better solution has been there for MONTHS, but I simply could not SEE it because I was used to the way it was working, Neither Chris nor Joan saw it either, and Chris helped me with all the initial set up and has taken half the pictures.

The message and key learning point is simple:

The Round Wheels are already in the wagon.

Improvement often just requires us to stop, step back, and LOOK for ideas to make things better, rather than simply doing the same thing over and over and somehow expecting better results.

I do TRY to live my own metaphor and look for those Round Wheels.
But apparently, “not always,”

For the FUN of It!

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
Connect with Scott on Google+

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Monday Morning Square Wheels and other thoughts

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 12, 2016

In Change, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation

Here is our new framework for considering how things really seem to work in most organizations, this one done as a paradoxical joke that might take a second. It is also something for consideration about the perception of reality:

Here are two of my most useful quotes:

Nothing made sense, and neither did everything else.
(Joseph Heller, from his book “Closing Time,“ (1994) )

It is not possible to awaken someone who is pretending to be asleep.
(Navajo proverb).

————

Caterpillars can fly, if they just lighten up. Thus, be the caterpillar or the butterfly, but always watch out for the birds and expect changes because we go through cycles of existence.

If you can’t be kind to others, at least have the decency to be vague.

Indecision is a key to flexibility.
A decision made is an opportunity for flexibility missed.
Thus, flexibility is a key to indecision.

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” — Marcel Proust

“In Paris, they simply stared when I spoke to them in French. I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.”
– Mark Twain

Some thoughts on Flying:
Keep thy airspeed up, lest the earth come from below and smite thee.

Basic Flying Rules:

Try to stay in the middle of the air.
Do not go near the edges of it. (The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.)
Strive to keep the number of successful landings made equal to the number of take-offs you’ve made.

If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it. And borrow money from pessimists, since they do not expect you to pay it back.

Some managers choose to be rock solid in their commitment to flexibility. Some drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.

“That’s like asking the vegetables how to design a refrigerator.” (An actual quote I heard a company president make when asked about the idea of employee involvement. Really!)

The dome on Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, conceals a billiards room. Billiards were illegal in Virginia when Jefferson lived…

The term “devil’s advocate” comes from the Roman Catholic church. When 20 of the church’s most important convene in deciding if someone should be sainted, a devil’s advocate is always appointed to give an alternative view.

Management in some companies reminds me of 5,000 ants on a log floating down the river with each ant pretending they are steering and that they know where they are going. But it is not their fault, it is simply the result of their perceptions about how things work.

For the FUN of It!

Check out The Square Wheels Project, our LMS for teaching Square Wheels facilitation skills to supervisors and managers.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
Connect with Scott on Google+

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Leadership, Teamwork and Making Progress

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 13, 2016

In Articles on Teamwork, Change, competency, employee motivation, Engagement, innovation, manager as motivator, people and performance, workplace performance improvement

My approach to motivation and engagement is based on this meme of how things really work in most organizations (both images, old and new):

Nothing fancy or earth-shattering, just people working to move their wagon forward, with a few possibilities for improvement…

We have:

isolated Leadership
uninformed or un-aligned workers
inefficient processes that do not work smoothly
poor or difficult communications, and
round wheels that already exist in the wagon that could be implemented to make things work more better faster.

and literally dozens of other key learning points about how people process and react to information.

We have been playing with this theme and different illustrations about how things really work as a way of involving and engaging managers and workers in the process of continuous continuous improvement, that the process of stepping back from the wagon serves many purposes. People have ideas and implementing those ideas improves how things work along with engagement. Leadership does get isolated from the hands-on reality and communications is an important factor in every workplace.

My friend in India, Shantanu Chakravorty, emailed me this picture, with no context and no explanation, heck not even a source. And looking at it for a couple of minutes gave me all sorts of ideas and inspirations and questions and comments.

What do YOU think is happening here?

This WILL take a minute or two to register and for some different alternatives to come to mind. Who is that guy in the bed of the truck and what is he actually accomplishing? Bunches of possibilities, but my thought is that this kind of thing happens very often in nearly every workplace!

For some extra thinking, spend 40 seconds looking at this animation and then spend another 2 minutes thinking about all the possibilities:

—

For the FUN of It!

 Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Co.
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

Collaboration – Abstracts of Blog Posts of Scott Simmerman

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 29, 2015

In Change, collaboration, Engagement, improve organizational performance, manager as motivator, productivity improvement

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 herein is share some of my thinking about these issues, to share a resource to stimulate your choices about these issues. My tools address these opportunities for improvement pretty elegantly.

Why do teams compete? Collaboration offers more positive benefits?

People continually make choices, selecting responses from their existing set of “behavioral alternatives” and often simply choosing to do what they have done before. The book, Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman does an excellent job of sharing the research on decision making and thinking and I expand on his thoughts in this blog.

This post focuses on some common reasons why teams compete and frames up some of the key learning points derived from session debriefings of our teambuilding simulation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. We find that a better understanding about their choice and choices, generated from their own behavior, generates powerful impetus to make changes in how things work.

Sabotage, Defense, Engagement and Workplace Collaboration

Disengagement is but one of the stages of disgruntled employee attitudes, and active disengagement can often generate actual workplace sabotage. This can manifest in a variety of ways, from encouraging other people to mis-align with corporate values to actual adversarial behavior. It can generate work slowdowns, increase sick days or even sick-outs, theft, poor customer service and other negatives. Some general frameworks for solving these issues are discussed.

Interdepartmental Collaboration’s Vital Link to Organizational Profitability

This overviews and connects to an article I published in HR Management Magazine that frames up issues of interdepartmental collaboration and the impacts on organizations. You can download and distribute the article, if that is of interest.

Collaboration and Teamwork and dealing with Mud

I use the metaphor of mud in both my Square Wheels toolkits as well as my Lost Dutchman team building game. Mud is the glop that most workers and most managers need to get a grip on, since it generally appears everywhere and it tends to simply bog you down and make even simple things more difficult. Some managers are better “mud managers” than others simply because they choose to do things differently. These best practices can be shared.

On Collaboration and Decision-Making

This focuses on the general idea of US and THEM, and that the reality is that they are us! It shares some simple thoughts on alignment and the benefits of having a diversity of opinion on things. The reality is that ALL of us know more than ANY of us and that collaboration greatly benefits the quality of our decision making. Involvement also generates ownership, which is important to implementation.

For the FUN of It!

 Connect with Scott on Google+

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on themes of People and Performance is here.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company