Tag: team building

Sharking is a term used in pocket billiards and other cue sports when one’s opponent tries to use sometimes subtle behaviors to disturb your game or your rhythm. It can be as obvious as talking to you while you are shooting or standing behind the pocket in which you are aiming to sink your object ball. The general idea is to disrupt and to give them an advantage. Often, sharking does not work, but sometimes it does and thinking that it does reinforces the tendency for a shark to keep on sharking…

In business, you might see it as a small comment at a meeting to distract you or to focus attention away from what you are trying to communicate, to decrease your effectiveness in some way, to their perceived benefit and to your detriment. Sometimes your peers do it to you, consciously or unconsciously.

In some cultures this kind of sharking is even The Norm. People poke fun at others and it becomes a joke to many. I think of stereotypical cop cultures or military cultures as examples, which generally changed with more and more diversity being added, which served to constrain it to some degree.

And sometimes, your boss can act as a “Petit Tyrant” — a little tyrant — and behave in a way that “sharks” you in some way. This can happen in so many situations that it is hard to nail down, and it often reflects their conscious or unconscious biases against things. It is not the size of the tyrant, but the act of workplace bullying that makes them little. And what they do may not even be important so long as they think it raises them up over you, somehow. This behavior, done over time, can disrupt teamwork and decrease performance or one’s motivation to succeed.

The best way to deal with it is to identify it, to acknowledge it and to hope that it goes against some kinds of rules and organizational paradigms, to make them see their behavior as abnormal in some way. But it can also be political.

I’m generally a “Rules Guy,” in that understanding the rules generally mitigates the sharking to some degree. In pool, it is not a legal activity and people can be banned from tournaments or leagues by engaging in that behavior. (If you want to see my summary of 10-ball rules, you can find it here – I could not find a good summary so I created one!)

So, how might this impact the perceived power of a leader?

In many ways, I think. Often, the “petit tyrant” would actually benefit if their behavior could be more self-constrained, that they do a better job of recognizing “the sharking” they engage with others in their workplaces. Their behavior actually does nothing to improve collaboration and teamwork and generally pushes people apart. It can also be political for someone other than themselves to address the problem.

Let me share a divergent example as a case study. Understand that I am a pretty good observer of behavior, looking at the issues around people and performance since 1978.

I learned how to play pickleball. It is a great game and a lot easier than tennis for an old-timer like me. It is nicely challenging, a group activity where one meets new friends, and is physically active enough to be challenging.

Of course, as I was learning the game, I was watching YouTube, spending many hours watching instructional videos, matches, summaries of rules and all that stuff. (I am, remember, a rules-hound.) I would guess that I have spent 100+ hours observing over the past 6 months.

My understanding of the rules and tips for play then sometimes bumped into the group’s organizer, perceived leader and instructor, who we can call BT. Generally, he was right, but sometimes he was wrong. And he did not, generally, seem to like the fact that I was aware of things about the game that he may not have known about. He criticized aspects of my game for months, on many things. (I can only guess at this stuff.)

But the reality is that he often seemed to play petit tyrant with me, and only me.

In racquet sports games, it is common to call out the score. In pickleball, there is a norm that one always announces the score before serving.

My Mom, starting about age 80, gradually lost her hearing and would generally wear a hearing aid. But with my sister and I, she would often say that we were mumbling so that we would have to repeat ourselves. I never witnessed her asking anyone but Kim or me about not hearing. To a degree, I think it was a power issue, that she could play “petit tyrant” and try to control us a little as she felt she was losing her power because of her age. Understand that at this point in time, I was delivering public workshops and presentations to make a living, that I had presented 100s of session and thought that my speaking was clear and comprehensible. Except for my Mom. So we often repeated ourselves for the next 20 years…

So, it was always ME who never said the score loud enough often enough, even though I said it every time. He said I talked to the ground, I spoke behind me, etc. He would interrupt my service rhythm a few times a game, standing there with both arms up, telling me to yell the score again. Various playing partners, standing near him or receiving my serves, always heard it and never asked for it to be repeated. And he never challenged anyone else ever on this, to the best of my memory (only me.) And to the best of my recall, no one else in our group ever asked me to repeat the score during play over the last 6 months. (BT also says that this is HIS rule, even though this is the norm in the game worldwide.)

BT also recently started complaining about how slowly I walked from the net back to the line to receive his serve. When he served, I had just turned around, and if he had waited ONE SECOND, literally, I would have been set. But it was not about my speed of walking, it was another example of how he could “power” me about my game. Sharking.

Other players see it, and they tell me to just ignore it. But does anyone think this will get better on its own? I don’t.

So, the next time he stops my serve, I will walk up to the net to say it clearly to him, then walk back at my regular pace to the service line, compose myself and serve.

Is it worth the effort to confront a Petit Tyrant? I think that is your decision and you need to weigh the balance of consequences. Maybe it is, and maybe it is just not worth the effort and you can choose to suck it up and sabotage their efforts another way. The latter is a reality — sabotage is a French word arising from the tendency of French workers to throw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the machinery that was taking their jobs away, as I understand it. (History Here)

Thanks for reading. I did want to vent a little, but I also wanted to share some thoughts for those of you who feel you’ve been sharked. It IS generally a conscious decision on the part of your opponent. Good bosses and good co-workers do not engage in these kinds of behaviors, only the ones who feel that things are competitive and that they rise up if you sink a little.

Question for Reflection:

Are there any sharking or Petit Tyrant behaviors that YOU might look to mitigate in your workplace?

Keep things rolling out there and leave better impacts on your teams,

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 incredibly useful Square Wheels® tools and images
and the board game version of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine

The new ONLINE, VIRTUAL version of Lost Dutchman is now being demonstrated (video here)

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

Outdoor Training: Issues of Learning and Change

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 21, 2014

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

The situation is simple when it comes to outdoor training and development:

Workers are the people who are doing the work.
Managers are the people managing.
Teamwork should have positive impacts on people and performance.
Training should impact perspective and understanding
Collaboration is more important than competition.
Debriefing and Discussion are generally the best desired outcomes, along with commitment to change.

So why do most outdoor activities seem to be highly competitive activities with lots of room for climate issues and other distractions? And why would we want MORE competition within the organization since it is already not helping and generally sub-optimizing — “interdepartmental collaboration” is an oxymoron in most places!

And I am sure that the workers find more competition within the different departments of your company right now than they find between your company and your competitors. The senior managers might see things differently, but do the workers themselves actually feel they are competing with others more than they feel they are already competing with their own management?

So, why not focus on more inter-departmental collaboration and alignment?
Why not build on improving communications and engagement?
Why keep doing competitive things when collaborative ones are needed?

—————————

We won the competition, but we lost the team building aspect of things. And I have the trophy to prove it! More on this below.

—————————

On occasion, I am asked if one of our team building games could be used in an outdoor setting. Wow, does that bring up some memories about what might have happened and the reality of losing control. I find too many uncontrolled things can happen in an outside environment and wonder why they are used, actually. And, so many of these outdoor events are strictly “games” and not learning events and, therefore, primarily competition-based engagement.

(Is that an oxymoron?)

Being outside is great, but is it cost effective for a business to make that decision? I guess if FUN is the desired outcome, and not LEARNING nor generating behavioral commitments to do things differently, outdoor games can work. But my personal experience is that the outdoor environment is generally NOT conducive to generating organizational change and I have lots of frameworks for that in my personal history of being a participant as well as a leader.

The idea of sports analogies or military frameworks applied to business development situations also makes me uncomfortable because businesses do NOT represent how sports teams operate nor are we generally accepting assault and raw aggression as good business strategies. We are not a football team with a quarterback and plays and countless practice drills and direct head-to-head team competition with other teams. We are not a baseball team, with players who each do their jobs in the field and then take bats individually against the pitcher of another team. We are not basketball teams, running plays and shooting baskets. We can make analogies to those activities, but we are not in those industries!

Paintball as a business exercise? Shooting at other people with the goal of doing them harm (killing them out of the game?) and demanding some level of motor skills coordination and physical activity of running and dodging to succeed creates an unfair playing field. Sure, there are analogies, but is that a business learning opportunity? Is building a rope bridge and then walking over it a real situation for your business (or driving a go-cart or bowling) — is it going to generate real business collaboration and improvement? Firewalking?

(I do have a good article on Business Sabotage you can read here!)

Sports are too much about winners and losers whereas business requires collaboration across a variety of operational and support groups. Military games are way too deadly serious and many of your participants may have significant emotional ties to such situations. If they were in a real war, your activity will bring back those strong negative associations and memories. If they had a child or relative killed or injured in some war, it is that same issue — you are coercing them to participate in a situation that creates unpleasant emotions.

Do we really need to use competition and competitiveness
as driving forces for collaboration within our companies?

(Is that telephone customer service rep actually in competition with another company or merely depending on collaboration from other departments to perform well in her job? Is that guy on the shopfloor really competing with The Koreans in producing a high quality automobile? Is competition the real driving force for top performance by people? (Answer: NO) )

Workers are the people who are doing the work. Managers are the people managing. Workers and Managers both want LESS competition within the different departments of your company. So, why not focus on more inter-departmental collaboration and improving communications and engagement?

Generally, the links to the business improvement issues — why companies are actually spending money and time with managers and employees — are sometimes quite vague when relating many outdoor activities to organizational behavior and leadership, problem solving or change. Sure, these outside exercises are fun and people do like to solve problems and compete. But it takes a good facilitator to bring out the discussions and not all the facilitators are all that good nor is there always support within the program design for a strong debriefing to take place. Plus, the links from the activity back to business are sometimes stretched.

I speak with experience as a participant of many different kinds of these activities. One was at a college with a bunch of my Leadership Greenville colleagues (a program supported by our Chamber of Commerce). Being collaborative and facilitative in my general style, I applied these skills in discussions about solving the outdoor problems at hand (like the acid river and the bucket on a string designs). The “session leader” actually decided I was helping too much and told me that I HAD to be silent and could not talk — this is also known as punishment in psychology and it has pretty predictable consequences long-term.

(Yeah, and imagine when I was allowed to talk in the debriefing! One of the questions I asked of her was about the leader’s business experience. Turns out that she had never actually had an actual job. And she is the leader of this group of business people? Really?)

Another such program on collaboration turned into a mass group competition, where the VP of the group was making things more competitive by timing the different problem solving activities and comparing different groups to the others.

We actually had a quite competitive volleyball teambuilding competition, too, and during the awards ceremony, many of the Losers actually booed the Winners in front of the company’s Executive VP Operations. And this was at a team building event where the company spent many 10s of thousands of dollars bringing players in from all over the US and hosting them at a retreat facility in the middle of Texas!

Note: I was on the winning team and I still have my trophy on my bookshelf as a reminder of how badly this went…

That same event also had one of the participants being stung by a scorpion when he leaned on a tree — he went into shock. But the facilitation team actually carried an anaphylactic shock kit with them out in the field, since it had apparently happened before (wonder if they had mentioned that when working on the design of the activities). Needless to say, that hour spent on it was costly for the 60 highly paid company people — everything stopped completely — as well as pretty distracting for all of his friends and co-workers.

Competition produces chaos and confusion, not collaboration and improvement

My outdoor delivery experiences also include a session where the sun came out and totally washed out the projected images on the screen so no one could see. At a different event, the temperature in the huge circus tent went to 110 degrees and the big electric fans blew all the papers off the tabletops (so we taped them down). But these same fans were so noisy that the debriefing was impossible, as also occurred with the game activities that followed after my session. And this narrative represents the short-version of all the things that went wrong…

Another event had it rain for an hour right after we put the maps and things on the tables. We quickly recollected all the soluble stuff and then, when the rain stopped, we had each table select what it required from our “Organized Pile of Materials” and take these things outside to their tables (which the hotel staff helped us dry off with a massive number of room towels).

YES, my games CAN be delivered as outside activities, but why? I cannot remember a single time when something did not go wrong and force us to make a major adjustment in our delivery (like an afternoon lightning storm or very high heat). And I cannot imagine doing a large group, outside, with any kind of controllable learning outcomes. Yet here is one we did indoors for 500 people that went really well:

– Why even allow the potential problems and distractions?
– Why necessitate a scramble when the weather changes?
– What is the big benefit of people standing around outside?Birds?

(Heck, maybe I could design a program around them all coming over to my house and working on my yard and gardens, ya think? Do it like one of those cooking classes — I could sell it as a Landscaping Teambuilding Initiative and maybe even get them to work on my neighbors’ yards…)

Lastly, I do not consider firewalking, golf, go-karting or golfing to be very good team building activities. Baseball is okay, maybe, since everyone can play and bat and all that but running is required (and I actually ruptured an Achilles tendon playing ball). Volleyball requires too much skill and the size and skill differences between people can be way too large. And how many times do I have to pass balls around or deal with a bucket on a string or hold hands with other people to solve a problem, anyway…

There are LOTS and lots of good team building games and exercises that can be delivered with high impact and good learning. So, why intentionally add uncontrollable factors just to make it some “outside” program whereby a much higher potential for non-participation or even injury might occur?

I will always remember the movie White Mile, where a corporate rafting, team-building trip ends in tragedy. Hoping to build bonds between his employees and clients, advertising executive Dan Cutler (Alan Alda) takes the group on a whitewater rafting excursion. But the raft capsizes, several of the men die, and one widow files a lawsuit. Cutler tries to hide his negligence, and one survivor (Peter Gallagher) faces a difficult moral dilemma. We often see the same kind of lower-level drama play out in such corporate team days… Watch the two-minute trailer here for some great scenes.

These uncontrolled, outdoor activities CAN go very wrong, but so many simply have the outdoors as functionally distracting to the learning that is supposed to be the main desired outcome.

Have fun out there! And maximize your team building impact.

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

Trust is the Residue of Promises Fulfilled – An Update

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On January 13, 2014

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, Engagement, executive team building exercises, large group team building events, Statistics on workplaces, team building exercises for the workplace, Trust Building

My friend Frank Navran once quipped that,

Trust is the residue
of promises fulfilled

and that quote has stayed with me for 20+ years. So, in my work on designing a new team building game that will anchor to trust, Frank and I reconnected and he pipped me over to Barbara Kimmel, who is the Director of Trust Across America. You can click on the link below and pop over to her website.

Like me, Barbara likes to use statistics and logic to link from these touchy-feely things like “engagement” or “trust” to real issues of organizational results. Some data she shared were of interest to me, so I reproduce some of that data here so you can head over to her blog — this section is called:

The Hard Costs of Low Trust

Gallup’s research (2011) places 71% of U.S. workers as either not engaged or actively disengaged. The price tag of disengagement is $350,000,000,000 a year. That approximates the annual combined revenues of Apple, GM and GE.
The Washington Post reported that, “the federal government imposed an estimated $216,000,000,000 in regulatory costs on the economy (in 2012), nearly double its previous record.”
The six biggest U.S. banks, led by JP Morgan and B of A have piled up $103,000,000,000 in legal costs and fines since the financial crisis (Bloomberg, August of 2013 — which also probably did not pick up a good bit of those recent settlements!)
According to The Economist Intelligence Unit (2010), 84% of senior leaders say disengaged employees are considered one of the biggest threats facing their business. (Only 12% reported doing anything about this problem!)

There are lots more statistics and I refer to bits and pieces of much of the literature and statistical proofs of impact of building trust and involving and engaging people in a wide cross-section of my blog posts about people and performance. Many of the key phrases below link to my blog articles on people and performance. For example, you can read my article on Building Trust clicking here.

This trust gap negatively impacts so much of the workplace. It directly impacts morale and increases employee turnover and decreases engagement. It is an issue of management and leadership. And it is not an issue of adding more extrinsic rewards to generate desired performance or improve results — those actually just work against you and often make the workplace LESS collaborative.

One of the potential tools you can use is the approach of building more collaborative teams and generating more alignment to shared goals and missions. Those kinds of initiatives tend to pull people together and generate improved morale, peer support and intrinsic motivation to improve.

You can see our Slideshare presentation and find out more information about our team building simulation for improving organizational performance results by clicking on the Lost Dutchman icon below:

And if I can help you frame up or discuss different issues and opportunities around your organization’s performance improvement and trust building, please contact me directly. I actually answer my own phone!

For the FUN of It!

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com or at 864-292-8700

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

A really neat set of inspirational cartoons…

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 12, 2013

In Change, employee motivation, empowerment, Engagement, intrinsic motivation

StumbleUpon sent me this a couple of days ago and I just got the chance to look at it. Pretty amazing, actually. It is a series of inspirational comics illustrating the works of people like Robert Frost, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Hunter Thompson and others and is REALLY well done.

This is an unauthorized screenshot of the one around Robert Frost’s writings:

You can click on the image or go to this page – http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1KspPi

It was done by ZenPencils — zenpencils.com – Zen Pencils adapts inspirational quotes into cartoons. The site is illustrated by Gavin Aung Than and it updates with a new comic every week.

Truly awesome stuff. Check it out!

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.

Teamwork, Communications and Optimization of Performance

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 22, 2013

In Change Facilitation, employee engagement, employee motivation, empowerment, Engagement, experiential learning, Facilitation, intrinsic motivation, manager as motivator, motivation in the workplace, Performance Feedback

My friend Lou Carloni has been sharing ideas about people and performance for many years and a post I received from him this morning was one that got my full attention. The focus of it was on the issues of team communications, and, of course, I will add my normal spin around experiential learning and organizational performance.

Lou’s firm was hired to study communication needs in the Baltimore-Washington Region and they interviewed, surveyed, and held focus groups with over 1000 business professionals. The question asked was, “If your organization had only enough money, resources, and time to perform training in one area of communications which area would it be: Reading, Writing, Speaking, or Listening?”

Reading and Writing combined received 5% of the vote;
Speaking received 40%;
Listening received 55%.

I agree with Lou on suggested solutions. One of them was to Get There In Person.

It is not just words, it is how those all come together to drive involvement and engagement, how the issues are framed and how possible solutions are discussed. It is really hard for most leaders to truly understand all the current issues faced by performers working to meet and exceed expectations of management and customers. It is just too easy to keep doing things the same way they were done before, what I always refer to with this illustration:

The real impacts come from managers who get in front of people, asking about issues and opportunities. Lou suggests that words alone account for only 8-10% of the message in interpersonal communication; the spoken sounds account for 30-40% of the message; and the non-verbal elements account for 50-60% of the real message you are trying to send. While you might agree or disagree with the numbers, the presence of the manager up front, listening and supporting is the key.

We accomplish this with our Square Wheels approach and offer a variety of tools and toolkits to assist in the process of facilitation. I have blogged often about this in here and you can find inexpensive Square Wheels Tools on our website. We also support a variety of different team building exercises like Collaboration Journey and Innovate & Implement that are designed to involve and engage people in problem solving. All these products can be delivered by managers with their work teams.

Lou also talked about Gaining Power With The Person. To this I would also add, The Team, since people do work collaboratively in most workplaces. This connects to developing rapport and trust. One way to accomplish this with individuals, teams and groups is through our team building simulation, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. In this design, the Expedition Leader exists as a person interested in optimizing ROI and results. The expressed goal of the game is to Mine as Much Gold as WE Can!

The reality is that the tabletops do not plan well, do not collaborate and communicate with other teams, nor do they bother to ask the Expedition Leader for advice or assistance. The game leader, just like the workplace leader, exists to support individuals and teams, but the choices people make are more often to go it alone and not ask for help. In the game, and in the workplace, this measurably sub-optimizes results.

We sell a variety of different Dutchman games, at different price points, for repeated organizational use. You can find out more information about the Lost Dutchman game by going to our website.

Performance feedback is a critical component of good performers and good results, but my work with organizations has continually shown that a wide variety of improvements can be made to impact performance results. You can find a free Feedback Analysis Tool through this blog post.

Lou also talked about Skills versus Attitudes, and I am not sure that these two things are operating against each other or part of a series of competencies that are all important. I am working up an article on Flow for the blog and for the articles section of my home page. Skill is important and there is a continuum of them and skills interact with the perceived challenges people face. Flow is when these mesh together…

I will not reflect herein as to how I see differences between Lou’s thinking and mine on this other than to say that I prefer the way Bob Mager deals with the question. Lou’s website is: http://www.smbcinc.com

Hope you found this of interest and use,

For the FUN of It!

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

Rewarding High Performance in The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine teambuilding game

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 12, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, Dutchman Delivery Tips, employee motivation, executive team building exercises, motivational team building exercises, Organizational Development Tools, team building exercises for the workplace, workplace performance improvement

Managers do not often deal with good performers in effective ways. Relying on extrinsic rewards is often a formula for completely missing the real underlying motivation of many high performers. Extrinsic reward systems are often problematic and cause more problems amongst the bottom 70% (who never win and are thus losers) or generate behaviors that are not congruent with missions and visions of the organization. I chat about that in a lot of my blog posts, most recently this one. There are a lot of posts on extrinsic motivation here.

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a team building exercise that is a bit unusual in that it focuses on the collaboration between tabletops to optimize the measured results. It is only partly about winning — it is more about what the higher-performing teams could have done differently to support the lower performing teams to optimize overall results. The goal is, “To Mine as Much Gold as We Can” and to optimize the Expedition Leader’s return on investment. Obviously, the more ALL the teams perform, the better the overall results.

It also tends to generate a My Team, My Team, My Team kind of response in so many cultures that tend to reinforce competitiveness as a basic operational strategy — something that tends to make the words “Interdepartmental Collaboration” an oxymoron in so many companies. The reality is that more collaboration will most certainly improve organizational results, engagement, service, cost reduction, innovation, etc.

A “My Team, My Team, My Team” focus can cause more competition than collaboration. The goal is to optimize organizational results, not win!

In Dutchman, teams can spend an extra day gaining information that enables them to optimize their results. One metaphor is a strategic planning one that allows them to re-allocate resources to have a better likelihood of success. The other is a Best Practice, one that enables them to move faster. It also gives them things to share with other teams – Turbochargers that double the speed of movement.

We’ve been supporting a network of consultant users and trainers since 1993 and have received most excellent feedback. As I note in another blog, we recently had the first Perfect Play that I have heard of. Some groups or triads within larger groups come close, but none got it perfect until David Simpson’s group of three teams with the retailer Coach. Now, the issue is optimizing post-game impacts and generating increased collaboration among the store managers now back at work.

Perfect Play has its own results summary powerpoint show.

We first show what ONE team could do to optimize their results — it is about planning and using information and resources properly. Their path would look like this, with the 20 days numbered in the circles:

They reach the Mine on Day 8, using up all their resources and returning on the last day possible, Day 20. The summary of results and resource use looks as follows and they had a surplus of $50 worth of stuff as well as two Turbochargers that they could have shared with two other teams (if they chose to). That sharing would have generated six more days of mining if all things were good.

But the real Perfect Play occurs when two teams decide to collaborate with each other on the planning and then involve another group into their collective. That looks like this:

Instead of one team mining 9 gold, this framework allows for two teams to mine 10 and that extra team to mine ELEVEN. This has only occurred in David’s game. And it makes for a great debriefing, in that a lot of the right organizational optimization behaviors have occurred in play, the teams managed things in a relatively stress-free mode (with no fear of real failure) and it carries over very neatly into the discussions of what they could choose to do differently.

A high level of information sharing is needed. The resources are tight to generate this perfect result:

And that very last part needs special mention.

To get a Perfect Play, the three teams need to ask for $50 from the Expedition Leader! I mean, is that a perfect design or what?!!

From among 100 or so debriefing slides, we might emphasize these six:

Our goal is to get successes among the players and among the teams, show the direct advantages of inter-team collaboration in the game, and bridge to the special advantages of inter-team collaboration back at work. The opportunities to share resources, collaborate, share best practices and help each other be successful in operations has huge leverage within the workplace as well as between departments. So, we use these kinds of handouts to generate ideas for improvement and discussions about choices we are making:

And, my new game will focus even more attention on post-game collaboration and organizational improvement. You can see a few of the game design ideas here.

For the FUN of It!

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

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

Team Building – Failures and Designing for Success

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On April 4, 2013

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, experiential learning, Facilitation, manager as motivator

My friend Andrew Grant at Tirian is an Aussie and a great writer and thinker about all things team building. I just now got his newsletter and thought to repost it here. I strongly recommend that you read this and click on some of the embedded links to his other thoughts and writings.

Here is what Andrew had to say:

Overcoming the IFS and BUTS of Team Building

The Australian swimming team’s performance in the London Olympics was the worst on record. This is a country where most children can swim before they can walk, and Australia is usually one of the strongest countries in this category, but this time around something went horribly wrong. A recent investigative report into the swimming team’s poor performance by Dr Pippa Grange has revealed that whilst the swimmers were all highly skilled physically, there was what has been described as a ‘toxic culture’ in the team. This led to, Dr Grange believes, ‘an increase in individualism, and in turn a diminished sense of responsibility or connectedness to the team’. Described as ‘a schoolyard clamour for attention and influence, with a ‘science’ of winning appearing to overshadow the ‘art’ of ‘leadership work”, the report has highlighted the need for strong leadership and alignment and a collective purpose.

It’s in situations such as these that developmental team building has a critically important role to play, as ironically all these soft skills can dramatically impact the bottom line outcomes. And yet there can be a great degree of cynicism and scepticism about the value and purpose of team building, and as a result it is often ignored – but at great cost.

How is it possible to design a team building session that works?
The typical response of individuals to the prospect of having to participate in a team building exercise has, by one jaded observer, been described as a ‘groaning’ response. Some feel they have ‘been-there-and-done-that’, while others are concerned about taking out valuable time from their day to do something that they feel is irrelevant (playing games). Some people reluctantly participate out of a fear of being seen to not conform, but they do so with hidden contempt. In these cases the team building program can be in danger of backfiring.

Through innovative simulations and engaging facilitation positive intervening experiences can and should be created. When professionally designed, these experiences can break down the barriers and provide unique leadership and team development opportunities and outcomes.

So how, exactly is this achieved?:
1) Check the group is 100% on board (challenge by choice)
Example: We once had a boss want to run an adventure based program, but he assumed that everyone would want to do what he did (a common mistake). He didn’t realise some people just don’t like running around chasing clues or being physically challenged. After a number of complaints the adventure idea was ditched. We ended up in an exclusive luxury resort in Japan where one of the unique cultural elements was to sleep on the floor! As this experience was so culturally different from anything else the team had been involved in, the desired goal to create a ‘unique’ experience that would challenge the team was achieved. We created a 3 day program around this event that really broke down the barriers and achieved incredible outcomes.

Solution: Taking people slightly outside their comfort zone does have benefits as it can challenge individuals to examine their behaviours, (with no hierarchy) but not to the point of discomfort where individuals feel coerced or threatened. Choose activities that all are comfortable enough with and all can participate willingly in.

2) Ensure the facilitators are skilled
Example: We recently ran a program with a skilled PhD trained facilitator from McKinsey – as she explained, facilitators at her level can spend hours just crafting a single question to ensure that the team can gain a major insight from the experience, and then adapt their behavior as a result. For the activity to have meaning there needs to be a learning outcome where some insight dawns on the participant in a way they will never forget, as it’s connected to the experience. Like a good chef, this goes way beyond simply knowing the individual ingredients to being able to design the final professional creation (a carefully blended combination). This is not the sort of experience where a university student tells a team to open the next clue, and then asks them ‘how they feel about it’.

Solution: Ensure that the facilitators for the program are qualified and experienced. Inexpensive and inexperienced facilitators might save on the day’s budget, but the real cost is wasting the participants’ time if an activity cannot be properly framed, contextualized and debriefed.

3) Ensure the program is both intelligent and relevant
Example: The danger with the ‘Amazing Race’ type exercises is that these programs tend to be linear with shallow content, and whilst fun, the time invested is often not worth the outcome. This easily leads to the ‘groaning’ /contempt effect.

Solution: Ensure the program content is intelligent and relevant: good team building should have an authentic theme to make it memorable, with intelligent and relevant facts and case studies related to the theme. As an example, one of our most popular programs which uses this strategy is ‘ON THIN ICE’. The program is a simulated expedition to Antarctica, with lots of video footage and interesting facts and information about the challenges faced by actual Antarctic expeditions. During the simulation a variety of issues related to virtual and cross cultural team challenges, leadership challenges, communication challenges and so on quickly surface. With careful questioning and framing, the real issues can be effectively and professionally dealt with. To add some inspiration, we often invite a polar expeditioner in to share first-hand stories of the challenges individuals and teams face in these high pressured situations, and the leadership skills needed to survive.

4) Focus on the key outcome rather than the activity – creating high performance collaborative teams
Example: A client once came to us asking to design a highly competitive team building program. When we enquired about the desired outcome, we were told ‘collaboration’. Even as the question was being answered, the client began to see the irony. This client was focusing on the activity rather than the outcome. Most work teams would struggle with the ambiguity of collaboration in a culture that breeds self-survival and competition. And yet the productivity of a work group often ultimately depends on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organisation. As 4 out of 9 people struggle with successful collaboration in the workplace, this should be a key focus of any team development program.

Solution: Team building programs need to be engaging and exciting, but not at the expense of reaching what must be the key goal of any team development program – collaboration. Simply participating in a collaborative exercise will also not be enough. Anyone can collaborate when they need to and when the conditions are controlled. The experiential learning opportunity created should drive home the need for true collaboration no matter how challenging the circumstances. (Read his post on The Collaboration Deception here)

Simulation for success

In most organisations employees are required to make more complex decisions more quickly, with fewer resources and no margin for error. Becoming good at this necessitates something few people have – opportunities to practice.

Musicians, actors and athletes wouldn’t dream of performing without extensive practice. But how do business people practice? Mostly they end up making mistakes and learning by trial and error. But learning from real mistakes can get expensive – both for the company and for the people who make them. Simulations create a “virtual practice field” that allows individuals and teams to test assumptions and experiment with ideas without having to suffer financial reversals or career setbacks.

So what does effective team building do? Peter Senge says that companies need to create practice places where issues that arise in the work place can be isolated and focused on. This enables the team to see the consequences of particular actions and incidents that can occur very rapidly in the workplace, and ensure they can be examined in more detail. The complexities of the everyday working environment can be simplified and analysed. Actions and attitudes that cannot be reversed or taken back in the real world can be re-tried countless times in a protected environment. If the participants are successfully brought on board, the environment is favourable, the content intelligent, the method educational, the facilitator skilled, and the focus correct… team building experiences can be high impact and highly transformational.

As Plato has so cleverly identified, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.”

Ensure the experience is well designed and planned, and you can ensure great success.

You can sign up for Andrew’s Great Stuff at www.tirian.com/articles/about-t-thoughts/

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Team Building and Collaboration for Performance Improvement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 15, 2012

In Articles on Teamwork, business team building exercises, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, executive team building exercises, LDGM, Leadership Development Game, motivational team building exercises, Organizational Development Tools, workplace performance improvement

A variety of recent emails and phone calls have gotten me re-energized. It seems as though a whole new bunch of people have gotten interested in doing our Lost Dutchman teambuilding exercise with their managers and staff to help them focus on overall organizational improvement and alignment. I say that because these are people who seem to be new at doing this, not the usual crowd that I hear from who have, “been there and done that” and who are just looking for a better tool.

And, we are seeing more companies in Asia using The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine” as a major part of their strategy implementation efforts. Based on the work of Robin Speculand in Singapore, we know that most strategy implementation efforts fail, and that is often because of low levels of organizational alignment, interdepartmental conflicts and a lack of overall collaboration to work through the risky stages. Dutchman works exceptionally well for those kinds of change initiatives.

So, I’ve been able to put my Coaching Hat on my head and talk about the different kinds of things that they can do. Three of these contacts were going to be doing large events (250, 100-200-500, and 1100 (really!) and thus I shared my Best Practice of getting all of the Most Senior Managers into one room for a full day to deliver The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, debrief the game based on the kinds of collaboration and teamwork shown by these leaders, and then to discuss how these senior managers would like their people to play together.

Sure has been fun, being in this business of helping people have lots of positive impacts on other people!

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Generating LESS Collaboration? Really?? And how about even MORE Collaboration!

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On June 18, 2012

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

I am sitting in a restaurant with a not-to-be-named old friend and customer and we are talking about why he sometimes uses a competitive product in his team building trainings. His comment is basically that, “The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine generates TOO MUCH collaboration among the players and between the tabletops.”

And my response was basically, “Really? How can one have too much collaboration among people in the workplace?”

It turns out that I did get his point. Basically, Lost Dutchman sets up measurable improvements when players work together and share information as well as resources across the tabletops. They need a good plan of action and an overall solid strategic plan to manage their own resources, so the game rewards that. But the game also makes extra resources available to a team even though there is no additional benefit to them. Those same resources could be shared and would have great benefits to another team, however.

What we are talking about is a Turbocharger. A team acquiring this resource can move two blocks a day instead of one block, thus going twice as fast as normal. If the team acquires the information about the Turbochargers, they get THREE of them, instead of the single one that they can use. Thus, they gather two extra ones that are not usable and that have no intrinsic value.

But my friend did a lot of work with sales organizations whereby the other salesmen were NOT normally collaborating with others. They were not competing, precisely, but they did share common territories and had some overlap in customers. Think of the sales people in a car dealership, for example, who represent the same company and products but who have their own base of customers / prospects and where “sniping” is not a positive outcome.

So, he was using Gold of The Desert Kings, which had some of the same kinds of game dynamics but where teams were more obviously in competition to beat each other and where the overall success of all the teams was less emphasized. Heck, teams that planned badly even died, which might have some relevance to certain workplaces. He used GDK even though he knew that Dutchman was a better exercise for the group. He wanted something that did not reward inter-team collaboration so heavily, since that was not the norm for some of his training sessions.

And he also liked Dutchman more because it was faster to play and easier to debrief. But it was just too collaborative in design… He was clearly conflicted.

But a moment later, the solution appeared: “Why don’t we design it with only ONE Turbo, so that we reward strategic planning and they can still mine more gold as a team, but it doesn’t set up that much inter-team collaboration as a game dynamic?”

Seemed like a simple idea then and it remains a simple idea now.

It is just one more of the examples of how we can make slight modifications to The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine to make the game more in line with desired outcomes. Instructions for creating these single-Turbo versions are included with the game materials,

For the FUN of It!

The Problems with Outdoor Training – Some thoughts on team building

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On May 3, 2012

In Articles on Teamwork

In a conversation a while back, I was asked if one of our team building games could be used in an outdoor setting. Wow, did that bring up some memories about what might have happened and the reality of losing control.

Firstly, I am not a fan of most outdoor types of activities. Generally, the links to the business improvement issues — why companies are actually spending money and time with managers and employees — are sometimes quite vague when relating the game to organizational behavior and leadership, problem solving or change. Sure, the exercises are fun and people do like to solve problems. But it takes a good facilitator to bring out the discussions and not all the facilitators are all that good. Plus, the links from the activity back to business are sometimes stretched.

And it is not that I have not personally participated in those kinds of things over the years. I attended one such event as a participant and was there at a college with a bunch of my Leadership Greenville colleagues (a program supported by our Chamber of Commerce). Being collaborative and facilitative in my general style, I applied these skills in discussions about solving the task at hand. The “session leader” decided I was helping too much and told me that I HAD to be silent and could not talk — this is also known as punishment in most circles.

(Yeah, and imagine when I was finally allowed to talk in the debriefing! One of the questions I asked of her was about her business experience. Turns out that she had never actually had an actual job and is a college student at Clemson. This was her first job, running corporate team building programs!! And she is the leader of this group of experienced business people from the Chamber of Commerce. Really?)

Another such program on collaboration turned into a mass group competition, where the VP of the group was timing the different problem solving activities and comparing different groups to the others. We actually had a really competitive volleyball competition, too, and during the awards ceremony, many the Losers actually booed the Winners in front of the company’s executive VP. And this was at a team building event where the company spent many 10s of thousands of dollars! — Note: I was on the winning team and I still have my trophy on my bookshelf as a reminder of how badly this went…

Competition produces chaos, not collaboration and improvement

That same event also had one of the participants being stung by a scorpion when he leaned on a tree — he went into shock but the facilitation team actually carried an anaphylactic shock kit with them, since it has apparently happened before. Needless to say, that hour spent on it was costly as well as pretty distracting for all of his friends and co-workers.

My outdoor delivery experiences also include a session where the sun came out and totally washed out the projected images on the screen so no one could see. At a different event, the temperature in the huge circus tent went to 110 degrees and the big electric fans blew all the papers off the tabletops (so we taped them down). But these same fans were so noisy that the debriefing was impossible, as also occurring the game activities that followed after my session. And this narrative represents the short-version of all the things that went wrong…

YES, my various team building exercises CAN be delivered as outside activities. But I actually cannot remember a single time when something did not go wrong and force us to make a major adjustment in our delivery. And I cannot imagine doing a large group, outside, with any kind of controllable learning outcomes. Here is one we did for 500 people:

If my client is paying big bucks to get people to the venue, feed them, house them and all that, and they are renting a room for lunch or dinner, why the heck not simply deliver the exercise inside under controlled temperature and lighting and audio/video and avoid all the disasters? Why even allow the potential problems? What is the big benefit of people standing around outside? (Heck, maybe I could design a program around them all coming over to my house and working on my yard and gardens, ya think? Do it like one of those cooking classes — I could sell it as a Landscaping Teambuilding Initiative and maybe even get them to work on my neighbors’ yards…)

Lastly, I do not consider golf, bowling or firewalking to be very good team building activities. Baseball is okay, maybe, since everyone can play and bat and all that. But volleyball requires too much skill and the skill differences between people can be way too large. And how many times do I have to pass balls around or deal with a bucket on a string or hold hands with other people to solve a problem, anyway…
There are LOTS and lots of good team building games and exercises that can be delivered with high impact and good learning. Why add uncontrollable factors just to make it some “outside” program whereby the potential for non-participation or even injury might occur?

I will always remember the White Mile movie (2-min trailer is here) starring Alan Alda: A corporate team-building trip ends in tragedy in this drama. Hoping to build bonds between his employees and clients, advertising executive Dan Cutler (Alan Alda) takes the group on a whitewater rafting excursion. But the raft capsizes, several of the men die, and one widow files a lawsuit. Cutler tries to hide his negligence, and one survivor (Peter Gallagher) faces a difficult moral dilemma.

For the FUN of It!

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

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

On Collaboration and Decision-Making

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On December 29, 2011

In collaboration, employee motivation, experiential learning, large group team building events, motivational team building exercises, workplace performance improvement

Games like The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine can make some really difficult concepts much easier to dissect and discuss.

Collaboration and decision-making tend to be pretty intense activities in so many situations. In the team building exercises we deliver, the Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing acts all get accomplished in a 15 minute planning period.

Normally, not everyone agrees at the start of the exercise, since people have different viewpoints on things like risk or have thought about resource management differently. Some want to get more information and some people are just unsure

Not all the players on a team will share the same ideas about how things should be played. These discussions are valuable — they help generate alternatives.

But, within that time period, it is evident from observing the behaviors of the team members that they are now a team, sharing a goal and working together to prepare for the journey forward.

Pressures of time and clarity of goals / visions will help teams perform the Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing steps within the Planning Period of 15 minutes

Now, that team can get to work and get things organized. What has NOT been resolved is that team’s role in the larger picture of the exercise. Watching the teams interact and the Collaborator being labeled a “Spy” is enlightening. The different tabletops still view the others as:

We hear about “THEM” all the time, but often they are really made up of “US!”

The goal is clear, the resources are defined, the possibilities are limited and the decisions being made are pretty critical. But teams bond to the exclusion of the other tabletops unless the Expedition Leader does some extraordinary things.

“My Team, My Team, My Team” focus can cause more competition than collaboration

One way to play the game is to stop things after Day 5 of Day 10 and discuss performance relative to goals and objectives. After all,

The Goal is to Mine as much Gold as WE can!

But ALL of us Know More than ANY of us, so sharing information and maybe the trading of resources and ideas can have big overall benefits. People collaborating generate better results than people competing, that is for sure! We play the game to get into serious discussions about issues and opportunities to clarify existing or new visions and goals as well as address the fundamental issues of poor planning and competition.

After all, we are in this together,

For the FUN of It!

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Benefits of Experiential Exercises in Organizational Development

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 5, 2011

In Articles on Teamwork, Blogs, Change, Corporate Team Building Games, Icebreakers, Managing and leading change, performance management company, team building exercises, Team work, Uncategorized

We sometimes have the opportunity to debrief managers and trainers on the themes of team building and how using experiential exercises can improve organizational performance. After playing, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, we received these responses from some of these groups:

What are some benefits of experiential exercises in training and management development?
• Gets team members involved and actively learning
• Speeds Learning and generates perspective
• Can directly apply to real-world situations
• We can take others’ roles and share their feelings
• Fun – and is thus much more memorable
• Makes us more open to other people and their ideas
• It improves communications
• It is easy to see our behaviors in our play so it is easier to discuss our thinking and rationale
• It produces shared experiences
• It stimulates thinking and reflection
• It is much more memorable and engaging than lecture
• We DO things, and then we discuss our reasons and ideas
• People see themselves in the mirror
• It increases power and impact of the key ideas

What are the costs of poor teamwork to our organizations?
• Company objectives cannot be achieved
• Increased Staff costs (unnecessary politics, poor internal communication, increased turnover and recruiting costs, increased training costs, poor internal relations, decreased morale, decreased trust / increased mistrust)
• Increased Production Costs (time, increased waste, decreased innovation and efficiency, reduced quality, reduced productivity)
• Reduced Profitability (loss of customers and image)

There is nothing better than candid responses from line managers and front-line staff when talking about real work issues in the workplace.

See more information about our different team building exercises on our website.

Team Motivation – Participant Ideas and Reactions

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 5, 2011

In Articles on Teamwork, Corporate Team Building Games, employee engagement, intrinsic motivation, Managing and leading change, performance management company, team building exercises, Team work

HOW DO WE MOTIVATE PEOPLE IN THE WORKPLACE?

Some simple ideas for involving and engaging people.

Motivating people is a chore, but a worthwhile one since it has so many impacts on so many aspects of people and performance.

Group dynamics often make motivating teams of people pretty straightforward, since groups like challenges and problem solving and peer pressures can generally work in your favor. Getting a team of people focused and aligned on an improvement process is often easier than working with individuals. Motivating individually can be pretty complex when you are looking to add extrinsic motivators to the mix. The intrinsic motivators are better, and these can also result from team efforts.

Our flagship team building exercise focuses on issues of collaboration and cooperation as well as having themes of planning and leadership. Team motivation is a critical component of driving success and generating positive energy.

We occasionally get a chance to play the game with groups of HR and training people, so we sometimes try to get their thinking on the links of the teambuilding game to the issues they see in the workplace. Sometimes, those perspectives are helpful, although we also recognize the reality that,

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

In tabletop discussions, players brainstorm, identify and discuss possibilities that could be implemented in the debriefing, so as to generate responses, since the same dynamics occur as players talk about their missed opportunities, the similarities of the play to work, and what they might choose to do differently back on the job.

Facilitating with groups of 5 to 6 at a tabletop, you avoid the issues common to larger “committees” of people such as the domination of discussion by a single individual. People in small groups are much more likely to express their feelings, ideas and opinions, especially after a shared emotional experience. Consensus and peer support is more likely to be generated, something critical to the need to build trust and to instigate and implement change.

Here is what people said to a few of these questions relating to team motivation:

People become energized by:

Shared Goals and Collaboration
Feeling Trusted and giving trust to others
Sufficient Resources
Understanding “How Things Really Work”
Shared Risks and Rewards
Challenges and Difficulty
Feedback on Progress
Time limits on Performance
Music, Hats, and Fun!

We become de-energized by:

Insufficient Resources
Unclear Procedures / Processes
Conflicting Goals & Objectives
Excessive Competition & Risk
Everyday Competition, Power & Politics
Systems and Procedural Issues
Lack of Deadlines

I always find it interesting to get the people doing the work to talk, in a collaborative way, about what they could choose to improve and why they would want to do it. There is a tremendous energy that can be tapped if they are engaged and involved and feel part of the initiative, rather than having things pushed on them. And having the group discuss such issues and opportunities often helps to generate the team motivation and drive to get things done.

See more about The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine at our main company website and on our informational site at http://www.performancemanagementcompany.com

Note that there are also a LOT of posts in the blog that have all kinds of links to different aspects of team building. As I edit this page, I see that there are over 300 different posts, most of which are on issues of motivation and engagement.

You might find this post on intrinsic motivation to be of interest. Click on the image which is a link:

You might also find this blog of images to be of interest:

Have FUN out There!

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Implementing Improvement – Ideas on Brainstorming

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 5, 2011

In Articles on Teamwork, Blogs, Change, Corporate Team Building Games, Icebreakers, Managing and leading change, performance management company, team building exercises, Team work

“Nobody ever washes a rental car!“

If one is to expect anything to happen after any training, they must insure that there is buy-in and participation and engagement. One often hears that we need to “empower” the participants go actually go out and do something. Well, I strongly disagree with that – With a doctorate in psychology and 30+ years of consulting and training experience, I have no clue as to how to empower anyone to actually DO anything.

I believe that there are many many opportunities for workplace improvement among individuals and among small groups. There is also some general motivation to make improvements if people see a gap between what happens now and what could or should be happening. Cognitive Dissonance is but one framework that supports this idea of intrinsic motivation for improvement.

But in the workplace in most organizations, and especially in today’s risk-averse and “job enhanced” environments, the real key to rolling forward is not something like feedback or empowerment; I think it is Dis-Un-Empowerment that needs to be addressed and implemented.

Most of us make choices all through the day as to what we will do or not do. Often, we choose NOT to do something because we perceive roadblocks (example: “He won’t support that idea because he did not support the last idea I had…”).

Most people can think of LOTS of things that would get in the way of implementing some idea or ideas for improvement (“It might be against policy.” “There probably won’t be any support / resources for that.”)

One key role of training (and management and coaching) is to act to REMOVE the perceived or potential roadblocks that are un-empowering to people acting individually or in groups. That can be accomplished by getting pre-ordained support from managers not in the workshop, having managers come into the training session to hear the ideas and manage the roadblocks (and have THEIR roadblocks managed – many managers are even more roadblocked than their people!) and for the trainer to have a very good background understanding of what can be done and how it can be accomplishes.

One of the things we miss today are trainers with the extensive background in how to implement and measure the effectiveness of the training when it comes to workplace improvement. There are lots of factors operating there, which can be one of the reasons that outside consultants can often get things accomplished when inside ones cannot — they have the power of money and support behind them.

Knowing how the most success PAST improvements were implemented can often share insight into how the next FUTURE improvement might be implemented. There are cultural keys that offer perspective on these kinds of things.

Creating a gap between how things are now (Square Wheels thumping and bumping along) and how things could be operating (Round Wheels already exist) and defining an implementation strategy for making small and continuous changes and improvements often makes change and improvement very doable.

But the key is that feeling of ownership involvement. Too many people “rent” their time to an organization and simply choose to go through the motions of keeping employment, rather than buying-in and being sufficiently engaged to improve workplace improvement. The statistics on engagement and on “ready to leave for a new job elsewhere” are pretty discouraging… But good managers generate it while average ones do not.

After all, how many of the readers of this blog are ready to jump ship right now if another offer came along and how many are actively searching for new employment? The stats say about half…

How many are brainstorming new ideas to start businesses or taking a class to be more marketable in the very near future?

And most people do want to make a positive impact on the work they do and the workplace around them. Many really WANT things to be better, if their managers will let them do so. It was Peter Drucker who said that managers basically prevented people from doing their jobs in many cases.

Things are NOT good — According to a November 2011 analysis of its database of 5,700 employers representing 5 million employees, human resources consulting firm Aon Hewitt reported that engagement levels indicate the workforce is by and large indifferent to organizational success or failure.

That should concern all of us interested in productivity and performance.

You can read more about Dis-Un-Engagement by clicking on the link and thus searching the blog.And, an article is here.

Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There.
Look for ways to make things better!

For the FUN of It!

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

Individual “versus” Group Brainstorming – Teamwork and Engagement

By Dr. Scott Simmerman

On August 5, 2011

In Articles on Teamwork, Blogs, Change, Corporate Team Building Games, employee motivation, Engagement, Managing and leading change, performance management company, team building exercises

I am just back from India where I finally met some old friends and had the chance to do a full day of Square Wheels and Lost Dutchman with EduRiser and about 130 senior managers. Fabulous. I was on my game and the group was really responsive, which fanned the flames. (Wish I could always do that well!!)

On returning, one of the blogs I read had a post about the differences between individual and group brainstorming (http://dld.bz/brainstorming) and it felt like my response there should be part of a post here.

Here is what I said in my response:

We have been playing with idea facilitation for what seems a zillion years and have gradually moved to a pretty simple and yet effective process. One, we use our Square Wheels® illustrations as a basis of getting things rolling…

Square Wheels One is a wooden wagon being pulled by a person with a rope and being pushed from behind by others. It is rolling on wooden Square Wheels, with a cargo of round rubber tires.

The cartoon works like an inkblot, in that the generality of it allows readily for projection of beliefs. Sometimes, we anchor it to a specific organizational reality like systems and processes or to issues of leadership and sometimes we just leave it unhooked.

From an individual basis, there are two things that seem to work pretty well. One is to use mind-mapping or some similar approach to structured creativity. The cartoon, because of its very general nature, is a great tool to teach the technique since the image can represent so many things. The other approach, more of a group technique, is to allow for “one minute of silent contemplation” of the image and its implications before then allowing a group of people to discuss implications.

Often, what I will also add to this conversation in the facilitation / debriefing of the activity, is how the individual’s own biases and anchor points will influence them differently at each tabletop and it is only when the group puts all the ideas together do we get more of a “full picture” of the breadth and length of the imagery and the complexity of the creative process.

It is common for a tabletop to feel accomplished with 20 or so ideas from this brainstorming activity. What I do to anchor the possible is show them a list of some of the 300 or so different responses and reactions to the Square Wheels One illustration that I collected over a few sessions. That is always surprising but it helps me anchor the key concept that,

— “It is dangerous to know THE Answer!”

I continue to be astounded at the real creativity and cleverness of people.

In an article called, “Teaching the Caterpillar to Fly,” I expand on many of these same themes. One approach is to tell a joke about the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly and then to demonstrate the reality of divergent thinking with an activity. People will quit thinking about possibilities when they “get” the answer:

Two caterpillars are rolling on the Square Wheels wagon when a beautiful butterfly floats by. The one caterpillar says to the other, “You will never get me up in one of those things!”

(When you “get” the above, read the below.)

I thought it was about active resistance to change before I tested that assumption with others. I now have 22 different responses to the joke, with my favorite being, “My mother was a moth.”

Creativity and innovation are pretty amazing and I KNOW that I could never have generated that last framework.

Google “Teaching the caterpillar to fly” and you can download the article.

Me, I would use a more additive word than “versus” in the question about individual versus group brainstorming effectiveness.

—–

The session I delivered went really well and I built much of the above into that morning session. We videotaped everything, so I am hoping to post up a video of how I approach this issue one of these days. If you want to see that, pop me a note and I will be sure to forward it to you.

Our goal was team building and the optimization of organizational performance, so I shared a number of easy facilitation ideas and tried to model good engagement and involvement in my approach and it felt as though that happened!

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

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

Tag: team building

Power, Petit Tyrants, Sharking and Performance

Outdoor Training: Issues of Learning and Change

Trust is the Residue of Promises Fulfilled – An Update

Trust is the residue
of promises fulfilled

A really neat set of inspirational cartoons…

Teamwork, Communications and Optimization of Performance

Rewarding High Performance in The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine teambuilding game

Team Building – Failures and Designing for Success

Overcoming the IFS and BUTS of Team Building

Simulation for success

Team Building and Collaboration for Performance Improvement

Generating LESS Collaboration? Really?? And how about even MORE Collaboration!

The Problems with Outdoor Training – Some thoughts on team building

Benefits of Experiential Exercises in Organizational Development

Team Motivation – Participant Ideas and Reactions

HOW DO WE MOTIVATE PEOPLE IN THE WORKPLACE?

Implementing Improvement – Ideas on Brainstorming

“Nobody ever washes a rental car!“

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Individual “versus” Group Brainstorming – Teamwork and Engagement

Tag: team building

Trust is the residue of promises fulfilled

Overcoming the IFS and BUTS of Team Building

Simulation for success

HOW DO WE MOTIVATE PEOPLE IN THE WORKPLACE?

“Nobody ever washes a rental car!“

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Trust is the residue
of promises fulfilled