We’ve been selling and supporting The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, a powerful teambuilding exercises with anchors to collaboration, leadership and motivation, since 1993. We have owners and users of the LDGM game worldwide, so I thought I would do two things to improve that ownership experience and expand on the issues and opportunities that we support with this exercise:

1 – Continue to publish articles with ideas to improve organizational performance and link to issues of corporate team building opportunities like this blog post.

2 – Go back and add the category, Dutchman Delivery Tips, to the relevant previous posts in this blog to improve the sorting of these particular articles. You can now search that Category for ideas about improving the link of team building simulations like LDGM to your development frameworks.

Most often, people just purchase the Dutchman team building exercise and play it with their group. It is pretty bombproof and users see that it goes really well without understanding the thinking under the design and those little things that make everything pretty congruent.They get a good outcome and they are then satisfied with the way things work and are not looking for different ways to play.

It is surprising how seldom we get into dialogs and interchanges about other features of the design, however, even though many options are detailed in our Professional Edition of the exercise or appear in different posts of mine. And the reality is that there are any number of different nuances that can be integrated into a program to improve its connection to desired outcomes.

Let me share three different delivery frameworks:

One:  I had forgotten ALL the cards for a program up in Gaffney. SC and had an hour over lunch between the morning Square Wheels and the afternoon Dutchman delivery. Immediate panic. The creative solution to that problem became the Inventory Management Delivery Option, where I gave teams their starting inventory and we simply kept track of consumption on an inventory form (me at the Trading Post and the Supply Expert at each tabletop).

What I discovered with this delivery was that knowing exactly what resources a team had helped me manage the game immensely — I could see which team had what resources precisely and then coach teams to share resources like trading surplus Supplies for Fuel between them. You cannot really do that in the normal way the exercise played…

Two: An old friend and consulting buddy told me the game was TOO collaborative; he worked with real estate people. SO, I designed the Single Turbo version of the Tortilla Flat Video. It does not have the three Turbochargers in the Video but merely the one, thus not allowing research sharing. (It rewards strategic planning and not collaboration. Neatly.)

Three: Someone asked me, “How can we mine even more gold each day?”

That was a really really excellent question, causing me to rethink the overall design… It is awesome that questions become new ideas.

What I did was to repack The Mine Video to have 16 Cave Cards (instead of 12) and I changed the instructions to tell players that by using a Cave Card, they could mine 11 ounces of gold each day. The extra Caves I include can be shared freely with other teams and each one used would generate an extra ounce of gold. We call this The Assay Office Version, since the Trader can report to another person (at The Assay Office) to track the gold mined over the days (leaving the Provisioner to simply bank the game).

You can purchase this complete tool, with instructions and delivery options, at this location on our website. It is about optimizing overall profitability and it adds another collaboration element to the play and discussion.

You can actually see when the collaboration between the teams starts and you can count the unused Cave Cards and you can add the number of extra ounces produced by the planning — getting the Mine Video. Each unused Cave Card loses $250 in results. Measurement of results adds more impact in your debriefing and linking back to the reality of the workplace!

(And, yeah, I can do all that / any of that by myself when I deliver the exercise for groups of 5 tables or less, although it IS a bit chaotic!)

None of this appears in the LD3, 4 and 6 games but this and more is in the Pro Version (but not mentioned directly in the Rental stuff, simply because it is too nuanced for a single use in a large group… But these kinds of enhancements can be integrated into all the LDGM game deliveries.

We believe that the Lost Dutchman’s teambuilding exercise remains as one of the absolute best simulations in the global marketplace for collaboration and leadership development games. If you are interested in a solid corporate team building simulation, drop me an email,

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.

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

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