Category: Uncategorized Page 1 of 4

In Change, Change Facilitation, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, Engagement, Icebreakers, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, performance management company, team building exercises, Team work, Uncategorized

Change is a constant in the workplace: there is always something…

Sometimes change appears to be happening too fast and sometimes it seems much too slow, given the business needs. Sometimes we are looking to make changes and sometimes we simply must make change to keep moving forward.

On my poems blog, I just posted up this illustration poster:

The simple idea is that the wagon wheel has broken, the team needs to get moving again, but the wheel needs to be replaced. With Round Wheels literally “at hand”, we put on a new Square Wheel simply because that is what we have always done. We roll on Square Wheels!

My “regular” line-art cartoons that we use in our toolkit on change, look like this:

The related image that shows some improvement looks like this:

Note the difference — the woman is now installing one of the ROUND wheels.

In the cartoons, overall, we see three people and some note the reluctance of the wagon puller to let go of the rope. Some viewers might comment that the guy at the far left is just lazy and not helping out. But you might also note that the wagon is up on the points of the Square Wheels, making it easier to install a new wheel but much harder to balance, which is the job of those two people.

One guy is lifting — we all know of those people who really put out the effort to help teams succeed.

Lastly. Many people simply miss the HORSE. The horse represents a completely different way to address the reality of moving the wagon. It is surprising how many people miss that aspect of the situation as they focus on the broken wheel. Heck, even the characters in the cartoon seem to have missed that!

What I have been doing for 20+ years is involving and engaging people to see things differently and teaching a VERY simple yet actionable model for understanding change, identifying leverage points and action plans and facilitating the process in such a way that the participants can identify things that they can do differently as well as engage others.

The key is to focus on employee engagement and ownership. If people are involved, they are more likely to be engaged and feel some sense of commitment to getting things done.

I use a simple tool, my Square Wheels illustrations and metaphor to set things up.

The wagon rolls on a set of wooden Square Wheels carrying a cargo of round rubber tires. The process continues this way because of a few different factors, such as the square wheels actually working (just like they always have), and the lack of perspective (“Don’t just DO something, Stand There!).

The reality is that stopping the process and implementing improvement takes time and is not always successful. Plus, the round wheels of today will invariably become the Square Wheels of tomorrow.

The intent of this facilitation is to involve people in stepping back from the wagon and seeing the obvious – the round wheels already exist and should be implemented to make long-term progress and not simply to meet the goals for today.

Sometimes, I introduce the concept of Mud, the glop that gets in the way of moving forward. This can include organizational restraints (perceived and real), politics, culture or simply the difficulty in changing. I then show the wagon and the people up to their “axles” in this mess and how hard it is to make progress. For me, “mud” is a great metaphor and I use it with the theme, “Get out of the ditch and up on the road” to introduce the issue of choice and choices. We choose what we do. Deal with it. (“If it is to be, it is up to me!”)

(“Mud” can also be grinding paste, cement, and other things. On my website at www.squarewheels.com, you can also find recipes for making Gack out of things like Elmer’s Glue and borax – Gack is a gooey mess — a “colloidal suspension.”)

“The best “Mud Managers” do things differently. What is it they do?”

This is a great question to ask, since it generates alternative behaviors and alternative thinking in their discussions, often anchored on best practices of the exemplary performers in the room at that time. (Peer coaching!)

At some point in the design, we will move toward my model of change, involving the current level of discomfort with the way things are now, the attractiveness of the vision of the future, the individual or groups’ previous history with change and the peer support for improvement.

All four things are actionable and under control of the manager. Change can involve teamwork or simply group process techniques for identifying issues and opportunities. But once something (a process, generally) is anchored as a Square Wheel, it almost always generates an implementable round one — this nicely taps into the cognitive dissonance model of Festinger.

Change does not have to be done TO people and is best done WITH them, having them involved in the different aspects of environmental and social support. This is why the illustrations work. We get people actively involved.

If you want to read more about this, you’ll find my article that includes these ideas, “Teaching the Caterpillar to Fly” at:

Teaching The Caterpillar to Fly – Thoughts on Change – Part One

Plus, if you’d like to make any comment or discuss any of this, it would be most welcome.

For the FUN of It!

Scott Simmerman Ph.D. CPF, CPT is still managing partner of PMC and collaborating with the team at PMC LLC, but also sort of retired…

Scott is developer of the incredible Square Wheels® tools and images
and the board game version of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine

Scott has presented his concepts in 47 countries and collaborates with consultants and trainers worldwide.

You can reach him at scott@squarewheels.com and you can see his profile at LinkedIn

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

Reflection and Innovation: Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 5, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, Change, Change Facilitation, Corporate Team Building Games, Engagement, innovation, manager as motivator, Managing and leading change, Uncategorized

This statement,

Don’t Just DO Something,
Stand There!

describes the action that we have been teaching as a basic tool of innovation and change since the early 90s. Only by looking at a situation from a dissociated perspective can one even possibly see that new ideas might exist.

Too often, we are so busy pushing and pulling the wagon, just like we have always pushed and pulled, that we seldom have the opportunity to step back and look at things from a displaced perspective. Once we do, we can often see that things are rolling on Square Wheels while the cargo of the wagon — round rubber tires — represent ideas for improvement.

A Square Wheels image from the tools of Dr. Scott Simmerman

Consider taking things apart to look for new ideas

The act of dis-assembly can identify issues as well as build teams. And new ideas will spring from that effort, along with improved teamwork.

Very often, people who perform better than others — the exemplary performers of any organization — will already be doing things differently than the others and can add those ideas to the mix. The round wheels in so many situations are already identified and tested and implemented and refined.

One of the series of Square Wheels images of Dr. Scott Simmerman

The more they play, the better it gets

(Note that the majority of the people, and especially the poor performers, just keep on keeping on and doing what they have always done and their Square Wheels remain in place. They need to get involved with new ideas.)

Innovations can occur quite naturally. Some of us are nearly always looking for ways to do things differently so that it is easier. Tom Gilbert expanded on a framework of “laziness” back in the late 70s in his book, Human Competence. I have always liked that concept: Because we are naturally lazy, we will always be looking for the easiest and most efficient way to do things.

Why not look for the downhill route instead of pushing and pulling the wagon uphill (and sometimes through the mud)?

By involving and engaging people in the identification of the things not working smoothly and through the sharing of best practices and round wheels, we do a better job of engaging and involving the workforce. Engagement is a key to motivation and sustaining high performance. Or, putting the Round Wheels to use!

People like to play with ideas and do things differently, if they feel that the team is behind them and the risk is low. It has all kinds of positive impacts and ramifications for continuous continuous workplace improvement.

If you like this post, give us a like or a tweet or make a comment. Your reactions are always appreciated,

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.

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.

Scott's Most Excellent Presentation Quotes and Quips

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 17, 2013

In Uncategorized

Teaching the Caterpillar to Fly

and other Square Wheels Workshop Quips and Quotes by Dr. Scott Simmerman, managing partner of Performance Management Company and author of the Square Wheels tools for improvement.

What follows are the main quotes and one-liners that I use in my presentations, with many of them linked to specific illustrations or serving as the names of the illustrations in the Square Wheels series. We also started up a new blog of illustrations and quotes and poems and similar that you might find interesting if you find these quotes of interest. We are calling that, “Poems and Quips on Workplace Performance” and want to make that a fun and interesting destination.

Any unattributed quotes in this list would be mine if you choose to requote it –don’t we all have some of these in our mind! And feel free to share some of yours in the comments.

Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There!
Get perspective and reflect rather than just continuing to do the same thing – this is usually linked with Square Wheels One:

Put a good person in a bad system and the bad system wins, no contest.
W. Edwards Deming

Get out of the ditch and up on the road.
Jon Linder – we link this to our mud illustrations in both SWs and with our Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine teambuilding game

It’s relatively simple. If we’re not getting more, better faster than they are getting more, better faster, than we’re getting less better or more worse.
supposedly by Tom Peters

One wheely good idea can lead to more wheely good ideas.

How long can we go mean and lean before we become gaunt and dead.

It’s all about Continuous Continuous Improvement.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
adapted from John Le Carre

We have a few illustrations that link to this concept. But it is basically about not being clear on what is happening or even having a bad idea:

Your brain works faster than you think.
source unknown

What you see depends on what you thought before you looked.
Eugene Taurman

We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are.
Max DePree, Leadership is an Art

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.
source unknown

When you go from being a caterpillar to becoming a butterfly, you’re nothing more than a yellow gooey sticky mess.
Ted Forbes

If caterpillars were meant to fly, God would have given them wings.
anonymous Spectator Sheep

Nothing is ever as dangerous as having THE Answer.*
*That is THE as in DUH!

If things seem really under control, you’re not going fast enough.
Mario Andretti

A mission statement is defined as “a long awkward sentence that demonstrates management’s inability to think clearly.” All good companies have one.
From The Dilbert Principle, 1996

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, God calls a butterfly!
Diane Mashia

Even caterpillars can fly if they would just lighten up.

Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.
The Eagles, Take it Easy

We could be standing at the top of the world instead of sinking further down in the mud.
Meatloaf, from the song “All Dressed Up and No Place to Go.”

It’s a lot like throwing mud at the wire fence. The key is throwing lots of mud and paying attention to what sticks where. Expect some rain.

The Yankees are only interested in one thing. And I don’t know what that is.
Luis Polonia

Boss spelled backwards is self-explanatory
(note – This is a US euphemism. Contact an American for further explanation!)

Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled.
Frank Navran

This may be a perfect opportunity to use common sense!
Bob Pike

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple stupid behavior.
Dee Hock

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
Abraham Lincoln

Swedish Proverb*: God gives every bird his worm, but he does not throw it into the nest.

* Apparently not yet recognized in Sweden, based on workshop comments!

“It’s hard to care for customers if you don’t think the Boss cares for you. Boss spelled backwards is also self-explanatory in many cases.”

Hope you found these interesting. For more quips and quotes, view our blog on poems and quips on performance

You or check out the Resources page on our old Square Wheels website. That has tons of articles, jokes and other stuff.

I hope that you find these of benefit and possible use. DO have fun out there and keep people energized and the work more engaging.

For the FUN of It!

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

Does Teamwork Work? Issues and Ideas for Improvement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On July 25, 2013

In Uncategorized

There are people who think that no teamwork actually works to improve performance and that the effort and expense are a waste of energy and time. Yeah, maybe. But it does require some planning and alignment to the real issues and opportunities of improving management team building for business improvement.

More and more, I see and hear about some exercises that really sound like mediocre ideas for impacting workplace performance and just do not understand how some of those activities are actually linked to performance improvement. Sure, tossing balls around in a circle with more speed the second time can demonstrate better coordination of a group’s activities and, yeah, seeing that improvement after people talk about how they could do it differently does indicate that teamwork works. But what the heck? How do you really make that activity bridge to improving interdepartmental collaboration when the bosses of those departments are not involved in the activity.

(And I DO think that paintball might be a fun activity to watch as the different department heads duel it out on an individual basis for Leadership Supremacy. But I really doubt that winning that exercise will dramatically improve trust and respect among each other or that is it is an optimal paradigm for building teams within an entire organization — paintball sets up, by design, competing groups with no possibility of collaboration. You know that they sell paintball mortars, right? Designed to kill lots of players with one well-placed shot.)

We know that there are many different kinds of troubles with implementing strategies and there are issues of organizational culture and divergent measurement systems that do NOT lend themselves to organizational team building or organizational alignment interventions. There are a lot of different intra-group and inter-group issues that can be directly addressed with interventions and team building, things that can be readily discussed and resolved once the issues are smoked-out.

PMC has a vested interest in the issue, since we design and sell interactive team building activities focused on resolving issues of engagement and collaboration between teams.

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, for example, has proven itself in its ability to generate commitment for change and improvement since 1993. It’s about solving problems, strategic planning, and collaboration with others who have information they could share. It is about working with others under the pressures of time, with measurable results.

And there IS a lot of crap training out there calling itself teamwork, in my opinion. I have attended and participated in way too many to pretend that they do not exist. Some are just plain goofy!

Yeah, let’s all cheer for the outstanding bag jumper while it is 105 degrees…

My particular pet peeves are around activities like Firewalking, Paintball and High Ropes — “training events” that have few links to issues of people working together to solve problems, interacting to define things to improve, etc. I just do not believe that “team bonding” is a sufficiently powerful incentive to change workplace business practives.

And Golf as team building? Really? HOW??— Sure, golfers are known as great teammates and team play is crucial to success (Not!). Maybe when the players are boozing it up at the 19th hole, but not during play, most certainly. It is one-on-one-on-one-on one, or maybe two pairs against each other. They cannot help each other, unless maybe reading a putt.

Bowling? Maybe. Cooking? Maybe, if one is running a big commercial kitchen in a restaurant or hotel and each of team is responsible for ONE aspect of that meal and they are collaborating on the overall timing… But just let one try to help another by offering some “help” in the way of advice.

Too many people ride as cowboys in their organizations – they are one-man bands, working alone and not in concert. There are too many workplaces that reward individual performance and then think they can expect their people to work together. In so many organizations — with lots of research supporting this — many of the people are not engaged and many are DIS-engaged. One might not expect much in the way of collaboration from those people.

A recent Fierce, Inc., survey found:

86% of respondents blame lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures.
70% of individuals either agree or strongly agree that a lack of candor impacts the company’s ability to perform optimally.
97% of those surveyed believe the lack of alignment within a team directly impacts the outcome of any given task or project.
90% of respondents believe decision-makers should seek out other opinions before making a final decision; approximately 40% feel leaders and decision-makers consistently fail to do so.

But we can motivate people and drive alignment to shared goals. People want to feel successful and not be scared by the risks of performing. We need to get them to a new place, mentally.

In high performing workplaces, you will also see a collaborative culture where people work together to handle issues and solve problems. Granted, that approach may not work too well in places like Real Estate, Mortgage Lending or Stock Market Sales, but we do see a strong need for collaboration and commitment where things like production or product design or customer service come into play.

Take any group of people, give them some common goals, measure them on shared performance, and allow them the ability to help each other and you have the basics for a workplace situation where teamwork will arise. Then, do some activity that demonstrates the benefit of collaboration on the overall results — something like, “The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine.”

Then, debrief that activity and discuss the choices that people made along with the choices they COULD have made, link it to the issues they see in their own workplace, and allow them to make commitments to each other (peer support) and you are highly likely to see improvement (if there is a bit of followup after the session).

Think of all the activities that we engage in where teamwork is absolutely essential to accomplishment — sports is but one endeavor. As my North Carolina Tar Heels demonstrated (yeah, I know about Duke winning the ACC Tourney), their improved collaboration and teamwork was visibly what enabled them to run out 20-3 for the last part of the season. Lacking that teamwork, they started at 6-4… Same players, but a different level of confidence, communication and effort.

And esprit de corps is most certainly higher in those places where people are involved and engaged and working together toward common goals.

Does Teamwork not work? I don’t think so. Teamwork is ALL about group performance. Teamwork always works if we don’t prevent it from working.

Sure, individuals can excel individually, but only through collaboration with others and if they are involved and engaged. Only with motivation can we get a group of people collaborating to high levels of accomplishment and performance.

It is about leadership. It is about identifying opportunities for improvement and then celebrating the successes that are gained.

Have more FUN out There!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.  Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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

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

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

Simple thoughts on Extrinsic Motivation

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 3, 2012

In employee engagement, employee motivation, Engagement, Feedback, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, Performance Feedback, productivity improvement, Uncategorized

Sometimes, I am not sure what triggers the motivation for me to pop into here and write up a blog. This one was triggered from “the holiday spirit” + some advertising on TV + a new LinkedIn discussion post on a similar topic + some of my own diabolical thinking and critical reflection.

This one is about motivating people through extrinsic rewards. Or, more about how that stuff actually demotivates people.

Extrinsic Motivation. What might make it effective? When might it not be effective and why? We really do know a lot about rewards, reinforcement and behavior and extrinsic rewards can control behavior in many ways — but some of them are somewhat surprising.

One is struck by all the ads on TV that suggest that viewers of football games and other TV shows will simply go out and buy someone a Lexus as a surprise gift for Christmas. I mean, really? Just hit the auto store and get that new car for a person who might be your wife or girlfriend simply because it IS Christmas (add theme of Jingle Bells here). (And you see the same kinds of ads for diamonds and other expensive jewelry — you are not a worthy person unless you spend lots of money on that other person on an extravagant or useless gift.)

Small Rant – Diamonds are always presented as a “very worthwhile investment.” one that holds its value. The gift that keeps on giving and that kind of thing. It is CARBON, people, and labs now can churn out truly flawless chunks of clear carbon (or colored clear carbon effortlessly)! The industry even suggests you give up 3 months of salary to get a “representative stone” for your marriage. Three months for a rock of carbon? Four years of car payments to demonstrate you are worthy? (Yeah, I rant…But how many people make money when they resell those things?)

Behind those ads, there must be some kind of hidden behavioral motivator that would cause one to want to buy a new expensive luxury car — I mean, most of us are not at all that altruistic, are we? So, what behaviors of that other person are you trying to motivate by getting that expensive gift?

There exists an extensive literature on BF Skinner’s concepts around the development of Superstitious Behavior, finding that a reinforcer following some random behavior will tend to make that random behavior get repeated. So, if the wife is washing dishes on Christmas morning when you say, “Honey, look out front!”, getting her a new car will reinforce her washing dishes… (More likely, she is sitting on the couch — remember, you made this choice of timing!)

A reality is that not all extrinsic rewards are rewarding to all people. That is one of the problems with using the to improve organizational performance. Generally, only the top performers actually get the rewards. And it is even worse than that. Bersin, in its “State of Employee Recognition in 2012” survey, reports that nearly 75% of organizations have a recognition program — despite the fact that only 58% of employees think that their organizations have one.

Obviously, corporate programs, which represent 1% of total payroll on such extrinsic programs, are not getting much bang for the buck. But remember that it is the “winners” of these programs who get selected to be supervisors and the winners of those jobs get to be managers and the winners among them become their bosses. Gee, winners are the managers and who makes the decisions to keep these programs to reward the winners in place?

Why not simply focus on the bottom 80% of all the people, many of whom are disengaged and un-involved.

I share some statistics and thoughts on involving and engaging the mass of workers through something I am calling “engagimentation.” It is a program on Dis-Un-Engagement. It builds on teamwork and on involvement and can help to generate intrinsic motivation, which is much more effective.

You can download a pretty detailed article on engagimentation and motivation by clicking here: I Quit! Nevermind. Whatever…

You can read a bit more on the situation there. Personally, I think that the best motivators are not extrinsic and are not given to employees with a goal of improving results of some kind. Why? Because they don’t always work. For an example, let me illustrate with a puppy. I mean, is this a cutie or what?

So, here is the deal: Make a comment on this article and I will find one of these little puppy guys at a nearby animal shelter and give it to you, free. I will reward your comment with a dog that you can take care of for the next 10 to 15 years! What could be better than that? And this particular one is a Saint Bernard, a lovely little guy who will get bigger and bigger (and bigger). If I cannot find you one of those, I am sure that there are some Great Danes and other ones that you would surely enjoy in your place of abode.

I mean, would this not be a great motivator one could give to everyone who had good performance?

(Me, I do not want a puppy at the moment! One cat is more than enough!)

Get a reasonable gift for those you love during this holiday season. And remember that you wife probably does NOT want a new electric drill or leaf blower.

And when you think about rewarding workplace behavior with extrinsic rewards, recognize that “not everyone wants a puppy” and that you just may be rewarding behavior that you do not really want to re-occur. You give someone a cash award after they return from a sick day and you may be rewarding them not to come in to work! Or, your timing is such that they just told a customer to go away, so you might be rewarding that…

Better to look for intrinsic ways to reward performance. Look to improve feedback systems and improve peer support of change and improved results.

Oh, if you like this post, you could buy me a new Tesla Model D. Ya think?

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 and owner of Catie the Cat.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Motivation and Dis-Un-Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On October 31, 2012

In collaboration, employee engagement, employee engagement, intrinsic motivation, motivation in the workplace, ownership involvement, team motivation, Uncategorized

I got engaged in a discussion on LinkedIn, on a discussion page for HR professionals, where the question focused on, “How one can keep an employee motivated.”

The comments, again from HR people, focused on motivating employees through appreciation and recognition, having “a good environment,” having good morale where motivation, environment, management and employee relations affect things – and also having monetary benefits, having a speech to inspire them (and that they cannot always be motivated), and that they should be happy to work for your company (I am not sure if the latter meant that they should he happy to have a job or that they should be happy while working for your company).

The contributors also thought that one should also analyze each person personally and be sure that the employee is properly placed according to their strengths and expertise and that they should be assigned, “challenging work that would keep the passion burning.”

Lastly, I thought that this was also an interesting comment:

“Motivation sparks from self. A self-motivated person enjoys everything in life. Other people can just inspire the person. A person who enjoys his or her work can only stay motivated. Money, appreciation, recognition, environment along with work & personal life balance are some factors which helps only after the person is self-motivated. Its my personal view.“

All this is fine well and good. And it makes sense. BUT, will any of these thoughts actually impact work and productivity or quality or anything? My response was as follows:

There is a really great short video by Dan Pink on the theme of defining INTRINSIC motivation — it is animated and 11 minutes long and you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

So, motivation is one thing that is actually pretty well understood. The issue is that organizations tend to focus much more on EXTRINSIC (applied) motivators rather than create a workplace that is engaging. Much of this comes from the work of BF Skinner on animals during the 60s and 70s and those who followed him (like me). It got into schedules of reward and all sorts of things, including superstitious behavior (blowing on the dice to roll a 7, for example).

People like Alfie Kohn (Punished by Rewards, etc.) showed many of the downsides, but businesses today spend about 1% of revenues on such extrinsically driven “reward systems” that half of the employees do not even know exist. Obviously, there are mixed levels of effectiveness.

A better approach is to focus on improving the workplace to do a better job of NOT de-motivating workers. Much of my recent writings have been on themes like Dis-Un-Engagement and Dis-Un-Empowerment, focused on getting “leadership” involved to do more to REMOVE those things that workers and work teams find de-motivating.

This kind of initiative can help generate alignment and teamwork and motivation and engagement / involvement to make things better for each and all.

The research shows that people are not engaged, in general. Spending money on a survey that tells you that you have a problem seems a bit foolish — if I were to ask four or five people the same questions, the dis-engagement would be obvious (either theirs or that of others they work with).

A LOT of this stuff ain’t Rocket Science and HR ain’t gonna fix it.

Some things need to be accomplished locally, at the interface of worker and manager; only there will improvements be made. (The exception might be if the feedback and measurement system were changed, since that helps drive behavior. Feedback drives results.)

YOU simply cannot MOTIVATE ME or anyone else. People motivate themselves and offering some “reward” for improvement is going to be a very short-term solution for maybe half of the workers.

As a joke, I could also offer them 10 cents if they were to reply, just to see if I could make my point!

A lot of people think that this is how things work in the workplace, insofar as motivating people for performance:

Needless to say, it might work in the former case until people want and expect even more, and it will certainly work in the latter (until the boss turns his or her back). The latter also generates Compliance, which translates to “very average” performance and there is no motivation to excel.

What we need to do is to remove the things that the people see as getting in the way of them excelling. Almost everyone WANTS to succeed. Let them.

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

Are Square Wheels better than Round Ones?

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On September 25, 2012

In Uncategorized

We have been playing with the concept of Square Wheels as a descriptive tool for organizational improvement since 1993. And, we routinely find that the Square Wheels represent things that thump and bump along for most people, such as dealing with companies like Charter Communications (over and over, thump thump… I wish they would fix the problem I first reported in June!) and with company automated call directors when you call in (“Please listen to this entire message, since our system has recently changed…”) and all that…

When we present Square Wheels One, we commonly get LOTS of examples of what might be happening. I’ve actually collected over 300 different responses to the illustration, many of which I have reported elsewhere and in powerpoint slides and in other media. Often, they represent problems in making smooth forward progress:

(unknown source)

BUT, wooden Square Wheels are not always problematic for everyone or in all situations. Sometimes, a Square Wheel represents a better solution:

It is better for cooking hot dogs than rubber tires
It works better for helicopters
It is better to use Square Wheels when descending steep hills
They are easier to stand on if you have to look far forward
They represent better opportunities for improvement

And, yes, SQUARE Wheels are better for shooting cannons.

But generally, most people would agree that implementing Round Wheels in the workplace is a far better idea than continuing to frustrate people with the constant thumping and bumping of the Square ones. Giving people a chance to implement solutions is intrinsically motivating, especially when they do this in small teams and get the recognition from others in the organization about the positive impacts of those improvements.

Have fun out there and get things done!

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

Thinking and the Brain – Why we need simple tools

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 23, 2012

In Uncategorized

I have been thinking about thinking lately, which is sometimes a dangerous thing to do, and wondering why things are not easier and simpler. But there are paradoxes everywhere… As a funny example, there is a thread in one of my LinkedIn groups about why managers are stingy with praise and a couple of my more lengthy posts are about thinking patterns and even genetic biases toward criticism as it drives continuous improvement. I think you can get to that thread by clicking here.

Anyway, I thought it got pretty funny, ironic and paradoxical that people would be criticizing other people’s comments, thoughts and suggestions in a thread about why people do not give more praise. I mean, should we not be giving some praise to those people sharing ideas??? Ah, the irony…

But a StumbleUpon email I got sent me to a Wikipedia page that pretty much shocked and amazed me with its list of behavioral complexities when it comes to how people think. It is, a List of Cognitive Biases that you can find here.

A quick look will give you a better insight into why we cannot get much agreement about anything and how we really need some simple tools to generate organizational alignment, ideas for improvement and the agreement on implementation strategies or pretty much ideas for ANY agreement.

Here are only the “A’s” and “B’s” in that list, with their definitions and links, which will give you a better idea of the complexity of all this:

Ambiguity effect – the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown.”^[6]
Anchoring – the tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (also called “insufficient adjustment”).
Attentional Bias – the tendency of emotionally dominant stimuli in one’s environment to preferentially draw and hold attention and to neglect relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.
Availability heuristic – estimating what is more likely by what is more available in memory, which is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples.
Availability cascade – a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).
Backfire effect – when people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.^[7]
Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.
Barnum effect – the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
Base rate neglect or Base rate fallacy – the tendency to base judgments on specifics, ignoring general statistical information.^[8]
Belief bias – an effect where someone’s evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the believability of the conclusion.^[9]
Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people, or to be able to identify more cognitive biases in others than in oneself.^[10]

And this is but one of four sections:

Decision-making, belief and behavioral biases
Social biases
Memory errors and biases
Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases

Obviously, this “information processing” of simple ideas is not really all that simple. There are tremendous differences in how people process information and assuming that “What you say is what they get” is really way off target — anything you say will go through that person’s own filters, some of which are listed on that Wikipedia page.

What you say is NOT what they get!
People process your ideas in their own way.

More than anything else, this points me toward the simple reality that we need to use simple images and ideas and generate discussions among people before we try to move anything forward. Nobody ever washes a rental car, and allowing them to build a sense of ownership / involvement is key to generating change and improvement.

The simple cartoon approach I have been suggesting for 20 years is one that allows them to apply their different individual information sorting patterns onto the ideas of a small group of people. Those could focus on what is wrong, what possibilities exist, what ideas they have for change and implementation and these discussions are more likely to generate a sense of ownership involvement, engagement and employee commitment than the simple and common approach of telling them what to do and holding them accountable for doing it.

Otherwise, I think we are just throwing mud at the wire fence and hoping that some of it will stick somewhere. One can normally expect rain…

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

Teaching the Caterpillar to Fly

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 14, 2012

In Best Practices, Change, Change Facilitation, collaboration, Continuous continuous improvement, dis-un-empowerment, employee engagement, employee motivation, empowerment, Facilitation, implementation, Innovation Implementation, Managing and leading change, motivation in the workplace, Organizational Development Tools, team motivation, un-empowerment, Uncategorized, workplace performance improvement

For 20 years, I have been playing with my Square Wheels cartoons and using the metaphor in a variety of training programs on managing and leading change, involving and engaging individuals and teams in performance improvement, and focusing on individual and team intrinsic motivation.

One of my most fun as well as powerful tools is around the metaphor of “the change from caterpillar to butterfly” and the paradox of how one might lead that change.

I start with the basic Square Wheels illustration and then, after I get those key themes and ideas anchored down, add in the storyline that there are two caterpillars sitting on the wagon. A beautiful butterfly floats by and the one caterpillar says to the other caterpillar,

“You’ll never get ME up into one of those Butterfly things!”

From here, it just gets crazy as I identify a whole series of punchlines to the joke, not the one that most people get and simply stop thinking about. And I discuss how this process of “stopping the thought process” is what often gets in the way of continuous continuous improvement at work and in personal development initiatives.

You can download a pdf file of the article, Teaching The Caterpillar to Fly, by clicking this link.

The article gets into my model for managing and leading change, talks about the use of the Square Wheels illustrations as tools for facilitating personal and organizational development and focuses on making improvements. Another document you might like is the poem about the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies

Teaching Caterpillar poem

This is a solid metaphor, and one where our Square Wheels tools work beautifully. You can also purchase a very extensive powerpoint-based training program on Managing and Leading Change here, which builds nicely on these metaphors and works to involve and engage people in the change process.

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

Stress as a Motivator? Cognitive Dissonance and Square Wheels!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 14, 2012

In Best Practices, Change, Change Facilitation, collaboration, Continuous continuous improvement, employee engagement, employee motivation, empowerment, Facilitation, implementation, innovation, Innovation Implementation, team motivation, Uncategorized, workplace performance improvement

In the LinkedIn discussion mentioned in a previous post, the question arose as to whether stress was motivational and if it has a link to creativity. The question was expressed as:

What impact do you think stress has on innovation – does it hinder or help the creative process? Does Stress work like the “fight or Flight” response?

I think that this is more than a fair question and my response and reactions are pretty straightforward.

Two framing questions that I would ask are, “Whose stress is it?” and “How MUCH stress does it generate?”

If the performer sees a gap between where they are and where they want to be, that will usually generate “a stress” — consider it a motivational drive. That can be very positive since it is self-generated. It is healthy if that gap is perceived to be something that can be closed and the goal achieved — it is one of the things that is involved in self-generated, intrinsic motivation.

I think of that old work on “Cognitive Dissonance” (Leon Festinger in the 1950s) that clearly explains and researches this issue. He focused on gaps and the discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. In a state of dissonance, people may feel emotions of frustration caused by the differences in their goals, thoughts and actions and that people are motivated to close that gap.

An example of this would be the conflict often seen in smokers who, knowing that smoking is unhealthy and annoying to others, will often change their feelings to not caring or to thinking that the smoking is worth short term benefits. A general view of cognitive dissonance is that a person is biased towards a certain action even though other factors favor different alternatives. It is this gap that sets up the possibility of change — without this perception, little motivation exists.

Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled the followers of a UFO cult as reality clashed with their fervent belief in an impending apocalypse. Festinger subsequently published a book called “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance”, published in 1957, in which he outlined the theory. Since then, Cognitive Dissonance has been one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology because it is simple and straightforward.

The theory says that people have a bias to seek congruence and alignment among their thoughts, engaging in a process Festinger termed “dissonance reduction.” This can be achieved in any of three ways:

lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors,
adding consonant elements, or
changing one of the dissonant factors.

What we do with our Square Wheels illustration is to set up a Rorschach Inkblot Test-like condition by showing the Square Wheels One illustration and asking people how it might represent how things really work in most organizations. With that very general introduction, and a few minutes of thinking time, individuals and groups of people will identify a variety of key themes about the cartoon and how things work. Since the cartoon is unreferenced and very general, people project their beliefs and thoughts onto it.

Once that has occurred, and the themes and thoughts are anchored and discussed, we can then simply ask the participants to suggest what might be represented by those Square Wheels in their workplaces, with Square Wheels being defined as the things that do not work smoothly. Next, we can have discussions about possible Round Wheels (there are many ways to facilitate these discussions to generate desired outcomes).

It is this creative cognition of a Square Wheel and the associated relationship of some Round Wheel(s) to it that generates the cognitive dissonance, the gap between how things are and how they could be. It is that gap which helps generate the motivation to change, to remove the Square Wheel and add the Round One into the situation. This IS a stress, but not a debilitating one.

And if this discussion is done at tabletops with 5 or 6 participants, there is often enough “creational mass” to generate some commitment to implement the idea or improvement.

We find that Square Wheels illustrations work pretty much everywhere. I have used them with Most Senior Managers in large multinationals as well as in workshops with managers and front-line employees. We have delivered this concept in schools, pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies and all sorts of industries and in sessions with hundreds of people representing every level of management.

Ideas for improvement are simply ideas — the key is generating enough motivational stress through cognitive dissonance and peer support so that things get implemented and changed and improved. These cartoons are unique in their effectiveness as organizational development tools — Fast, Simple and Effective.

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is a globally experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Consulting: Egos, Ownership and Effectiveness

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 10, 2012

In Uncategorized

Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car.

Get that straight. If there is little ownership, there is little care. It took me a long time to learn that crucial lesson, basically, a couple of years, from the time I left a successfully implemented and working project to see it fail and die off shortly thereafter. Why? Because I took so much ownership in the project that even the Plant Manager was referring to it as, “Scott’s Project,” and he was also a bit embarrassed that I was able to do some things that he apparently had not.

How some newbie young consultant could come in, find improvement possibilities and then implement them and improve morale left him a bit perplexed — it was better for him, personally, to just let things go away!

Some colleagues of mine are starting to consult with some of their clients using the results and outcomes of my team building games and Square Wheels cartoons to put themselves into a position where the company will pay them to come in and implement those ideas. Neat!

So here is a summary of the things I shared with them in the last of a few messages that frame up what they might do — call these my Learning Lessons about Successful Implementation:

One of the most important lessons I learned early in all this is that paradox of ownership.
As my consulting skills improved, I more and more became the expert.
As my expertise increased, I was able to see more things and come up with much better solutions.
As I continued to improve, things happened more smoothly– my conversations with managers were more targeted and the programs I was involved in were called, “Scott’s Program.”

All this was very gratifying and the designs, strategies and implementation all went very well…until Scott “left the building” and was no longer around to followup and observe and reinforce and all that stuff.

Since I was the only one with any ownership of anything, when I left, there was no motivation to sustain the initiatives even though they worked great. There was no one collecting data or analyzing results.

The key is OWNERSHIP AND IT WAS ME WHO OWNED THE INITIATIVES.

Be cautious of all of the above. Go slowly, share ideas upward and give credit to those who generate the ideas, get them actively involved at the front lines and get the managers actively involved. Use your status to make sure the more senior managers know what the managers were doing successfully and where they were making personal improvements with their staffs (the personal growth stuff).

Be careful to not allow your own need to get some reinforcement and recognition interfere with the reality that you do not need that nearly as much as your client’s people do!

And the managers! Ensure that the middle managers are getting some recognition from their managers so that they are more likely to sustain things.

Make sure that the managers understand that their role is to encourage and support their reports in gaining ownership of the improvement initiatives. And be sure to cascade that upwards!

The consultant can take very little personal credit with the organization on any of this or it muddles things up. Take pleasure from doing all the documentation and for your underground role in generating the results.

Otherwise, it becomes yours instead of theirs and dooms the project to long-term failure.

Nobody Ever Washes a Rental Car

Resistance can come from anywhere and take all kinds of forms…

Many will simply watch and voice their opinions

Ah, the paradoxes we deal with in the organizational improvement arena…

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

Working Home, Selling Globally

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 10, 2012

In Uncategorized

In the late 90s, I was asked to present some ideas at a conference for the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) on the theme of building a consulting business and ideas for building international business, since I was successfully moving in both those directions.

As a tool, I put together a simple little package of ideas, that was presented as a workshop, with the goal of helping people gain some grip on the concept of working from home (maintaining low costs) and selling globally (making the business less local and more open to being recession-proof). Now, in my 28th year of business, I have a number of exclusive relationships with non-US companies representing my intellectual property on a royalty basis and who give me global exposure for the sale of my materials, so I guess this stuff actually worked.

Today is a session from the LinkedIn’s Top Recommended People (TRP) Group (one needs recommendations from others to join) on “Finding That Exclusive Work / Life Balance” which is moderated by Joy Montgomery.

That got me thinking that I might post up that paper on building a home business that might be generally helpful to people. The last revision of this was in 2006 and I asked a college professor friend of mine who works with adults and consulting as a theme to use it as a group discussion project, which has not happened yet. That would be a good way to gather some new ideas and update it a little. But the handout, which you can download by clicking here, is meant to be a self-paced, idea-generating document.

Maybe it will help you generate a new idea or re-frame an older one to move things forward.

Have some FUN out there, too!

Ideas for business improvement

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

Tripping to India to do Strategy Implementation and Team Building

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 9, 2012

In Uncategorized

Last year, I had quite a journey even before I headed off to Mumbai. My passport expired at the same time as did my one-year, multiple-entry business visa to India.

SO, I put the passport into “The System” and got it back surprisingly quickly. Then came the application process for the entry visa to India. To be honest, it was an incredible “up to your axles in the mud” kind of process and terribly frustrating, time consuming and bureaucratic. And one would think that they would WANT people going there to do business and improve the economy!

Scott, talking about being up to your “axles in mud,” with Spectator Sheep. This situation sure felt like that!

Online, the application process gave me some options so I applied for the 10-year, multiple-entry business visa since it was the same price as the 5-year one and not much more expensive than the 1-year one. The application requirements were as before as were the timelines and I had already gotten a 1-year business visa so it was not as if I was new to the system or the process.

But in this case, I ran into “the processor bureaucracy.” To make a long story short, it took me nearly a month with my making 7 phone calls, repeatedly sending documents and letters, changing one or two words in the application letter (I am a one-person company but the letter from my company to the embassy has to be from someone else in my company verifying my honesty and ability to pay any debts occurring in India) and there was an issue with the words “training” and “contract.”

The processor assumed that if I were going there to do “training,” then I had to be someone’s employee in India — that I could not be training unless I had an employment contract! I did have a contract, for EduRiser to represent and protect my Intellectual Property — that they were contracting to ME, essentially. But I had to change the wording so that those two words did not appear.

I was going there to market my organizational development tools (Square Wheels and The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine) and to meet with EduRiser and Solomon’s staff to look at new product development and marketing ideas. I was going to present to some large conferences to model the delivery of the tools to decision-makers. Our contract protects my intellectual property, mostly. BUT, the person reading the application materials was MOST CERTAIN that I was going to India for employment, and thus, I must complete an Employment Visa. And having “a contract” proved to her that I was an employee and not the owner of my own company doing business with another company there. Her ignorance plus her arrogance about this was most amazing, actually, and combined with her unwillingness to listen, caused me (and probably many other businessmen) a great deal of anguish.

Requirements for the Employment Visa required me to have an employment descriptive document with things like my having to receive an annual salary of at least USD $25,000 from that employer and that my sponsoring company had to assert that I was uniquely qualified and that there was no one in India who could do my job. (I cannot imagine how that verification would actually be accomplished but I do suppose that I am a bit unique…).

In reading the requirements, we would have to LIE on the application for me to qualify for an employment visa.

With my being totally truthful on all things and with the processor actually losing my passport in their mailroom, I finally made that one perfect phone call to the right person who said, “I can fix this!” and she did, using the information that they already had. It proves the value of the empowered employee when it comes to customer service.

I eventually got it after a MONTH of them diddling around with this processor company’s people (absolute power corrupts absolutely?) and making mistakes and losing things. And, this put a great deal of pressure on all of us given the commitments we were making to deliver large programs in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. I got it because I connected with a different processing person at that same company who actually understood and wanted to be helpful. The rest of the people were absolutely awful to deal with.

Anyway, it was a good trip and we continue to refine and define opportunities and build on successes. There are a variety of new products that we can construct and distribute. Long term, I am looking to leave a footprint with my works.

A lot of materials will recombine the Square Wheels tools into a program on strategy implementation; something that is a critical issue for most large organizations. We will be building on the work of my old friend and associate, Robin Speculand in Singapore, and focusing on using his Compass model and his general information, combining his approach with my tools for generating engagement and involvement and alignment and using the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine exercise as a tool for changing behavior and generating commitment to missions and visions.

I have worked on implementation themes for 30+ years, but never linked these tools in this manner. We are redesigning the play of Dutchman to allow for mid-game restructuring and communications, which will improve its effectiveness around the strategy and vision themes.

And, I will get another post out on this as we do more structural definitions and product development.

Square Wheels are everywhere! So are the Round Ones.
(And thanks to Jennie at Travisa for helping me out when all others failed…)

And I am really looking forward to working with the illustrations and games again in India.

Dr. Scott Simmerman is an international traveler, presenter and 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 and has presented in 38 countries so far.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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

Category: Uncategorized Page 1 of 4

The Reality of Change, Innovation and Employee Engagement

Reflection and Innovation: Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There

Don’t Just DO Something,
Stand There!

Team Building Followup – Maximizing Impact with Cartoons

Scott's Most Excellent Presentation Quotes and Quips

Teaching the Caterpillar to Fly

and other Square Wheels Workshop Quips and Quotes by Dr. Scott Simmerman, managing partner of Performance Management Company and author of the Square Wheels tools for improvement.

Does Teamwork Work? Issues and Ideas for Improvement

Military Team Building Games – some thoughts on alternatives

Simple thoughts on Extrinsic Motivation

Motivation and Dis-Un-Engagement

Are Square Wheels better than Round Ones?

Thinking and the Brain – Why we need simple tools

Teaching the Caterpillar to Fly

Stress as a Motivator? Cognitive Dissonance and Square Wheels!

Consulting: Egos, Ownership and Effectiveness

Working Home, Selling Globally

Tripping to India to do Strategy Implementation and Team Building