Category: Brainstorming techniques Page 1 of 3

In Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, empowerment, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, people and performance, Square Wheels LEGO images, The Square Wheels Project

Ah, the Internet… And StumbleUpon. Blogs. And research on behavior. And Creative Genius. And themes of leadership and productivity and employee motivation. Organizational culture.

I love it when it all comes together…

Way back in 2012, what seems like at least a decade ago, I was reminded of the managing monkeys metaphor of William Onchen (HBR, originally in 1974!), who wrote about their management, care and feeding. Solid stuff.

Dan Rockwell, in his most excellent Leadership Freak blog, reminded me of some of that today. He talked around “whose monkey is it” and framed up the pronouns in a way to get you to pay more attention to what is being said. There are three different ways to listen to the discussion and the pronouns you use in discussing that little critter:

‘You’ – The monkey stays in their zoo. They own the issue. Responsibilities are theirs.
‘We’ – The monkey is a shared. “We will fix this.” Responsibilities are shared. Beware of adding unnecessary layers of complexity by sharing too many monkeys with team members.
‘I’ – The monkey moves to your cage. You own this issue. Responsibilities are yours.

And my curiosity caused me to click on a “Cognitive Science” link on StumbleUpon 3 years ago because it showed the following (copied with permission) research and metaphor.

In his article, the story about the situation and the behavior continues. In mine, I think you probably get where I am headed…

A key point is behavior and to consider how certain workplace behaviors get started and maintained.

The behavior of a group of monkeys is sustained by the organizational culture and the environment around it, and probably not even by any consequence system that still exists. I think that the behaviors generated years ago are often still in place and continuing to influence teamwork and collaboration and even best practices.

Jason Wells talks about the concept of filiopietism, or the reverence of forebears or tradition carried to excess, but prefers another term: the tragic circle. (He moved his site but you can see his illustrations by clicking on this link – The Lesson of the Monkeys )

And I agree. He links the concept to the behaviors of societies, and I think that the concept links even more directly to workgroups and organizational cultures where there are extrinsic rewards and punishers for specific behaviors.

There are many such practices in workgroups that get carried on long after the original event. Techs at a car dealership client of mine would all yell, “What?” when one of them would yell out, “Hey, Stupid!” — My guess is that a manager, once upon a time, was calling for one of them and yelled out the phrase and it just got established as a little “reminder ritual” for all of them (including the actual good-guy manager!!).

Most people in most workplaces are UN-Engaged. Why? You can’t know precisely, even when you look at it from all different kinds of angles. There are all kinds of local reasons. My take on it is that dis-engagement is being caused by something, maybe something that is inadvertent, but still a causal factor acting in the environment. It might be something as simple as “a banana” — the issue of some loss of trust or some shared negative corporate memory. And until we address the root cause, it will continue. Nothing will improve and little will change over time. The monkeys will simply continue to sit there…

Sure, one “Senior Corporate Leadership Answer” to the Monkey Problem is to get all NEW monkeys and start all over but that is a costly and difficult solution to implement. And some of the thinking may still carry over during that transition. Some organizations actually do that, moving from one place to another to shake things up and get new people.

But a more better simple alternative is to engage them (the people participants) in some discussions about what and why and look for new alternatives that can be implemented or problems that can be addressed that simply reinforce the situation at hand. So, “Yes, we have no bananas” (audio – vocal starts at 1:10, from 1923 (history) ), but we do have people who have a level of commitment to performing.

We need to do some serious Dis-Un-Engagement in the workplace, working with teams to identify the things that are getting in the way of people being engaged and actively removing them from the situation. Doing the precise same things, introducing one new monkey after another, will not make any difference.

Our new facilitation training for supervisors shares a straightforward approach for dealing with such issues and opportunities. You can see our approach, which uses my metaphor for Square Wheels at:

The tool is focused on discussing issues and opportunities, and the approach is to generate open discussion of the things that could work better, the issues of the culture and visions, and the generation and implementation of better ideas. It focuses on asking and listening and on generating ownership involvement,

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.

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

Facilitating? What are we accomplishing?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 20, 2016

In Articles on Teamwork, Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, innovation, Innovation Implementation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

I play with LEGO. Yeah, and I do it in my training sessions too, focusing on the theme that things can be improved.

While cruising around, I read a solid post by Pere Juarez Vives called The Art of Facilitation, in which he put a little LEGO scene together. Cute. But it also tends to illustrate one of my issues with what is viewed as facilitation: It is not simply about playing with things but needs to be focused on the engagement aspect of work and on the issues of identifying issues and opportunities and then doing things differently.

What Pere does is focus on the key points of the International Association of Facilitators basic premises, which is fine. It is an excellent organization and I went through their Certified Professional Facilitators (CPF) certification many years ago. You can click on the image to go to his writings.

I liked how he framed his post around the role of the Facilitator and how he aligned the key points to the IAF framework for professional facilitators. But I also have issues with that framework, since so much more facilitation is done by (or should be done by) managers and supervisors of people in the workplaces. Gallup just showed that US Engagement is at a 5-year high but recognize that it was still only at 34%, and that this is a LOT higher than what is seen in most countries. Engagement still represents a critically important issue for workplace motivation and innovation.

While some of these professional, arms-length practices are good, I always clang with them when I do a facilitation with managers, since I WANT them to leave with the same skills and techniques and approach that I did TO them — they get it, now I want them to DO it and those ideas are fundamentally mis-aligned with IAF focuses; they are viewed as un-professional in a way!

Facilitation is all about engagement, and there is simply too little engagement in most workplaces and with most Bosses. Meetings and discussions offer a wonderful opportunity to ask about issues and potential solutions. Thus, when I work with these managers, I want them to learn from me what I did and how I did it so that they can leverage the knowledge with their people.

Primarily, I do this with my Square Wheels^®metaphor, which is amazingly fluid and flexible. Here is a little poem I did about teamwork:

A key principle is ownership, which I express as, “Nobody ever washes a rental car.” Participating in a discussion builds ownership involvement. So, getting these managers to lead similarly is my key focus in so many situations.

I also use the Square Wheels metaphor about how things really work, with the idea that the Round Wheels are already in the wagon. These days, I illustrate those things using LEGO.

The reality is that it is NOT about playing with things, but about generating workable ideas and then having the motivation and momentum to actually implement them. So many facilitations simply do NOT accomplish things when people go back to the same work with the same pressures and parameters.

So, I suggest that you step back from your wagon and consider the possibility of doing something differently for a change.

Check out yesterday’s blog on thinking out of the box, for example.

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

Learning Skills, Note Taking, and Improving Performance

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 26, 2015

In Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, dis-un-empowerment, experiential learning, improve organizational performance

I will admit that I was never much of a student when in school. It was an 82 average in high school and a 2.23 in college and all that. On the other hand, my performance in classes and my effectiveness in research and my overall engagement in the things I was interested in was the flip-side of all this. I got into one of the finest educational institutions in the world for my doctoral work on behavioral neurophysiology because of my research publications, high SAT scores and my experiences in presenting at international conferences (as an undergraduate!). It was not because of classroom performance!

The key point I wanted to share is that I only learned how to learn about 10 years after graduating. No one ever pointed me to any sort of learning technology or job aids into how the brain stores and retrieves information. Only when taking courses in NLP from Jon Linder did this stuff really come together.

We knew a lot back then but we just did not share it with the students! Now, I would think we could be doing things differently to help our students as well as the workforce.

Sarwan Singh put out a pretty good slideshare on note taking and study techniques I thought to share. I would have added the mind-mapping visual tool to the set but it is what it is.

Take a walk through the ideas and see if there is anything that you might find useful:

You can also find a lot of blogs out there that review mind mapping tools, which is an approach I use a lot when motivated to capture ideas or plan a presentation.

If we want to make our organization more of a learning organization, and improve the performance of our people, we should probably give the trainees some access and some experience about learning how to learn and how they can improve retention and memory. The above is a place to start,

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.

Better Roadblock Management – Dis-Un-Empowerment and Square Wheels

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 5, 2015

In Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, dis-un-empowerment, dis-un-engagement, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

My regular readers know that I use images and metaphors to express a lot of my thinking. My basic metaphor for how things work looks like this:

Square Wheels One LEGO image by Scott Simmerman

Square Wheels are the way things really work, and the Round Wheels are already in the wagon. Don’t just DO something, Stand there!

For 20+ years, I have been playing with issues of empowerment and engagement and team building, using cartoons and games to drive out desired behavior and produce better communications and alignment to goals and missions. I take the low road on all this, working hard to keep things really simple because I find that things ARE really simple.

If we are going to motivate and engage people in the workplace, it seems critical that we need to focus on removing the things that people perceive as getting in the way. So many people are un-empowered and un-engaged and it is necessary for their managers to actively involve them and to change or remove the perceived issues and roadblocks.

While one cannot empower or engage anyone directly, they can certainly coach and assist them in changing their beliefs and shifting their thoughts toward going #morebetterfaster, right?

In moving from my line-art representations to serious playing with LEGO block images and themes, we have upgraded some of our simple toolkits and support frameworks. Right now, we have the Stupidly Simple Square Wheels Toolkit (a very simple communications tool) packaged and on the website with the online training program found at The Square Wheels Project.

We have reworked all the materials in the Managing Workplace Roadblocks Toolkit, which is a neat expansion of a package of tools that has worked so well to dis-un-empower people and workplace improvement ideas. It shares a workable model and various support materials about how to frame workplace issues so that individuals and teams can deal with them effectively.

The model uses LEGO pieces to represent the roadblocks, with images in powerpoint to generate discussions along with worksheets for use in processing the ideas. It is easily linked to the various tools in the LEGO Serious Play® frameworks.

There is more to come, and a slideshare program and maybe a short video describing how things can change and how managers can more effectively involve their people in workplace improvement ideas, along with team building and coaching frameworks,

For the FUN of It!

A detailed profile can be found at my LinkedIn page

 Connect with Scott on Google+

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Scott’s quips and quotes on Poems on The Workplace is here.

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company
LEGO® and LEGO Serious Play are trademarks of The LEGO Group

Challengers: People to play Devil's Advocate and Contrarians

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On November 30, 2014

In Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, Facilitation, innovation, Innovation Implementation, Managing and leading change, Thinking

Everyday news is awash with examples of bad corporate decisions, the ones that make you wonder, “How could they do that?” There are huge corporate decision-making failures such as witnessed with GM and the ignition issues or Bridgestone and the flipping Ford Explorers where problems were covered up. There are others, like the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan where backup generators to run the cooling systems were located in an area subject to flooding, a decision which caused 150,000 to flee and the eventual loss of many lives and livelihoods. And then, there is Duke Power’s very delayed decision to clean up 70 miles of the Dan River which they contaminated with 140,000 tons of toxic coal ash sludge that may never get cleaned up.

And there must be a zillion similar small examples happening every day in every organization, decisions that could be greatly improved if someone’s role was to challenge the thinking rather than to simply go along (often referred to now as The GM Shrug). GM people knew of the safety problem early — it was detected even before the first of these cars came on the market, according to an internal investigation about their handling of this issue. But nothing was done and the cars were manufactured and sold, resulting in some deaths and other problems.

A blog by Dan Rockwell on seven secrets to success, referenced in another post of mine, suggest this decision-supporting idea as one of the key secrets:

#6. Embrace forward facing contrarians.

Conformists don’t build the future, but forward facing contrarians pull you forward. Protect them from the frustrations of others, as much as possible.

Personally, I do not think of the label of Contrarian as being much of a positive one, nor its alternative, The Devil’s Advocate. Contrarian sounds too “centennial” and angry – I mentally image some Roman guy in a toga with a sword standing on a pedestal or something. The Devil’s Advocate role was thought to originate with the Roman Catholic Church in 1587 to challenge against canonization of a person, “to take a skeptical view of the candidate’s character, to look for holes in the evidence, to argue that any miracles attributed to the candidate were fraudulent, and so on. The Devil’s advocate opposed God’s advocate.” (from wikipedia)

But what do we label this person?? What do we call that role? How can we frame this challenging job for teams in a positive way with our language?

– Divergent Repostulator?
– Anti-Advocate?
– Challenger?
– Re-Conceiver / Re-Conceptualizer
– Reverse Thinker?
– Polymorpheus Recapitulator?

I’m thinking Contrarian has a nicer ring than Devil’s Advocate but that Challenger has an even better framework for organizational improvement than Contrarian… I’m going with Challenger as that positive role for helping groups make better decisions. Appoint a temporary one today for your groups.

I will build that concept into some of my debriefing tools for my team building games. With six people on a team in The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, for example, one of those people can certainly operate in a way to positively challenge the “group-think” and help drive out better strategic and tactical thinking.

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.

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Elephants, Line Managers and Workplace Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 6, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, Best Practices, Brainstorming techniques, Change, Continuous continuous improvement, employee engagement, empowerment, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, Managing and leading change, motivation in the workplace, team motivation, Team work, workplace performance improvement

More and more, I am convinced that the key training people in organizations do not reside in HR / Training Departments but exist in the ranks of the line managers. The complexity of their job roles, however, can block their efforts to involve and engage their people to implement change and improvement. We need to look at that reality. Here are some thoughts and ideas.

——————

Managers are responsible for performance. Managers are responsible for quality and service. Managers are responsible for productivity and results. Managers do reports and attend meetings. And, more and more, we are driven away from the simple act of focusing on skills needed to motivate and retain people (including the managers!).

Yet these same managers are the only ones who have the direct influence on the workers to understand issues and generate changes.

The reality of the supervisors and managers will probably look something like this when it comes to opportunities to involve and engage their people:

So, what are we doing to provide managers with the tools they need to function as organizational performance improvement consultants, coaches for identifying best practices and communicating and implementing changes and improvements? Are we giving them the time they need and freeing up worker time for them to be asking, listening and considering?

Are managers involving and engaging their people or are we just wasting time and energy thinking that they might?

This could be brainstorming and an action to involve and engage people in workplace improvement. Or, this might represent another “Yell and Tell” training session.

In most workplaces, people are NOT involved and engaged — sure, the BEST Bosses are good at leading people forward, building ownership and engaging people in teamwork and process improvement. But in most organizations, BOSS spelled backwards is self-explanatory (email me and I will explain privately, if this euphemism is not immediately understood!) and people are not being engaged — the boss is too busy, as in the haiku below:

What do our managers need to do to shift the energy of these meetings and discussions from negative to positive? One solution is to use better tools and an approach that is facilitative rather than confrontational. This simply requires the right tools and some simple, self-taught facilitation training.

Asking is a much better approach than Telling. Engaging is a much better approach than generating resistance to change. Generate SMILES, not frowns.

For the past 20 years, I have been developing simple but powerful tools for involving and engaging people and generating ownership and performance improvement.

My view is that the solution to the work situation looks something like this:

And we need to allow the team and the managers the time to consider possibilities and plan actions.

If you have any questions about how your organization might accomplish more of this, drift around randomly through the PMC website and generate your own thoughts on how people can be more intrinsically motivated and build a better sense of team and “US.”

People have ideas for improvement and supervisors can do a better job of asking and engaging and implementing, don’t you think? Could people simply choose to do things better and more efficiently?

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.

 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 Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

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

Brainstorming and Implementation – That DOES work…

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 15, 2014

In Brainstorming techniques, Change, employee motivation, Facilitation, innovation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

In the past year or so, there have been a number of articles and writings on the theme that brainstorming is no more effective than simple idea generation by individuals. I’ve seen the research but not really evaluated it insofar as the reality of how it works.

Frankly, I find that brainstorming actually does work really well to generate LOTS of ideas and to help frame up a few of those ideas for implementation.

My process is simple. I show an image and ask:

The idea is simple: to let the participants consider the image, project their ideas onto it and then share them as a tabletop. It uses simple and standard brainstorming practices but anchors thinking to some simple metaphors about people and performance. What it also does is generate shared ownership and teamwork when these initial ideas are then fleshed out into discussions about generating workplace Square Wheels™ as well as generating some specific round wheels potential solutions.

Where I differ greatly with those thoughts that brainstorming is equally effective to other approaches for idea generation and creativity is in that interactivity, the reality that one idea from one person can stimulate a related or tangential or even opposite idea from someone else. PLUS, that reality that:

It is often the case that someone who is not involved in the development of an idea might feel the pressure from a perceived risk or will simply reject a different way of doing things because the initial idea was not their idea! This can be subtle and be seen as passive resistance to change or it can be obvious, as a rejection of the idea in a meeting about performance improvement. We have all seen these kinds of things occur.

So, my thought is a simple one:

You simply cannot generate a team-based process that generates active ownership involvement by simply collecting individual ideas from individual people. The group dynamic is simply missing.

You agree? You can find our toolkits by clicking on the image below:

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 Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Intrinsic Motivation and Engagement – Training is NOT the answer

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On January 9, 2014

In Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Facilitation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, Organizational Development Tools

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

I read that in an old John Le Carre novel 20 years ago and it stuck with me. It is just one of those quotes that just makes some sense out of why so many things can be improved. Using my metaphor for how Square Wheels really work in the workplace, we have something like this:

connected with:

A reality of organizations and training globally is something like this:

and that also relates to:

Engagimentation is my term for Dis-Un-Engagement, which is acting to remove the things that people perceive as un-engaging. It is simple roadblock management when you reduce to the ridiculous, but it can be done in a way that actually generates intrinsic motivation and the sense that the organization is listening.

I think that the typical Training looks like this, an attempt to build individual strengths:

The reality of going back to work generally looks like this:

Because we cannot generally address organizational structural and process issues in much of our training, and because of issues like resistance to change and a lack of overall workplace engagement, we have a wide variety of performance based issues. Here is an article on the problem of how we manage people and here is an article about workplace intrinsic motivation from other popular blog posts of mine.

One possible solution to these issues of ownership involvement and problem solving and intrinsic motivation would be better facilitation of ideas for performance improvement from the workers. We offer some simple cartoon-based tools for that purpose.

Lastly, remember to have some fun out there!

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 Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

Murphy's Law, Reframed

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 4, 2013

In Brainstorming techniques, Change, Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

Murphy’s Law is pretty basic and to the point:

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

As to its origins go back to Capt. Edward Murphy and his work at Edwards Air Force Base back in 1949. (You can read more about this on another post of mine.) The story goes that one day, after finding that an electronics component was wired wrong, he cursed the technician responsible and said, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.” The contractor’s project manager who was keeping a list of similar “laws” added that one to his list, which he called Murphy’s Law. It then appeared in that contractor’s advertisement and the rest is history.

We’ve been playing with this basic concept for 20+ years, but just in a slightly different and more actionable context. It looks like this:

Recently, I posted up a couple of cartoons and one in particular merited a bit of discussion, I think, since it links up so well to the real world application of Murphy’s Law and how it impacts people and performance in the workplace.

Consider this illustration and caption for a moment:

Note that I said Maybe. And DO think about the illustration itself for more than a minute – otherwise you will miss the key learning point.

The illustration is one that I call, “Trial and Error” and I have written extensively on the issues surrounding the common view of this by most managers and organizational leadership. You can find more on this theme here.

Murphy’s Law states that things will go wrong. That seems to be a pretty common occurrence. Tightly linked corollaries to The Law include:

Nothing is as easy as it looks.
Everything takes longer than you think.
If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
Nothing is ever so bad that it cannot get worse.
Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.

Viewed in the context of the above, many people looking at the illustration above will see all the problems and issues. They will point out the negative and what should have been done differently. But there is most certainly another side of this. There is the issue of continuous continuous improvement and the reality of how innovation really works.

Sure, the team might have done things perfectly the first time. And we can probably generate another four or five things that they could have accomplished in this iteration of the problem solving. They could have already put on some Round Wheels and they probably could have put the horse at the front. But consider the reality that they are now using a horse and that they have stepped back far enough from their wagon to see that the Round Wheels do already exist!

Now, they need to invent some device or some approach to actually mount those round wheels and maybe fill them with air and maybe adapt the axles to the tire rims. The Reality of Change is not that simple and elegant model that you think might work; change tends to actually operate more like this:

Maybe they can find a different way to involve the horse and they can implement a way to thus steer the direction that the wagon goes. One broken Square Wheel can find one Round Wheel as a replacement and that may lead to other things as time goes on. Heck, maybe they can eventually hook up another wagon to the back and invent the train!

Innovation and invention is full of Trial and Error and probably many cycles of it. Understand that some people put a LOT of effort into helping to try or implement new things and make workplace changes and improvement. In many organizations, though, the reality of change is one of risk-taking and opening oneself up to criticism, disdain and derision.

Note that two other Murphy’s Law Corollaries are:

Any problem can be overcome given enough time and money. But you are never given enough time or money.
All truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and eventually, accepted as self-evident. (Schopenhauer)

Improvement is about perspective, continuous ideation, constant trial and re-invention. It is about team support and celebration. It is also about getting the support of leadership, which often really requires money and time. It is about the celebration of all of the improvements made to generate momentum for future improvements.

So, that simple cartoon that we started with is chock full of a wide variety of different themes and messages. I’ll end with an old quote from the NLP literature:

If we always do what we have always done,
we will always get what we have always gotten.

As leaders, parents and managers, we need to support innovation and improvement, and sometimes that just happens when things break and we are forced to do things differently. It is much easier to criticise new ideas because we are sure that the old way works pretty much okay. And a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world!

For the FUN of It!

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Poems and Cartoons on Performance – Engaging Ideas

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 25, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, Brainstorming techniques, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, un-dis-engagement

Since 1993, I have been using cartoons as tools for conversations. The illustrations are simple and the concepts are straightforward, but the impact of these are pretty mind-boggling.

The main illustration that sets up all these themes and frameworks is called, Square Wheels One and it looks like this:

My general approach in using it is to give people one minute of silent contemplation about their ideas and perceptions, framing it as, “This is my model of how organizations really work.” Okay, if you have not seen this before, give it a minute of your time before reading below.

The methodology of using this is anchored to the Rorschach Inkblot kind of process, where people project their beliefs onto the illustration. Different people focus on different aspects of the cartoon, and there are no boundaries. After that one minute of individual silent contemplation, I then allow the tabletops of 5 to 6 people to discuss their ideas, freeform. Sometimes we collect them on easel pad paper (which slows down the process dramatically) and sometimes we just allow the conversations. I say that they have 5 minutes for the discussion, but I only stop it when the murmur and laughter subside or if I am under real time pressures to move on (like in a 30 minute workshop).

15 years ago, I tried to collect the different ideas that came up from the different groups that were in my workshops:

And there were lots of different responses, for sure:

I actually collected 13 PAGES like those above before I quit collecting. It became a huge mental issue of sorting and the activity became somewhat pointless — I had proved my point about ideas and the projective nature of thinking. And I will admit that even today, I still occasionally get a response that I had never heard before. Amazing.

Some of them are a Real Hoot, that I collected on this page:

The Big Idea here is that people have an amazing amount of creativity and perspective if we can only allow them to express it. If we can direct that same energy to workplace improvement ideas and build teams and teamwork around those things that they want to address, we are way down the road toward building involvement and engagement.

We sell simple toolkits for Dis-Un-Engagement and the involvement of people in solving performance issues in their workplaces. And I can readily customize materials for special and specific uses and users.

The ideas are there. The Square Wheels are everywhere. What can we do to simply get our people focused on identifying the things that need to be changed, playing with new or different ideas, and then building the informal teams needed to implement some solutions.

We can get them to do things with each other, instead of generating resistance to change from what our ideas might be. We can let these activities reinforce achievements and drive internal motivation. We can remove the things that they find are un=engaging.

So, I started playing with some cartoons and slogans and poems and Haiku to play around with the ideas that we can make improvements. Here are a few around Square Wheels One:

Yeah, and more to come!

For the FUN of It!

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Roll Better Ideas Forward – Improve Engagement and Innovation

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 13, 2013

In Brainstorming techniques, dis-un-empowerment, dis-un-engagement, employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, ownership involvement

The old brainstorming process works. It just does not work very well. And there are lots of ideas about how to make it better. In past blogs, I’ve shared a number of ideas and techniques to improve the quality and quantity of ideas. You can see this recent post, for one set of thoughts: “On Brainstorming and workplace productivity improvement” – the link.

This is your brain.

Brainstorming is pretty well understood and is a common technique used by people for idea generation. It originated back in 1942, with a BBDO ad executive named Alex Osborn who used the approach and coined the term “brainstorming.” He used these four rules of involvement and engagement:

1. Focus on quantity. More ideas are better and you can always separate the good from the less good
2. Withhold criticism. There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm and you want to just keep things flowing.
3. Welcome the unusual ideas. Look at things from every perspective and withhold judgment.
4. Combine and improve ideas. Things are synergistic and a bad idea can generate a good one. Recapitulate and juggle thoughts.

This approach is so common that I would guess 50% of supervisors could tell you the rules and they are often presented First Thing when facilitators use the technique. It has not changed much. The only real issue is that this is not the best way to generate involvement and engagement and ideas.

Research says that some of the best ideas actually come when people are alone and doing “considered consideration” of issues and opportunities and working in groups at a fast pace may miss some of the better ideas. An article last year in the New Yorker shared some fundamental ideas about how to optimize impacts. (find “GroupThink, The brainstorming myth” by Jonah Lehrer here)

Basically, research has shown that groups using classic brainstorming approaches generate fewer ideas than people who work alone and then assemble and pool their ideas.

What seems evident from this and other research on idea generation and innovation is that the best ideas and solutions to organizational issues seem to come from group discussions about ideas generated in isolation.

This research supports what it is that makes our Square Wheels One illustration such a great engagement tool, since it sets up a short solitary time for idea generation followed by some group processing of ideas and sharing of different perspectives and it changes the language of talking about organizational issues.

Getting people to talk about issues and opportunities is getting them to consider options and possibilities, and the power and strength of this visual metaphor allows them to return to these same organizational improvement issues down the road. You put their brain on fire!

Your brain on fire after brainstorming

The Square Wheels are everywhere, and so are the Round Ones. And once you start this process of issue identification, positive group processing, peer support, commitment to implement and the resulting praise and recognition for successes or movements toward success, you generate a more positive and engaging work environment.

If you want a simple “icebreaker” animation as a discussion-starter, we just uploaded a new animation to our tools for improvement, one that you can purchase and easily use with any workgroup:

This Icebreaker Toolkit comes complete with delivery ideas and support materials. Plus, you can always contact me directly, since I LOVE to play with ideas. Find more information here:

https://www.performancemanagementcompany.com/square-wheels-animation-icebreaker

All through the use of a metaphor about how organizations really work. Square Wheels One is the illustration that sets up the discussions of how things really work in most organizations and helps people to project their thoughts and ideas about their workplace on to the visual. They can work individually for a few moments and then collaborate as a group to expand their viewpoints.

The reality is that the Round Wheels are already in the wagon.
We just need to take some time to look for things to implement!
Sharing improves engagement / innovation and impacts teamwork.

The most revolutionary solutions spring from group discussion of ideas hatched in isolation. Let Square Wheels cartoons work for you.

(Brain on fire from CartoonaDay.com)

—

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

Dot-Voting and Square Wheels for Innovation Ideas and Improved Shared Ownership

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 7, 2013

In Brainstorming techniques, business team building exercises, dis-un-engagement, employee engagement, employee engagement, Engagement, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, large group team building events, ownership involvement

There is a real need to generate active involvement and engagement and to link that energy to innovation and continuous improvement. So, I wanted to share some ideas about how to get many things accomplished using a great interactive tool that I call “Dot Voting.” There are a bunch of ways to nuance it, but the basic thought is that it is all about actions to generate ownership of ideas.

The impetus to post the blog was a call from the CEO of an engineering company that had great participation from his people in general but he was hearing that better overall alignment needed to occur. He, of course, thought the mission and vision were clear but he also was perceptive enough to understand that everyone was working hard but not in perfect alignment. He was looking for some ideas to build a better sense of consensus among his 23 people.

We discussed his use of my Mission Statement Exercise, which is designed to generate a shared sense of ownership and help develop a clearer sense of goals and values. This is a complete toolkit that we sell on our website. It includes a simple Square Wheels powerpoint set and an explanation of a Fast Networking exercise designed to generate involvement and ownership across all the tabletops.

That Mission Statement development exercise is designed to get their ideas and to accomplish that quickly and efficiently. The discussions that result are powerful approach to clarifying expectations and discovering if expectations, goals and measurements might be incongruent to the overall desired outcomes in a framework that encourages everyone’s thoughts and participation. Involvement is a key to all this. After all,

Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car,
and
If you don’t know where you are going,
any path will get you there!

Geese Flying is about organizational behavior

Things are really simple most of the time. When you see geese flying, they work together but you also might notice that one side is longer than the other. Do you know why that is? Simple: there are more geese on that side…

So, the Mission toolkit lays out ideas for how one can pretty quickly get everyone on board and aligned to a common vision of the future and even feel as if they have played a part in that.

There is another tool that works great with large groups to get ideas and opinions and that can help drive a sense of consensus and that is Dot Voting, which also goes by Multi-Voting, cumulative voting and even dotmocracy. The concept and approach are quite simple and straightforward and there are different forms of use and delivery. As you might gather, it is democratic and evenly weighted in terms of individual opinions.

Some of the benefits include:

People get to browse a lot of data and information processed by other people
They get a chance to give their vote or votes to items on which they agree
It works with small tabletops as well as large events
Lots of ideas and information are collected and processed, allowing for an immediate “read” on the results as well as continued study and analysis.
Everyone participates and everyone is engaged
The manager or facilitator can stay neutral and allow for peer pressure and peer support to bring ideas and potential actions together
One can reach an immediate decision, if things are structured that way
It works exceptionally well for brainstorming and for Square Wheels idea sessions

The basic rules are as follows:

A facilitator is needed to run the session and keep things moving. That can be a manager or supervisor, but they would need to be neutral on the content and focused on allowing the session to flow.
Each person gets a certain number of colored sticky dots. All people get the same number.
People vote on the ideas or work done by a group of people at a tabletop.
People cannot vote on their own work.
You may have multiple rounds of voting, each using different dots meant to indicate different things (discussed further, below)
You share a time limit for voting – and you ring a bell to suggest that there are only 30 seconds left for voting
You want everyone to have sufficient time to look at the work of many or all of the other tables. You want them to see how many good ideas there are as well as have a vote in what happens
Some closure or summary is needed. This can be done by the facilitator or by people who speak for their tabletop’s work or by a senior manager who has the position power to do things.
All votes and ideas and work are anonymous
You may drive for some immediate action, or actions can be deferred. You can allow people who want to work on that “popular” item to form self-managed teams and go stand by or sign their names to that sheet of ideas.
You can always also provide a Parking Sheet for collecting other good ideas that did not get represented in this immediate work.

Some attempt may be made to insure that each tabletop is working on something different than the others and we generally use the Square Wheels metaphor about how organizations really work to set up the language and process of improvement. A sample worksheet looks like this:

In a typical Square Wheels^®session, for example, we allow tabletops to share 3 to 5 Square Wheels on worksheets and/or easel pad paper. Then, we first give each table one Large Colored Dot to stick on one of the Square Wheels that they would like to work on, with the goal of developing two or three real solutions or approaches to implement Round Wheels.

Before the tables can then start to work, we review the overall selection to see if any of the selected Square Wheels are the same as others (since one list might have a similar item as another and two different tabletops select the same one). Or, you can just let the process flow. The idea is to allow each tabletop to select an issue that they want to deal with, one that they will have some degree of ownership of.

You can also allow each table to vote more than one time on the finished ideas. You might give each person 4 red dots to vote on which idea is the most critical one to address or give them yellow dots to indicate which would be the most politically or culturally difficult to implement, or green dots to indicate which might have the biggest financial impact on the organization.

I will generally give out blue dots to allow people to vote on which issues they want to see fixed immediately.

Even with a really large group (200+ people), a round of dot-voting will only take 5 or so minutes. What you also get are people looking around at all the other ideas of the other tabletops. (Heck, sometimes people ask me if they can have more dots — I take that as a very positive sign and I do give them extra dots!)

This is a great kind of informal team building session in that you can allow people to really get involved and working together for improving the workplace. You can see that some issues definitely attract the attention of the group, while others seem less critical.

You can also combine this approach with a Roadblocks Management activity or the Mission Development mentioned above.

(Another beautiful aspect of this approach is that it tends to suppress that “Pet Peeve” kind of thing that one worker might have about something. They might be complaining about one thing for years, but if it gets NO dots, then there is a message there that they sometimes receive. At least, in the future, you can talk about it as not getting much actual support from others in the workgroup!)

Hope this is useful. And try out our tools for involving and engaging people for workplace improvement,

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
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

What are The Square Wheels Toolkits and why do they work so well?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 20, 2013

In Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, dis-un-engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator

Since 1993, we have been working with interactive “cartoons” and sharing the related tools as worksheets in seminars and powerpoint-based toolkits downloadable from our websites. My conference presentations most often include a free set of these materials that the participants can use back on the job. My focus has been on the themes of continuous continuous improvement and the active involvement and engagement of people in workplace performance.

How things roll in most organizations and most workplaces

What makes our toolkits unique:

If you purchase one of our toolkits, you get a complete training package, with ideas and instructions for facilitating discussions and generate the necessary involvement to help implement change. I firmly believe that,

Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car

and that if people are not involved, they cannot be expected to have any commitment for success. Often and commonly, people will resist things done to them when it comes to change and improvement. So, our unique illustrations get people involved and engaged in discussing issues and opportunities.

With a one-time cost, you get slides around the package theme along with handouts that help capture attention and ideas. Most things are designed for small group facilitation, to generate teamwork and shared ideas. Everything is based on the tools and approach that I have personally used to address some issue. And each toolkit has plenty of ideas and instructional support — plus you can connect directly with me, for free!

I sell facilitation; you generate engagement.

And all this for a one-time cost = Cheap! You get the tools and the materials gain exposure to future managers and prospects. After 20 years, the nature of the referrals we get are surprising and rewarding; it’s nice to create materials that can be remembered for improving effectiveness.

Why should you take a chance on using the illustrations?

Because they work. You can easily develop an interactive training program focused on team-based problem identification and problem solving. They generate involvement and teamwork. They get people thinking about issues and opportunities.

Because they are easy to use. There is really not much downside to showing the illustration and asking for ideas. They do not generate any defensiveness (they actually spark some humor) and do get everyone contributing when done as small-group discussions. They are easily used by new supervisors and grizzled senior managers. They work tops-down and bottoms-up as good communications tools.

Because they are complete. Most people get the tools, use the tools and then sometimes contact me, not with questions about using them but to talk about how well they worked. These are complete toolkits, with all sorts of facilitation ideas and potential uses explained.

Because they are bombproof. Their nature is engaging and they are shown as a general framework of how things really work in most organizations. They start as silent contemplation followed by group discussions followed by room insights and ideas. They frame issues as Square Wheels and possibilities as Round ones. There is never any defensiveness, since they are telling you their ideas.

Because they are flexible. There is no underlying specific or rigid model; it is just a cartoon or a series of cartoons. You use these to ASK people for their thoughts and ideas. They anchor to your organization’s key issues and opportunities.

And because of their general nature, people will project their ideas onto the illustrations. They will see what they see and think about the organizational realities. They give you their ideas and you can generate their commitment and involvement. They can help you link lots of issues to commitments to improvements.

Square Wheels are Really Good Stuff.
Easy to use. Highly effective.

I’ve used them with thousands of people in hundreds of venues on dozens of different organizational issues, in 38 countries so far. But that is simply for testing. You can do this yourself.

Lastly, we completely guarantee your satisfaction.

You are buying simple to use materials from me, personally, and I take pride in their effectiveness. Call me if you would like to chat – 864-292-8700 or chat with me on Skype – SquareWheelsGuy

And if you need a new and different approach or toolkit, let’s develop one,

For the FUN of It!

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

Workplace Motivation – “I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…”

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 16, 2013

In Brainstorming techniques, Change Facilitation, dis-engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Facilitation, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, un-engagement

“I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…” is my anchor point for what seems to happen often in the workplace. It may be a sudden thing, where the pin hits the balloon and the worker finally snaps and decides that they are quitting — but often, before actually leaving, they will placehold their current work as they will look for another job. Or, it may simply be that the person burns out, gets totally blase about things and just does not care to try very hard anymore. Then, they will simply work to meet minimal expectations.

In this post, I excerpt some of the key thoughts and data points in my article about workplace performance. You can download a copy of the full article from box.com by clicking on the image below:

What I will do herein is highlight some of the key points about how to engage the dis-engaged or to accomplish what I talk about as Engagimentation.

We can start with how it all starts, with a statement of how things are working:

Yeah, just imagine that! Let me know if you actually find one of those because they would be a good role model for the rest of them. I can imagine that things work pretty well there and that they are profitable. It is a nice thought. But research shows that it is far from the average workplace of today, where surveys consistently show the majority of people as dis-engaged and only casually involved. Surveys of managers show that many think that people would be happy to just have a job (and they are); but happiness with being employed does NOT translate into productivity and performance results.

Stats show 85% of employees report their morale declines significantly after spending 6 months on the job (from Sirota Survey Intelligence) and 49% of workers say they constantly have their antennae out for new job opportunities — even when they are happy in their current position. Few feel their current employer is giving them a fair deal in terms of advancement opportunities (Kelly survey).

We start with an energetic, positive and committed new hire who becomes one of those people who simply disappear and are working to simply get by and noticing if something better might come their way. Focused on meeting the minimally-acceptable standards of productivity and quality, they seem no longer much interested in much. They are not the first person you call on when something needs to get done. And there are a lot of them in most workplaces.

The article has a series of statistics that back up the basic idea that the majority of people in the workplace are simply choosing to underperform because they are just not “into it.” They are not bad employees, they are just not giving what they could and it shows up in a variety of ways. Think of them as: Average. Middle. Muddling. Mundane. Un-exceptional. Un-engaged.

Some Common Situation Causal Factors could include:

Being Restrained: One area of concern is around the mis-fit of policies, procedures, rules and regulations. They may become frustrated because they are restrained in how they accomplish things. They might want to be more helpful to customers or they may see possibilities of improvement that are either rejected as ideas or simply brushed aside.

Being Ignored: They may simply feel that they are ignored. They might not have feedback systems that provide effective information about their performance and those results may be invisible, in their opinions, to their management team. They might feel that they need training (or they are sent off to training for no apparent reason). And when they do extend forward, no one notices or comments; it changes nothing.

Not on the Team: Or, they may feel as though they are not part of the team or the in-crowd. People at the margins tend to become marginal. As part of a team, they often feel that their efforts contribute to the overall good. But with no sense of such involvement, they tend to become less involved, quickly.

Accidental Adversaries: Another factor was discussed by Peter Senge in his work on learning organizations and involved a series of small negative events that, in the bigger overall situation, would become more and more annoying over time. Repetitive small “pinches” could eventually be disruptive. There was not one event or one thing, just a bunch of little things that added up. It should not be surprising that these loops could be common between workers or between an individual and a supervisor and that, left unattended, they underpin a motivational problem.

Punishment, defined as a negative consequence that occurs following some behavior, is another issue in many workplaces. We are not talking “public disgrace” here or corporeal punishment; we are more often talking about little comments or perceived slights or the threat of negative consequences that could occur in response to behaviors.

When people are strictly following policies, procedures, rules and regulations, they will not be productive. (Yes there are situations like safety where strict compliance is important, but less so for customer service, manufacturing or similar kinds of activities). In fact, most work slowdowns are anchored in people following things overly precisely and carefully.

What do we do? How do we motivate these people?

Re-engage them. And understand that this will take time and effort. You cannot do this to them, but you can do it with them. Change and improvement take time, but the capability is there. Remember that, “Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled” (Frank Navran) and that you need to build your base moving forward.

Re-frame the solution into the simple context of Dis-Un-Engagement. This is the process of working with them to identify the things that are unengaging them and do things to remove those factor, in reality and in the perception of reality. The key is to be seen doing things differently. (I am not talking about faking it; I refer to the reality that many beliefs they might have are simply not true but if they feel that they have some control, these factors become less important.)

Dis-Un-Engaging is re-motivating by de-un-motivating!

Identify the past and present things that are currently un-engaging people and use facilitation and teamwork to identify those factors and issues that can be changed, added or reduced that will help to eliminate or minimize these performance issues and change the culture.

Actually, this is really straightforward and accomplished by:

removing the perceived (common) or actual (sometimes) things that are un-engaging people and teams, you serve the purpose of re-engaging and re-energizing them;
facilitating, you generate active involvement. You lead and engage;
creating a new sense of vision and mission about the future;
using teams to solve problems, you build the teamwork support, energy and resources needed to supply the peer pressure to improve and sustain.

Many believe that this is all there is to motivation:

clicking on the image will take you to another article on motivation

There are always threads in my LinkedIn groups focused on the above. Many organizations try to control people’s behaviors extrinsically, a highly difficult process fraught with all sorts of potential negative side effects. Money works, but there is a continuous need to increase its amounts to get the same results over time, and you will get a lot of competitive responses between people that have negative side effects and interfere with teamwork. Plus, extrinsic incentives will only motivate the top performers, in most situations.

In B, we will get performance. But it will be compliance-focused and not exceptional. And, do NOT turn your back, since various kinds of retribution and sabotage are common.

Recognize this simple reality: People WANT to succeed.
We simply have to help them come back in and re-engage.

You can start with something easy like this:

And simply listen for how people want their workplace to be. They will talk about the different problems that were fixed and the way they were engaged and involved to fix things.

After that works and you get a grip on the kinds of things that are seen as issues, you can help define how things work and get after those things that need improvement. Our approach has always been to ask for issues and opportunities using our Square Wheels illustration toolkits:

But there are lots of things you can do and how you can do them. My approach is to use the above and then get them thinking like this:

Intrinsic motivation comes from feeling successful and wanting to continue to improve how things work.

We want the group to feel like they understand the issues and can deal with them effectively. The key is to implement some improvements and possibly use teams to help with that process. Do things differently! Success makes Continued Success more likely.

Doing more surveys without doing anything to involve and engage people tends to feel more like this:

Working hard, turning corners, working hard, turning corners, working hard...

Companies spent $700 million on engagement surveys. They got close to nothing in return – engagement is dropping most places.

Don’t just have more surveys and more discussions. Involve and engage the people in the organization — especially those in the middle — to improve performance results of all kinds.

You can download the complete article on workplace engagement by clicking this sentence. Your feedback would be appreciated.

You can also find a 3-minute video on my YouTube page that explains the concepts around coaching and improving average performance and the idea of moving the overall performance curve to improve results at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cohrhcYpDCk

For the FUN of It!

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

Addendum – There is a really interesting “I Quit” letter going around, reportedly from a woman auditor who quits PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) because of people, structure, culture, and job growth. She pulls no punches. You can find that, with a long series of comments from other people, at http://gawker.com/this-is-the-best-i-quit-email-youll-read-all-week-1467082884

Innovate & Implement – an exercise linked to getting things done

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On February 22, 2013

In Brainstorming techniques, business team building exercises, employee motivation, empowerment, Engagement, executive team building exercises, experiential learning, innovation, Involving and Engaging People, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, team building exercises, team building exercises workplace

We’ve been playing with the design of a package focused on innovation for a couple of years. Since creativity and innovation are not primary focuses of mine, this game languishes a bit in my development of it, even though it works really great. It is a full, developed, and effective program that I simply need to play more often with my workshop groups.

It is a board game playable by 3 or better 4 people. Each table is separate from the others in that there is no collaboration or that kind of framework, other than what the players at the table do. I tried to model the issues around common problems that teams face when they try to solve problems and implement ideas and, like most of my other games, it is loaded up with metaphors.

We give each team the instructions and they have to pull together to develop a plan of action and coordinate efforts. As the game progresses, they get more and more efficient with their actions, and make more and more progress.

The goal is to move about the board and enter rooms and solve problems. Once they find the Round Wheels, they can then return home and end the game. Some measure of luck is involved, but it is more about efficiency and effectiveness. And while they can ask for help and find additional information “from a Training Class,” the work harder to avoid that than they do on learning anything!

You, as facilitator, can keep the players “tight to the rules and policies” or allow them to bend them a little to play better and faster. You, in a real sense, influence the Innovate & Implement game culture.

The debriefing of the game is excellent, and we package the exercise complete with our other Square Wheels tools to allow you to either integrate the game with your existing innovation or implementation processes or to build a complete program around the exercise with our other outstanding tools.

And you always have Scott to assist. He freely offers his consulting and coaching time to insure that you have the product you need integrated with the learning that you want.

The simplicity of this exercise would allow your supervisors to play it with their people to involve and engage them and generate the intrinsic motivation and teamwork to go forward and identify and solve their workplace issues and then develop an effective plan of action for implementation.

This package is a great value at $495 and you can see more information about the exercise at our website. Click here or on the game board icon below:

This is a fully developed, completely supported package of excellent tools!

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

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

Ideas on People and Performance, Team Building, Motivation and Innovation

Category: Brainstorming techniques Page 1 of 3

Monkeys, Management and Motivation – Simple Ideas

Facilitating? What are we accomplishing?

Learning Skills, Note Taking, and Improving Performance

Better Roadblock Management – Dis-Un-Empowerment and Square Wheels

Challengers: People to play Devil's Advocate and Contrarians

#6. Embrace forward facing contrarians.

<a rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/114758253812293832123″ a>

Elephants, Line Managers and Workplace Engagement

Brainstorming and Implementation – That DOES work…

Intrinsic Motivation and Engagement – Training is NOT the answer

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

Murphy's Law, Reframed

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Poems and Cartoons on Performance – Engaging Ideas

Roll Better Ideas Forward – Improve Engagement and Innovation

Basically, research has shown that groups using classic brainstorming approaches generate fewer ideas than people who work alone and then assemble and pool their ideas.

Dot-Voting and Square Wheels for Innovation Ideas and Improved Shared Ownership

What are The Square Wheels Toolkits and why do they work so well?

Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car

Workplace Motivation – “I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…”

Dis-Un-Engaging is re-motivating by de-un-motivating!

Innovate & Implement – an exercise linked to getting things done