The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine

Dutchman is packaged with extensive debriefing materials. A large compendium file of 100 questions and frameworks is included along with files on how to facilitate debriefing of the exercise in various contexts. We also include "The Perfect Play," a powerpoint file showing optimized results based on planning and collaboration, as well as other ideas for discussing team and group performance.

This debriefing material is what Scott Simmerman, who designed Dutchman, actually uses and, therefore, it incorporates over 12 years of his input and experience with facilitating and debriefing the exercise. A number of possibilities are included for you to define and refine to your needs.

Scott is a Certified Professional Facilitator (by the International Association of Facilitators) and was also Senior Vice President of Operations for a large retail concern. He has been working in organizations since 1984 on issues of performance management and organizational improvement. It was his experiences with implementation and improvement that were instrumental in his designing exercises with real-world application. You can rest assured that there are numerous ideas included for linking the play to organizational developmental issues.

Many users integrate Dutchman into other training content on leadership, team building, personality styles, quality improvement and other organizational concerns. We also have a complete training package available focused on project management, designed by Paul Bryan (formerly with EDS). The exercise is metaphor-driven and these metaphors link beautifully to all sorts of training and learning paradigms.

For example: When mining, teams get 10 ounces of Gold for each day in the mine; thus, managing resources and information to spend as many days as possible mining gold is a primary objective. Teams can maximize their results when they collaborate and share information and/or get the Expedition Leader involved in helping them. "Mining as much Gold as We can" is a great metaphor for maximizing organizational effectiveness.

If teams plan by getting additional information, they can acquire Turbochargers -- a best practice metaphor -- which enable them to move twice as fast. They can also share Turbos with other teams if they choose to; this generates more Gold. Often, however, these resources are unused and results are sub-optimized. We can measure this result and provide that analogy to the group for discussion of similar opportunities in the workplace.

Play, generally, will find teams competing much more than collaborating; they find that they work together as a tabletop team quite well but that they want to act now rather than plan. Their competitiveness minimizes planning as they rush to get going. They focus on only their own team and its productivity rather than developing a collaborative approach. This, and many other factors, causes them to lose sight of the larger objective of maximizing overall results.

The Expedition Leader/Facilitator has many choices as to the focus of the debriefing and can readily link the behaviors in the exercise to situations for workplace improvement.

The debriefing possibilities are what make this exercise truly unique and extremely powerful as a tool for change and improvement. A variety of metaphors built into the exercise will allow you to link to themes of planning, motivation, teamwork, collaboration and performance improvement - this is an obvious strength of our program in comparison to so many other team building activities and there is no comparison between the behaviors generated in a program like this and the results of "ropes courses" and other activities.

We guarantee you will find powerful and effective links from the play of Dutchman to actual workplace improvement themes that will lead to purposeful discussions of possible improvements and tactics for implementation.