Category: team building event ideas Page 2 of 3

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, large group team building events, motivational team building exercises, team building event ideas

We can improve the impact our expenditures of large teambuilding events if we carefully consider some success factors in generating ideas for innovation and implementation. Our tendency is to repeat what we have done before, and the goal of this article is to simply provide some new anchoring ideas for doing things differently and generating more impact.

There has been a great reduction in those “All Hands” kinds of meetings over the last 10 years. Once upon a time, one had to play a year ahead to find hotel ballroom space for meetings and make site visits and tour facilities; today, it is a lot less difficult. Being online makes all the difference and makes selection and programming communications really simple.

Back then, hotels were pretty arrogant about controlling all things and having complicated one-sided contracts for everything but today, one finds them a lot more flexible and interested in obtaining your business. Times change and their business has become a lot more competitive…

Herein are some key thoughts about making your company events more effective. And here are a couple of my older posts around some of these same issues and opportunities:

Here is an article about selecting a presenter who will involve and engage your people in an event that can actually change behavior and generate momentum for improvement. There are a lot of links in that to other articles and resources about organizing resources, also.

Here are some ideas about generating engagement and momentum for implementing change following a large group event

Here is an article about improving teamwork and collaboration in a large event

A post on some of the ISSUES with outdoor training types of events and some cautionary thoughts about anchoring to learning and change

Frankly, there seem to be a lot of strange and sometimes seemingly irrelevant things done in the name of team building and organizational development. The reality says that if you hang out at a large hotel and wander about the meeting area and you will see a lot of people sitting, just sitting there inactive when the doors are opened, as if they feel relieved that they successfully avoided things.

This observation is supporting the reality of Death By Powerpoint, or at least death by non-involvement and non-engagement. (One wonders why there are not required governmental warnings about deep vein thrombosis for sitting so long at some of these sessions!)

People at Onlinemba.com came across my blog while researching Team Building and sent me a link to one of their articles called, “How the Top Companies Take On Team Building:”

Few corporate-culture business phrases are as potentially groan-inducing as “team building.” Visions of cheesy performances and “inspiring” activities like coal walking and trust falls immediately spring to mind.

Yeah, it seems that a LOT of people realize that we can choose to do things differently for our meetings. With technology, so much of that data-stuff that executives like to live-present can be handled in screenshares or webcasts. For the most part, they are not asking for ideas or suggestions but merely sharing data. Face-to-face is an expensive way to push data at people.

I’ve posted up before on some of the more ridiculous or hard to seriously consider team activities such as golf, paintball and the infamous fire walking — and I just saw a twitter post suggesting that “detoxing” could be done as a teamwork improvement activity. (Seriously!)

Maybe there are some positive individual impacts from doing those kinds of things but I just do not see the teambuilding aspects unless we get into the discussion about peer pressure forcing people to do things that they don’t really want to do. (Sorry, I meant “encouraging” and not coercion or forcing people to do things in the above…)

Even comedic writer Dave Berry weighed in on Burger King’s toasty experience grilling their own managers with their firewalking activity — see my blog post on that here.

Many different activities DO have a variety of positive organizational impacts, and many of these are not costly. Some are a bit off the wall, like hiring a comedy troupe to come in and cause people to laugh at issues and reframe improvement opportunities (if they do not offend the senior managers too much!). And there are literally dozens of different online surveys and Personality Inventories with linkages to team behaviors. These can be framed as a team building exercise if there was more to it than simply discussions. Maybe they could let the comedy troupe do the personality testing?

In my way of thinking, I will simply continue to be designing and offering games such as The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine or Innovate & Implement that are fun, controllable, inexpensive and actually link directly to workplace collaboration and performance improvement.

We know that it has a lot of long-term impacts on participants and gets everyone involved and engaged. AND, it can be used for very large groups of 200 or even more.

Team building exercise, Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

click here to read more about the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine

In addition to selling the exercise to trainers and consultants, we also rent the exercise to people interested in an inexpensive, yet powerful large group event. If you click on the link below, you can find a clear explanation as to the frameworks for rental as well as our prices. It is inexpensive and powerful. Click here if you would like to see a few testimonials.

If you have any questions, please feel free to chat me up. I will offer my ideas and frameworks to you,

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.

Debriefing Team Building Games – Some Ideas and Reactions

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 29, 2014

In business team building exercises, Change Facilitation, employee motivation, executive team building exercises, experiential learning, Facilitation, team building event ideas, Team work

A few weeks ago, I posted up a 35-slide Slideshare compendium of some of the main debriefing themes we use, anchored to our teambuilding exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. The goal was to share how the exercise connects to organizational development issues and opportunities as well as to illustrate how we feel team building exercises of ALL kinds should work.

Dutchman focuses on aligning teams and players to shared goals and on generating collaboration between the tabletops as some of its unique competencies. It also links to leadership, motivation, strategic planning and project management themes.

Once I uploaded that file to Slideshare, I sent the link out to some of our existing consultant and trainer users of the exercise for their comments and reactions. All were positive and a couple of people offered up some good frameworks. Raju Madhaven, who used the game to train thousands of people when he was with Wipro in India (and who is now out consulting and training with his purchase of it) shared some good comments that stimulated me to blog about this:

You can consider including the Tuckman model of Teaming – Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing (slide 21/22)
Asking the question – Does your organization reward collaborative thinking? What are the ways in which it can reward? (slide 20 & 26)
Slide 23 – While the poem is great- I wish the readers don’t misinterpret the visual! (it shows a driver and his vehicle on a mountain flat with no way to go up/down!
I use the text in slide 33 a lot- very effective

So, let me embellish his comments with some of my own:

1. The Tuckman Model of Teaming is a very simple expressive model of four stages of team development: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. It is often useful in describing how people feel when they are challenged as a group to make a decision but it is not a tight model nor one that has proven itself as an organizational tool.

In referencing that model, Raju was referring to the slides that I use to express the common reactions of teams to the challenge and the need to go from differing ideas to a shared consensus in order for the team to operate efficiently and effectively:

The tabletops do move from discord and disagreement to a readiness to operate, and they accomplish this in the 15 minutes of allotted Planning Time before the start of the game. That simply demonstrates that people CAN reach a decision and work as a team under time pressures, if the goals and objectives are shared and the mechanics of how to operate are known.

2. Collaboration – Raju likes to ask questions about how organizations deal with the culture of collaboration — is it supported or is the culture more competitive. Much of the Dutchman game design supports the measured benefit of collaboration, since we can track how sharing information and resources helps to optimize overall results.

The issue of rewarding collaboration is a difficult one, I think, since the addition of extrinsic rewards generally increases complexity of the interactions (do you reward all team members for the extra efforts of a few of them or do you reward all the teams participating in an organizational improvement initiative when only some of them were major contributors and some may have faced legitimate roadblocks like a lack of funding for their work. I am a Big Believer in using intrinsic reward and self-satisfaction to push behavior rather than the extrinsic rewards to recognize success. Some balance is certainly needed!

Collaboration is an obvious benefit to organizations, but the way that we often structure measurement and feedback systems is to generate competition rather than teamwork. In many cases, the term “Interdepartmental Collaboration” represents an oxymoron (words that do not go together) and we even call different operating units “Divisions” in many large organizations, somehow expecting divided organizations to function together.

The consulting and alignment and leadership development of these aspects of organizational structure are a difficult issue to address in many organizational cultures, simply because they have always been competitive in their orientation. Dutchman accomplishes this better than anything we are aware of…

We have a number of consultant users framing the Dutchman exercise into one for strategy implementation and restructuring and similar massive organizational change initiatives.

3. Intrinsic Motivation – I have long used this illustration, along with a body language physical exercise, to stress the important feeling of success that comes from accomplishment.

So, I am using the concept of pinnacle or reaching the top as the anchor point for the image, not the fact that they are “stuck” or any such thing.

In my trainings, I sometimes have people stand up and then raise their arms over their heads. I ask them how that feels and responses are uniformly positive. Then, I have them droop their arms down and round their shoulders forward and put their heads to look down and I ask them how that feels. Routinely, they will say things like “low energy” or “depressing” or “heavy.” Then, I repeat the arms over their head, have them cheer or jump up and down or similar and then tell them that they always have a choice in terms of how to react to situations!

So, for me, the cartoon illustrates a success state, a state of accomplishment, and I discuss things from that perspective.

I am not thinking that anyone would not see that from the way I debrief that slide! You can use that kind of framing in most any training, I would guess. You might also note that the vehicle in the image has round wheels, but that is a whole different conversation!

4. My two simple ending or closing statements:

I like to anchor my sessions in the concept of choice and choices. We all get to choose our reactions to things and having a more diversified set of choices or considered alternatives helps us to choose better. Ownership is important, since

Click on above to read Scott’s blog on ownership involvement

All of our games and toolkits are designed to generate active involvement, a sense of ownership and commitment from the resulting discussions, and a set of considered alternative choices for future decisions.

I hope that you have found this framework useful and that maybe a new idea has been generated about improving the impact of your training and organizational development initiatives,

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.

Team Building and Large Event Management Ideas

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 18, 2014

In business team building exercises, collaboration, Corporate Team Building Games, employee engagement, employee motivation, executive team building exercises, implementation, Leadership Development Game, motivational team building exercises, Organizational Development Tools, team building event ideas, team building exercises for the workplace, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, workplace performance improvement

My network of consultant users is sharing the idea that the “large team building event business” which has been pretty sparse is starting to pick up once again. There seems to be renewed interest by companies in hosting effective team building events for their management teams to help refocus on issues of business improvement or interdepartmental collaboration. The theme of strategy implementation has inherent interest, as does general teambuilding to improve interdepartmental collaboration.

This is good for us because we offer one of the most effective simulations out there for helping to focus people in the theme of optimizing results through better communications, alignment and planning. We are also well-positioned to build on the successes of many of the outdoor training or challenge courses that set the stage for less work on individual learning and more work on organizational improvement.

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine fits a unique position in the marketplace. It is inexpensive to own and use, with only a one-time purchase price and no annual fees or licensing requirements or similar. A corporation like Wipro can run it with 30,000+ employees with the additional cost of printing paper, for example (true!). And I just got a testimonial from a consultant user who has had the game in continuous use for 19 years (that even shocked me!).

And people are reporting that their organizations have not been doing much with teamwork, sometimes for many years. They battened down the hatches on those kinds of developmental events a few years ago and just have not moved toward re-energizing their people or refocusing or realignment. The time seems to be approaching when some solid OD will have clear benefits.

If you might be interested in a solid developmental activity, you can rent the exercise from us, custom-packaged to meet your desired outcomes. You are dealing with the principle designer and owner of the company, so you get hands-on support at a high level.

Lots of people look to do team building within their organizations and Dutchman is one of those exercises that works well with small and large groups.

Normally, my conversations are generally with consultants and trainers who have been doing these kinds of things on a smaller scale and are looking for some new tools and approaches. Many of those conversations were with the, “been there and done that” crowd who were simply looking for some new and better tools than what has been out there in the marketplace.

We also just put together an agreement with Challenge Korea, an outdoor-based team building company who is going to begin using Dutchman, in Korean, and working to assist the larger companies there. It will be a good product addition to their current offerings, and will enable them to build more collaboration and followup implementation with their clients.

So, it has been fun to put my Coaching Hat on once again, along with my Event Planner Hat, and offer up some ideas for optimizing impacts for these new clients.We just had one organization run Dutchman with 9 different groups of college accounting students all over the US, with sizes from 140 up to 250 — and with great reported successes.

The exercise is about getting help along with information and on collaborating and sharing information and resources to optimize results. But what leaders see are people choosing NOT to get available planning information, to compete rather than collaborate among tabletops and to choose to not get help from the game leaders who are there to help! The messages are pretty obvious and the debriefings are most excellent.

Anyway, it is really neat to see these kinds of large events start happening again, since they can be powerful events to engage people in change and improvement and to lead them out of the current “engagement doldrums” that we seem to find ourselves.

Have some FUN out there yourself!

 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.

Debriefing Teams for Optimizing Impact – some thoughts on facilitation, planning and debriefing

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 31, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, Facilitation, Involving and Engaging People, large group team building events, Leadership Development Game, team building event ideas, team motivation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

I have been supporting the use of my team building board-game simulation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine since I started selling it to consultants and trainers back in 1994. Because I am so familiar with how it works and because I have done it so many times, I simply forget about the learning curve and the challenges faced by a new facilitator. So, I thought to share some ideas on keeping things simple and bombproof.

The exercise comes with a variety of instructional supporting materials plus the oft-repeated notion that the user can readily contact me by phone, email or Skype or whatever. But I would guess I actually hear from maybe 15% of the new users. More often, I tend to hear from the experienced users looking to spin the game off into a different direction or that have some delivery constraint they would like to solve. You can find some ideas around those issues in other places in the blog.

• Read about some general key learning points about team building and collaboration on the blog that is found here (Learning Lessons from Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine.)

• You can find some ideas about how to run large group team building events here. (This is focused on Dutchman but applies somewhat generally.)

• Here are some thoughts and ideas about delivering cross-cultural kinds of learning and team building events. (See more about cross-cultural frameworks for leadership development using Lost Dutchman here.)

• Here are some thoughts about getting through Day 1 of the exercise, when you are going to have a crash course in banking the game and also teach the Team Traders their role. (Find the blog about Surviving Day One here.)

• You can find some ideas for operating The Trading Post here. This is about how to “bank” the exercise. (Click here for Provisioner Training blog)

Generally, if you will search the blog with the search term “Dutchman,” you can find a variety of abstracts about many different articles on delivery.

I recently got a most excellent email from a new user, a person who I think is relatively junior in his organization of team building experts but one of the few who speak English. They purchased the Pro Version of the game and that game comes with a huge variety of play and debriefing possibilities. So, he asked me some questions:

Opening to my email reply:

Basically, I do what the client needs me to do to generate the desired outcomes they want. From their goals and objectives, I “automatically” adjust many of my leadership behaviors to align with their goals.

Please do understand that there are a few different aspects to all things about Dutchman, from small ideas that can be stressed in some client situations and not in others as well as differences in how the exercise is functionally facilitated. One can deliver the game and make people stick tightly to the rules and timelines or one can allow tabletops some flexibility.

Like cooking a meal, there are various ways to put it together. I do NOT play tight with the Beacon Card, for example. I do NOT take half of the gold from the team if they ask for help. That would embarrass them, in my opinion. So, the Beacon Card is simply a relief valve for the stress of planning and playing = they can always get help if they mess up and it takes the fear of “death” out of the play. I simply use that process to ask the players at the tabletop what choices they made and what they might have done differently and I relate it to their business practices if I can.

I try to go out of my way to explain how the exercise works and how to frame the game to optimize outcomes. Here is a post I did a while back as a specific reply to some questions about linking the play of the game to some issues for a large global senior manager meeting. (That delivery went extremely well!) My goal is to share the best ideas I can with my user-customers.

On Mar 28, 2014, (new customer) Robert wrote:

Please give us a feedback on the Debriefing: – There are many debriefing formats. Is there any order to which we can review them?

There are many dozens of ideas and discussion topics in the combined debriefing slide files. And there are many different styles for debriefing — I would guess that every facilitator using the game has evolved into doing things in their own unique way based on their personal style, their experience, and the audience.

This is over-viewed and discussed in some new video recordings I made available and I have included the links to these. When you get to the debriefing, there are all sorts of possibilities. I generally start my debriefings with the use of a series of cartoons, which allows me to comment visually on some of the key observations and make connections to desired outcomes.

MY style tends to show a question that I know is directly relevant to the client’s goals and outcomes. It is a high priority slide both in discussion time required and in its intended impact, for example. I show the slide, ask the question and then allow time for each table to discuss the issue. I will often move around through the group, listening to ideas they are discussion and possibly commenting or supporting or suggesting that they mention that to the larger group (when I allow the more public individual comments during the group discussion time on that question.)

My selection of which slide to use is also a fairly complex decision process, since I will never have all the time I would like for debriefing.

Plus, if we were doing a general debriefing after the session and returning back in the afternoon for a WORK session to define specific ideas to be implemented and to form work teams interested in implementing those ideas, my two debriefings would be somewhat different.

There is NO “Best Debriefing” and no ONE Debriefing. That is why so many different debriefing slides are included with the exercise.

Personally, I think I do a good job with my facilitation of the debriefing. But Thiagi would do something totally different, as would other users like Jeff Taylor or Gregg Baron. Each of us has our own style and every client is different. AND NO ONE WOULD DO IT THE WAY I TOLD THEM TO, ANYWAY!!! (grin)

There is a kind of script with that video link that I mentioned above but even that is not a fixed script. I simply talk about what I saw in the context of what the client wanted in the flow of the cartoon series. Some things are somewhat constant and consistent while some other slides generate wildly different comments from me.

I do have some notes included within the comment sections of some of the slides and there are some written discussion debriefing ideas in various places.

If you are debriefing a game focused on generating ideas about how to improve your personal facilitation of the game, you would do a much different debriefing than if you were running a session for the most senior managers of Samsung who were interested in the implementing of a new strategy, right?

The funny thing about your questions to me is that you are providing me with no real context other than “debriefing.” If I do not know what you are trying to accomplish with the debriefing itself, it is really hard to help. That is why I engage the client in clearly defining their desired outcomes; it helps me focus all things toward those goals.

I do not use the formal paper debriefing handouts that are included in different versions in your toolkit. Others might. It depends on the use of the handouts and what they are to accomplish. If people feel that they will be collected and analyzed and that they are personally responsible and accountable for what they write, you would get a much different outcome than if they were told that they were just simple worksheets on which they might capture their ideas.

There is no one way to cook a meal. And, since you are in Korea, there are many styles of kimchi with every chef doing things differently.

Basically, we are not some solution looking for a problem, but a tool that can be skillfully used to generate behavior and discussions of choices and the planning for different desired outcomes. These are two very different frameworks.

My approach to delivery is as a Facilitator, not a lecturer. My goal is to generate thinking and considered alternatives.

But this is all a result of facilitating organizational improvement initiatives since 1978. I am still learning…

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.

Team Building Followup – Maximizing Impact with Cartoons

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On September 26, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, experiential learning, intrinsic motivation, Involving and Engaging People, team building event ideas, Uncategorized

This is our 20th year of selling team building games and we are pleased to have so many great customers. In particular, we get tremendous feedback about The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. This focuses on leadership and inter-organizational collaboration as well as anything we have ever encountered. And we have the testimonials to prove it.

Another one of our special tools revolves around our Square Wheels illustrations and the toolkits that we developed for facilitating organizational improvement. As many people know, we started up a separate blog just for cartoons and poems — that has been FUN!!

These two things came together when a good customer asked if we had used any of the Lost Dutchman cartoons as poems for followup with individual participants, since so many of the debriefing discussions focus on themes of, “What will you do differently when you get back on the job?” and similar questions. Good question, the result of which is me playing with illustrations and doing more rhyming. I never thought of myself as a writer, much less a poet.

The result is that I am building up a big base of poems around all sorts of issues of organizational behavior. My goal is to have a complete set of illustrations that users could grab to send in regularly scheduled followup with clients or that clients could use with the game participants themselves as a way of throwing some mud at the fence and getting people to continue thinking of the choices they make around collaboration and problem solving.

I thought to share a few of the ideas here. Research has shown that images are retained better than words AND that simple poems and phrases add to the impact. So, the idea was to combine the images and some poems into a graphic that users of the game would be able to embed in followup emails or use in other ways,

Here are some of the first of these illustrated poems:

One of the things that has been amazing is the quality of user feedback and testimonials we get about the overall effectiveness of the exercise. You can see some of what our users say in this blog post summarizing our owner survey.

Lots of times, we generate Action Plans from the debriefing in our sessions and we can all be pretty assured that we can do some things to improve on the likelihood of implementation because of the nature of the comments that are generated. I am hoping that cartoons, poems and questions might be another tool.

I hope that you find these of some interest; we are always looking to collaborate as well as to optimize the impact and effectiveness of our materials,

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.

Annotated Abstracts of Management Team Building articles

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 15, 2013

In business team building exercises, Engagement, executive team building exercises, motivational team building exercises, Organizational Development Tools, team building event ideas, Team Building Games

Many of my posts are descriptive of ideas for business management team building exercises and posts on how to use training events to impact engagement and involvement for workplace improvement. This seems especially true for those focused on executive development, since the actions at the top have so many impacts as they cascade down through the organization.

One of my basic beliefs on these kinds of motivational team building exercises is that these events can be fun but that they can also be inexpensive and tightly linked to specific organizational objectives. One of the things we do is to deliver such sessions and then sell the client the simulation to run themselves through training or other kinds of developmental initiatives. They are really good when bundled into a strategy rollout kind of strategy.

What I did for this blog was simple: I searched my posts on “Motivational Team Building” and came up with about 20 different articles among the 275 in the blog. Then, I selected 5 that seemed most relevant to someone searching for that kind of information.

1 – In Lessons from The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, a game on teamwork and collaboration, we focus on some of the key learning points in our teambuilding exercise. One is that collaboration, even when it is encouraged, is really hard to generate. People choose more often to compete even when it sub-optimizes results. It is also easy to see that the three most important resources are Time, Information and Each Other. We also then talk about the issues of My Team, My Team, My Team and how we can help organizations improve overall collaboration and engagement.

2 – The post, “Maximizing Team Building Impacts with Senior Managers,” addresses how to involve and engage the top managers of an organization with the goal of cascading the teamwork and alignment down. In many organizations, the phrase interdepartmental collaboration is an oxymoron, and it exists because of exclusive measurement systems and the competition between leadership – causing the silos. This article focuses on working with senior management and shares some thinking about how to implement this initiative throughout an organization.

3 – Innovation, Strategy and Motivation is focused on my thinking about the overall effectiveness of a program I did in Mumbai, India for a group of very senior managers. It was focused on my friend Robin Speculand’s approach to strategy implementation and wrapped around my Square Wheels illustrations as tools for generating alignment and engagement. I include links to Dan Pink’s materials on intrinsic motivation and also relate to other resources for impacting people and productivity.

4 – Does Teamwork Work? Issues and Ideas for Improvement is about the basic design of team building programs and their linking to organizational improvement. There are a lot of activities out there representing themselves as team building that may or may not be truly effective in linking to real organizational improvement initiatives and business process improvement. Many might have aspects of collaboration or team thinking involved, but are they really designed to facilitate a powerful debriefing? Dutchman was designed to link to issues of optimizing performance results.

5 – In Workplace Motivation – “I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…“, there is a solid review of the data and statistics on workplace motivation, which anchors really well to what we can do differently to better involve and engage individuals and teams for performance improvement. The data show that there are just so many people going through the motions of working, and that they could accomplish a lot more if the workplace was more situationally engaging. People can do more, and they will if you allow them. It is a lot about Intrinsic Motivation.

These are a few of almost 300 articles in my blog, ON PERFORMANCE. I hope that you find some of these ideas of use and benefit as you move things forward in your organization or for your clients.

Plus, I am just starting up a blog of poems, quips, one-liners and other illustrated cartoons with captions and slogans. You can check it out at http://poemsontheworkplace.wordpress.com/

We believe that we have some of the most useful tools for communications and organizational development that exist. Our team building games are simple and effective and our Square Wheels toolkits easily involve and engage people to share and implement their ideas for improvements.

Have FUN out there!

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

Team Building and Poems on Performance – Cute Visuals on Collaboration and Goal Setting

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 9, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, collaboration, Corporate Team Building Games, experiential learning, Metaphors for business improvement, team building event ideas, team building exercises for the workplace, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

Teambuilding is about generating alignment to shared goals and visions and also about involving and engaging people in collaborating for optimized results. The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is our tool to teach along the lines of competition and collaboration as well as planning and doing. Basic to its unique design is that sharing information and resources helps tabletops to optimize overall results for the group.

To set the stage, understand that the goal is to mine as much as WE can and optimize the Expedition Leader’s Return on Investment (ROI). The role of the Expedition Leader is to help teams be successful. We feel that these two factors model the desired outcomes of most leaders operating in most organizations. The reality is that teams more often choose to compete rather than collaborate and that they seldom ask the leadership for help, advice or even resources to generate maximum results.

So, with this as a basic entry point, here are some poems and illustrations that help to illustrate the issues and opportunities. Teams can make better choices in a variety of different ways. So, here goes…

So, the planning now completed, teams begin to play the game and see the results of their planning and their choices. The goal is to mine as much gold as we can.

Now, the play is almost done and teams are looking about and making comparisons about their performance to the performance of other tabletops. Some chose to collaborate, some chose to get advice from that Expedition Leader and some might have even asked for some resources to help optimize ROI for the table and for the group.

So, now we can take the time to reflect on things and turn the game into a powerful learning event where we discuss past choices for the game and future choices for the organization. It lends itself to reflect on things that are done well and things that need to be improved. It is a chance to reaffirm the goals and directions, share the visions and to pull things together.

Have FUN out There!

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

Thoughts on Team Building – Cross-Cultural Impacts of Lost Dutchman

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 29, 2013

In business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, experiential learning, Facilitation, large group team building events, Organizational Development Tools, team building event ideas, team building exercises for the workplace, workplace performance improvement

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine really works well cross-culturally and I was reminded of this when my associates in India sent me their new marketing flyer. In the past year, they have developed a great base of multinational clients and have delivered both leadership development workshops as well large group events.

I was really impressed when they sent me their new flyer for the game.

From the beginning, I have always seen Lost Dutchman as a simple tool for organizational development, one that links to some of the real issues of interdepartmental collaboration, leadership and alignment, and how to motivate people to work together for improved results.

It is always great when other people also “get it.”

I just finished a significant update to all of the handout materials and our debriefing slides. If you own an older or smaller version than Lost Dutchman Professional Edition, you would find these materials of interest, since they are not included in the materials furnished with the game. There are a lot of new files added to the handouts, also.

If you are just simply interested in ideas for facilitating teamwork, you would probably also find these materials helpful, since they represent different templates and frameworks for generating engagement and involvement in general, and they focus on the ideas that we use within all of our team building games for generating perspective on issues and opportunities for improvement.

You can download these materials at this location on the Performance Management Company website.

Take a look and see if these materials can be useful for you.

Have FUN out there!

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Having an Off-Site Company Meeting? Ideas for Success

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On March 14, 2013

In Change Facilitation, employee engagement, experiential learning, ownership involvement, productivity improvement, team building event ideas

There are some good tools out there to optimize the success of an off-site meeting. The list of Don’ts is pretty obvious to most of us if we spend 2 minutes thinking back to either the “Most Memorable Bad Meetings” we have attended or try to remember all the sessions that we forgot – many of these corporate gatherings leave nothing but a hole in time. My goal here is to share some alternative approaches to this problem.

Gaining negative examples is especially easy and brainstorming with four of your senior managers on the Bad Ones might actually even be fun (if, and only if, none of them were directly involved in the “planning” of that event!)

It is kind of fun to sit by the fire and tell stories!

In a nice blog by Bob Frisch and his team (see it here), they share a number of good ideas about Big Picture Planning for Events. The blog was a shorter version of an HBR article by Frisch and Chandler that expands things a bit more.

Their tips include the requirement that there be some pre-planning focused on desired outcomes and key goals for the meeting.

Typically, it seems like the CEO says, “Let’s have a meeting” and defines who will attend. A list of top leaders is generated and maybe an outside expert. Budget limitations define venues, numbers and activities. Golf gets expensive and bowling is too goofy. Airfares, room rentals, cars and meal costs add up quickly and there needs to be some ROI in order for this to make sense. And when all these things come together, the outcomes of the meeting should be apparent and the changes driven from the commitments should be meaningful.

This does not mean the generation of a list of characters who should be there because they are bosses’ bosses or that kind of thing nor should it simply be a list of people who do good PowerPoint presentations, because the reality is that much of that kind of content can be webcast or podcast these days and need not be part of the travel-time agenda. And also envision the normal glazed eyeballs and distracted looks in the dim room during the last session you attended…

After all, how many PowerPoints IS it possible to watch and survive?

(Some surveys say 3, but my personal experience is sometimes ONE. Yes, when I have a scheduled delivery of one of my team building experiential exercises, I will sit in on other presentations and will often observe participant reactions rather than listen to content. I can remember some good ones, but the reality is, “more are quite bad than somewhat good.” They don’t call it “Death by PowerPoint” for no reason, right? A search of “Death by PowerPoint” (in quotes) generated 346,000 results and without quotes, it was 27,100,000!)

Message: Fewer Lectures by Senior Managers without vetting for engagement and interest!

People can sit at their desks and review powerpoints either by going through the file, as a podcast or even a webinar. Why pay the costs of airfare and hotel and then have them sit basically isolated and hopefully listening?

What do you want them to Do Differently as a result of sitting there?

We look at such events as the only time that you can get these people into a room to interact and engage each other, to dialog face to face to build more collaboration and cooperation, or to solve real business problems and take away an impetus to do something differently.

The reality should be that we do a better job at the front end in designing the desired back end and the behavioral outcomes we desire. The program itself should be engaging, or have engaging components. People need to interact and develop a sense of ownership and commitment.

Let’s take the situation of the top management team that has developed a new strategy that needs to be rolled out. Who are the key players who will determine the steps to successful implementation and who are the people who NEED to know first-hand about the strategy so that they can begin communications? Who needs to attend to help us develop the roll-out plan and the timelines? Where do we focus and what do we need to change or eliminate from our measurement systems so that we can add some new behaviors that support the desired changes?

It is these kinds of questions (and more) that will help us define the plan and drive better outcomes.

Our approach looks more at involving and engaging participants to generate some ideas for innovation or improvement and doing different activities to teach and practice facilitation / motivation skills that the participants can use with their staffs or to do some team building to identify real ideas to improve collaboration or to design strategy interventions.

Other consultants and trainers in our network do sessions specifically designed to focus on Creativity or Leadership Development or Strategy Implementation.

But the goal and desired outcome is to enable change. This will not occur if you sit there and observe the scoresheet, any more than a basketball team will take practice time to sit and go through the Box Score of the game from two nights ago. Reviewing information is not going to improve skills or interactions and it is certainly not going to develop a level of ownership commitment needed to do something differently.

A couple of days ago, I got an email from a young engineer who is part of a planning team designing an event for 250 people. From the information I could gather, this was to include a one-hour interactive team building session for 1/3 of the group at a time and for tables of 8 – 9 people since this was how the rest of the program was apparently designed.

I referred him to my blog post on team sizes and optimal outcomes which basically reviews a lot of research that indicates that small groups perform much better than larger ones and that supports my 25 years of playing with tabletops no larger than 6 to drive behavioral change. Plus, devoting ONE hour to teambuilding at a multi-day conference was highly likely not to change one small thing, even. But at least they were looking for some experiential learning to accomplish this as opposed to doing DISC or something…

My suggestion to him was at the NEXT conference, they do something like our Lost Dutchman team building exercise, do it for the entire group, and spend half a day participating AND working on ideas for improvement and change. The desired outcome should be to generate some plans for doing things differently and for developing a followup plan to make it more likely that things will actually change and improve. It will not come from some senior manager standing at the front of the room talking about The Mission and The Vision and The Strategy. We need to paint the picture for people about where we are going:

Square Wheels View from The Front of the wagon image

The view at the front of the wagon, which is different than the view at the back!

Alignment will come from the active engagement of participants and the detailing of specific desired changes — and ideally measuring those improvements in a meaningful way.

After all, Nobody Ever
Washes a Rental Car!

People must have an ownership commitment in order for them to be expected to take care of things and do the maintenance and other tasks necessary to take care of the business.

What I do is designed to be an excuse for a targeted debriefing — all my activities are designed to generate perspective and discussion and engagement so that tabletops can reframe situations and generate ideas for improvement. The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a 2 hour game that we can debrief for days — seriously. If I am asked to deliver a session, I want 90 minutes for the debriefing and also the active participation of the Most Senior Manager, who I get to lead, “What does Mining Gold mean for Our Organization (and what will we choose to do differently to mine more gold!)

If I use the Square Wheels as an approach, we will always get into a discussion like this one. (You can download and view a pdf version of the worksheet below by clicking on this link: SW – RWs worksheet)

There are many interactive games that you can use to teach collaboration skills (like Collaboration Journey) or creative, innovation and implementation processes (like Innovate & Implement). And lots of other vendors sell useful and effective products that can link to real behaviors and engagement.

Why have anyone sit and watch? What would YOU prefer to do?

The goal is to involve and engage people for some change in behavior. This is a lot easier to do at one large event with a focus on facilitating and involvement than to do one-on-one in rollout. Companies can deliver powerpoint show in many different ways at a lot less cost than at some venue.

Getting people off their seat and on their feet and involved with discussions of potential improvement or an analysis of the critical factors necessary to implement some new strategy is ONLY accomplished at such events.

————–

This came from the Haines Center’s newsletter – Strategic Management Insights (April 25, 2013)). It added some solid additional perspective and ideas:

8 Tips for a Successful Management Retreat

Accomplish strategic planning, team building or simply have great conversations about the business, with a successful retreat. Regardless of the size of your organization, bringing senior managers together for a well-planned retreat is a smart business decision. Conducted properly, corporate retreats can be a great investment that helps move your company in the right direction. They can be a great opportunity for strategic planning that will enhance performance and foster overall growth. Follow these eight tips to assist you in planning a successful senior management retreat:

Decide on the focus. Every organization has its unique dynamics, goals and challenges. Are you designing a retreat for strategy or just team building? Do you need to improve office morale? Do you just want to relax? Your agenda may vary depending upon the focus of your retreat.
Find a suitable venue. Pick a location with comfortable accommodations, a variety of meeting facilities and easily accessible local attractions. Be sure to consider what your senior managers would benefit from. Aim to make your decision based upon the overall quality of the experience offered, not just the price.
Select appropriate participants. If you fail to select the right players, your retreat will be unproductive. Identify key people. Consider the benefits of including executives, managers and top-performing employees. Invite only those that can actively participate in achieving your focus. No more, no less.
Set an agenda. Customize your retreat based upon your key objectives. Be sure to fill each day with a well-balanced mixture of business and fun. Distribute the agenda before the retreat so your managers can begin to think about the topics and prepare themselves to participate in any activities.
Bring information. Before the retreat, ask your senior managers to compile a list of relevant information, data and research about your organization and its business environment. Use the list as a starting point for discussions and to promote the sharing of ideas.
Begin with a group activity. Plan an informal event to kick off the retreat. Use this as a way to introduce new faces, minimize tension and encourage group interaction.
Retreat now. Repeat. You will be amazed at what you will accomplish with a well-planned retreat. Repeat the events as often as possible to ensure that leaders don’t go ‘back to business as usual’. The investment will be worth every penny.
Engage a facilitator. Find someone from outside the company to facilitate the retreat. Maintain your goals and vision, but allow a seasoned professional to manage the process of achieving them.

A successful senior management retreat will help you to gain a better understanding of your most important leaders. Contact us to plan the retreat that may help your organization to achieve superior results.

You can reach Haines at http://www.hainescentre.com

—————-

My personal experience with meetings and conferences extends over 30 years and 38 countries, a lot of it presenting and a lot of this listening to others. Like many of you, I have sat through 100s of presentations of all kinds in all sorts of venues. Only a few are memorable. My positive and negative experiences plus a lot of research on experiential and accelerated learning have helped me as I designed some really great tools for organizational development and engagement. These engaging tools are all simple to use and highly impactful, guaranteed!

If you are interested in a large group team building event focused on organizational alignment and inter-organizational collaboration, my Lost Dutchman game is superb.

You can rent the exercise very cheaply for a one-time use or purchase it for repeated use in training or as part of an implementation program for strategy or change. SYou can also find some ideas for ways to cheaply run a large group team building event AND fully engage the senior management team on implementing strategy in this blog post.

And with any rental or purchase, you also get my personal absolute unconditional free full support for dealing with your questions and challenges. AND, I will guarantee great results.

Email me for desired personal help. Or call me. I am more than happy to spend time framing up different approaches for improving people and performance, regardless as to whether it is going to generate a sale for me.

For the FUN of It!

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

Square Wheels are a trademark of Performance Management Company

Military Team Building Games – some thoughts on alternatives

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On February 17, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, large group team building events, Leadership Development Game, team building event ideas, team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace, team motivation, Uncategorized

Good Governance, rather than autocratic leadership, is one of the keys to creating value and improvement for organizations and society.

Organizations of all types are looking for tools to help improve collaboration and teamwork and they sometimes are looking toward military models of operations, since we tend to view SEAL groups as highly organized and effective. Thus, many view the use of some kind of “military model of leadership” as a tool to improve performance in their own organizations.

And remember back in 1986 when everyone was going toward “Top Gun” kinds of training programs and employee improvement actions because of the popularity of the Tom Cruise movie and the apparent thrill of flying a jet fighter? Ah, if organizations could only work like that! Zoom Zoom! They were printing Top Gun Baseball caps for everyone, it seemed. (But if you actually remember the movie, the leadership and congruence among the teams sure was not that smooth and everything was a competition, which sometimes nearly got people killed. There was constant conflict and often a lack of coordination, Boss-driven compliance, demotions and all that…)

I am sometimes asked how our teambuilding and collaboration products can be used for a Military Team Building Game or similarly themed-exercise, either as a game with a military theme or one that can be used by a military unit to teach practical leadership and teamwork lessons. And there are a bunch of anchor points to generating good results and impacts.

Some of my client colleagues who do these kinds of team building events in various military organizations all say pretty much the same thing. Russ, for example, said, “The only thing I have to say is that military has the same issues as civilian, local focus, lots of distractions, different risk levels,…. Nothing jumps out as specific or different for Military applications.”

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine remains my flagship product and one that we are proud to offer to clients of all types, profit and non-profit, who are interested in generating more engagement and collaboration across organizational barriers. The focus is on the overall result of the group, not any one team. And the applications toward idealized Military Efficiency are pretty straightforward.

My personal beliefs are that an exercise themed on a military team building would tend to be too focused on competition / violence, something that might not sit well with a female audience or one that an objector might find distasteful. My “Military Might!” exercise, for example, is one that my son and I designed initially for his high school Air Force ROTC organization to teach the criticality of planning and attention to detail. As Corps Commander, Jeff needed to improve how things worked and improve attention to detail, as in taking inventories and similar functions. But Might! game is about planning to kill terrorists – and I am reframing the design to become an oil exploration exercise with many of the same learning points; just a different message medium.

So far as generating compliance because or ordering people to do things, it is common that people commanded may not complain, they may simply do. But the distaste for being told will remain. And compliance does not generate a lot of desired outcomes in general.

And the basic theme of a “military game” may generate unanticipated consequences*. I have a friend who still suffers from PTSD from his activities in Vietnam. He remains an out-patient in the VA hospital and attends group therapy. If he were one of the players of a military-style game, he would have fun, but there would be a residue left behind from such an event and it would probably trigger a lot of negative memories and emotions. The problem is that one can never really predict what will trigger what in other people…

* (My lawyer friends say that nothing is actually “unanticipated” but that due diligence would discover the unexpected problem and prevent it from ever occurring! “Saying” that it is unanticipated does not remove one from the responsibility for the unintended consequences…)

A colleague in the DC area and who regularly delivers programs for military leadership development and communications courses had this to say about military-themed team building and leadership training in general (in blue):

For decades there’s been a huge emphasis on collaboration information sharing across units and services (between Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy). Collaboration is an important and real issue today between these groups, not to mention between our security services like Homeland, NSA, FBI, CIA and local police forces. There remain a wide variety of teamwork and communications issues that directly impact public safety.

The phrase “joint operations” is used frequently (a similar phrase is “going purple”). This is about reducing the historic inter-service rivalries, and increasing effectiveness through the concept of one, joint fighting force. This kind of military team building exercise can also show up on the local level. It is also related to Emergency Preparedness, where interdepartmental and turf issues can show themselves clearly.

[As an aside here, my personal observations of such joint operations at a local high school among the fire, police, state police, EMS and Public Health Services was so inefficient and ineffective to be almost comical. A big laugh for me came when one of the demolition guys took a great deal of time and space to set off his “explosion” to mark the beginning of the terror-response activity. It was a real “guy moment,” in my view and had nothing to do with the exercise other than the fun he had blowing stuff up! Heck, they had difficulty choosing the radio channel to use for communications among the divisions!]

Dutchman also contributes to understanding these concepts and their power.

– Today’s military and government agencies face a variety of pressures to be more nimble, fluid, change on the fly as conditions change.

– And today’s military members fill roles they haven’t played before, in place like Iraq and Afghanistan – nation builder, mentor, friend, teacher, diplomat, as well as warrior.

Interdepartmental Collaboration is not good

Joint military teamwork can look something like this

Those are a lot of different roles, so feeling part of a team and developing one’s leadership and collaboration skills is a critical component of any developmental initiative. Getting groups to work together across natural competitive lines is a powerful tool to implementing new missions and visions and optimizing results.

So, to the extent that Lost Dutchman helps people see the importance of what I mentioned, in the above, it can help you convince folks in the military of its utility for them.

(You can see more of Russ’ thinking about things here: www.russlinden.wordpress.com)

We think that we have an excellent leadership development exercise in The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. It links to the real issues of aligning people to a shared mission and vision and it supports collaboration, even when teams choose to compete. And while it is not a military team building game, it accomplishes all of those things that such a design would need without resorting to attacking others or creating damage or some such thing.

Dutchman is about leadership and collaboration and sharing goals and objectives. It is about optimizing results with limited resources, planning and gaining strategic information that is critical for overall success of the team and the group.

Our many user testimonials say that Dutchman is a great team building game – see some of them here at our other blog

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

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Large Group Team Building Events – Using Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine and Square Wheels

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On February 14, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, large group team building events, Leadership Development Game, team building event ideas

I was asked about using the Lost Dutchman game for working with large groups a few minutes ago so I thought to share some ideas. These days, I do only a few training events and presentations a year, mostly for when I go to kickoff a new exclusive contract with a collaborating company in foreign lands or when I see a good challenge or high impact event. I love this stuff and it has been 28 years in the business, now. It is hard to believe but we first started presenting The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine in 1993 — 20 years ago and it is better than ever!

There are few interactive, participative and engaging team building exercises that work really well with large groups. (I will note that I can deliver Square Wheels sessions for large groups, interactively and with a great deal of participation, but those sessions are just not as FUN and Memorable as the Dutchman ones…)

And I will admit that I really do like using the game with large groups, since it works really so well with large groups and I will often be able to get the most senior leaders actively involved with me in its delivery.That tends to generate their level of ownership involvement and commitment toward both the delivery as well as the required followup needed to actually implement the ideas that are suggested and the impacts that are discussed.

I guess my most favorite “trick” is to get the organization’s Most Very Senior Manager (see pictures below) to actually lead the post-game discussion of:

“What might mining as much gold as we can mean to our organization? What things can we choose to do differently?”

The responses to that from the direct reports are usually right on target and meaningful and they would not even bubble up if the participants did not think that they were at least somewhat doable and that they would obviously need the involvement and active support of that senior leader. It is the perception of roadblocks and impediments that seem to be the most common roadblocks and impediments!

Plus, I like working with the senior managers most of all, and if we are doing a large group team building event, let’s say 150 to 200 people, I can often get the senior leadership team to actually go through and debrief the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine team building training event with me before we actually do the training on how to co-deliver and support the game in the venue and then afterwards.

Followup is the breakfast of team building champions!

Doing these kinds of sessions also has a certain level of challenge for me and it does leverage my time pretty nicely. Often, my simple credibility as developer of the exercise seems to lend itself to having a good deal of impact on the issues that the organization faces to improve collaboration and performance.

When you can get the senior leader of the organization up front and asking what people can do differently, that is really neat:

Or when you can get the President of the organization on the floor, in a cowboy hat (below drinking coffee), trying to “Help Teams be Successful and Maximize ROI,” that is great to reference in the debriefing as well as when he wears his cowboy hat to management meetings to talk about optimizing organizational performance results:

Since we sell our Professional Version of the game to organizations and consultants, they also find the game easy to play and useful for engaging participants in discussions of issues and opportunities for improvement. Many of our user-base runs the game with large groups and one client company (Wipro in India) ran one session with 870 people in one game! The testimonial we get are routinely excellent:

You can read more about delivering the exercise to large groups in other articles on our blog. This one shares some ideas about actually delivering the exercise for large events and was written to support owners of the exercise.

You can find out a LOT about this exercise from my Square Wheels website by clicking here and more about pricing and purchasing the exercise at www.PerformanceManagementCompany.com

My role is to help team be successful and maximize Return on Investment!

How can we help YOU?

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Some testimonials about our Team Building Exercise, Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On February 10, 2013

In collaboration, employee engagement, implementation, Innovation Implementation, team building event ideas, team building exercises workplace, Team Building Games, team motivation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

We think that The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is an absolutely great team building exercise that allows anyone to help their organization focus on issues of collaboration, optimization of overall results, and improving how organizations implement change and strategy. It links to our Square Wheels tools, elegantly, and thus is a great tool to use for building employee engagement and the implementation of creative ideas for improvement and innovation.

And we are not the only ones that feel that way. Here is one from an internal trainer, one from a international consultant and one from an executive assistant who ran the game with her company’s senior leadership team (and got rave reviews from them!)

We find that people who have used some of the competitive products in the marketplace (and by competitive, I mean that they DO generate competition when they should be generating collaboration) are either much more expensive or not as flexible or just not as good (or all three). You can click here for a comparison of Dutchman with Gold of the Desert Kings, for example.

If you want to learn more about the exercise, please visit our website. Or, better yet, give me a call at 864-292-8700. I generally answer my phone most hours of most days and would love to chat about this stuff.

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Big Company Team Building Events

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On October 31, 2012

In collaboration, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, Leadership Development Game, motivational team building exercises, team building event ideas, team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace

This blog post is about what Big Companies do for team building events and the kinds of programs for team building and organizational development that exist. It is also about Big Events for companies, I guess, and focused on some key thoughts about making events more effective. Frankly, there seem to be a lot of strange and sometimes seemingly irrelevant things done in the name of team building and organizational development.

Hang out at a large hotel and wander about the meeting area and you will see a lot of people sitting, just sitting there inactive when the doors are opened. It gives rise the notion of Death By Powerpoint, or at least death by non-involvement. One wonders why there are not warnings about deep vein thrombosis for some of these sessions!

People at Onlinemba.com came across my blog while researching Team Building and sent me a link to one of their articles. The title was, “How the Top Companies Take On Team Building” and I liked the way it started, since I pretty much agree with this:

I’ve posted up before on some of the more ridiculous or hard to seriously consider team activities such as golf, paintball or fire walking — maybe there are some positive individual impacts from that but I just do not see the team aspects unless we get into the discussion about peer pressure forcing people to do things that they don’t really want to do. (Sorry, I meant “encouragement” instead of coercion or force in the above…)

Heck, even Dave Berry weighed in on Burger King’s toasty experience with that firewalking kind of activity — see my blog post on that here.

But the OnlineMBA article mentioned above is a pretty good one. It talks about some different activities that DO have positive organizational impacts, many of which are not costly. Some are a bit off the wall, like hiring a comedy troupe to come in and cause people to laugh. I have actually seen that backfire but that is a whole ‘nother conversation. And they talk about doing Personality Tests as a team building exercise — I guess that could work but it does not sound like a lot of laughs. Maybe they could let the comedy troupe do the testing?

Me, I will just stick with offering games such as The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine or Innovate & Implement that are fun, controllable, inexpensive and actually link directly to workplace collaboration and performance improvement. We know that it has a lot of long-term impacts on participants and gets everyone involved and engaged. AND, it can be used for very large groups of 200 or even more.

You can find user review survey about Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine impacts here. The feedback about the effectiveness of the exercise is pretty amazing,

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

Why use Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine for large team building events?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 9, 2012

In business team building exercises, collaboration, Corporate Team Building Games, employee engagement, executive team building exercises, Involving and Engaging People, LDGM, Leadership Development Game, motivational team building exercises, team building event ideas, team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace, team building exercises workplace, Team Building Games, team motivation, Team work, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, Uncategorized

I was chatting with a human resources director and we were planning the presentation of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine for about 250 people — her whole organization — in one big fun learning event. This was for a financial institution priding itself on customer service and customer / employee retention and collaboration and communications, so the fit was quite good.

The plan we discussed is for her to have her senior management team do a team building program using Lost Dutchman, where they will sort out their issues and opportunities and what they choose to do differently and improve on and then teach them how to support the delivery for the large group. As I posted up in the blog the other day, using senior management to help deliver is a pretty common model for me, one where the internal people do all the training and delivery work without using an outside person. It dramatically helps generate alignment and makes these people part of the actual perceived organizational support team!

Why use Lost Dutchman and Senior Managers for such events?

Well, the design of the game precludes my personal involvement — I am not required to help deliver it, which has many positive impacts. If I understand the desired outcomes, I can customize the suggested debriefing. If a trainer can use the game with her executives — and the metaphors of the exercise and the actual behaviors of the executives — she can deliver a highly congruent program and deal with the results without “personal involvement.” She will not be attacked for her leading discussions about the sub-optimizing choices of the leadership team.

AND, she management/leadership prepared to support the delivery of the exercise to all the employees. This saves a great deal of money and dramatically improves the relevancy of play to reality of how things are working and can work.

After all, two main themes of the game are focused on organizational alignment and collaboration:

and

The Goal of the game is to COLLABORATE and optimize results...

These are business card magnets that we often give out as reminders of why we played the game. They generally wind up on file cabinets and breakroom refrigerators.

The word we use is, “WE” but teams take that as, “My Team, My Team, My Team” in many cases.

Dutchman is a powerful game that’s easy to learn to deliver, bombproof and congruent in its play and focuses discussions on choices that we make and alternative choices that are available in the game, and then back in the workplace. Collaboration and engagement are the things that lead to employee involvement and intrinsic motivation.

And because it is straightforward and easy to play, it becomes a great event for managers to truly demonstrate their active support for helping teams be successful and optimizing results of the entire group.

Dutchman works great for very large groups

Dutchman is a powerful exercise for large events since you run the game with internal people (and leaders if you can involve them) and the game metaphors are completely congruent with the concepts of collaboration between departments and engaging people to motivate high levels of performance. The discussions focused on actual behavior and the choices that people could make in the future are also great ways to discuss possibilities. It is these visions of how thing could be that help drive improved overall results and engage and motivate individuals. It is the alignment to missions and visions that helps push things forward.

Have fun out there, get people aligned and performing, and improve things!

You can see more about the exercise on our websites at http://www.performancemanagementcompany.com/category_s/110.htm and at
http://www.squarewheels.com/ld/ldindex.html where there is a LOT of descriptive information.

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

Rental of Team Building Exercise for Large Groups

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 1, 2012

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, executive team building exercises, Involving and Engaging People, LDGM, Leadership Development Game, motivation in the workplace, motivational team building exercises, Organizational Development Tools, team building event ideas, team building exercises, team building exercises for the workplace, team building exercises workplace, Team Building Games, team motivation, Team work, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a great team building exercise for focusing teams of people on themes of leadership, alignment, collaboration and the optimization of performance results. We’ve been selling and supporting the exercise worldwide for almost 20 years.

And it has been pretty crazy here lately, with some new business coming from some old friends, which is really neat. Two different consultants contacted me about renting our team building game, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine to run large events for their clients. And both are old customers.

The wild thing is that both used to be with corporate training departments that bought the exercise from me about 10 years ago. They had great successes with it and, as they described the situations, they wanted a high impact and bombproof session for their new clients. Thus, they remembered the exercise and thought to contact me.

Renting the exercise is one option. It is best for those “Large Group Team Building Events” that are a one-off kind of thing. Many of the customers of our small games (for 3 or 4 tables of 6 people each) like being able to run it once or twice for really large groups without having to invest in our large game version. It is also useful for a one-time team building event such as an “all-hands” meeting where the management staff will run everyone through the game. We have supported many of those kinds of trainings and there is no upper limit on the size of the group — one client had a session of 870 people in the same room!

Unlike a lot of the other designed team building simulations, we have a truly elegant and pretty bombproof design, which allows us to NOT offer train-the-trainer or require certifications or have other kinds of restrictions. Many of our customers simply get the materials, review the overall support documents, go through the powerpoint and — maybe — call me. Many choose not to bother!

I offer free and unlimited telephone support – you talk to the game designer and a master facilitator, not to some “support person.” Few people seem to need the support, though, which says that the included materials are pretty complete. They should be, since we first delivered the game back in 1993 and have played with its design and supporting documentation since that time.

I can also customize the design in small ways, and work with you to design and refine a debriefing that fits with your goals and objectives and within your time limits. Generally, for large groups of 60+, we like to have 3.5 hours to do the game and the debriefing. I like at least an hour and even 90 minutes for the debriefing, since that will help generate the commitment to improve collaboration and teamwork, planning and communications.

We are surprisingly inexpensive, high-impact and very memorable, and the game can be specifically tailored to generate your desired outcomes. This is THE world-class team building exercise focused on improving inter-organizational collaboration and aligning people to shared goals and objectives. It can be run by line managers and executives, too, not just people in training and consulting.

We also have a posted pricing schedule, so you can look at the costs of renting this team building simulation and the detail of delivering the exercise before contacting us.

We think we are the best value in large group teambuilding events, costing lots less and offering more benefits than most other competitors,

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

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After all, Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car!

After all, Nobody Ever
Washes a Rental Car!