One of my customers is Novartis, who used my Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine exercise with their scientists to look at issues of improving teamwork and collaboration and innovation successes. Their two trainers and I talked on the phone for over an hour after their first delivery, debriefing and discussing some of the things they saw and framing up tighter ideas for future deliveries around their fine-tuned desired outcomes. There are lots of possibilities around how to build the game into their existing team building and leadership courses as well as to look for ways to impact more of the interdepartmental issues.
Frankly, I absolutely love those kinds of conversations, since they often generate ideas that I might clarify better in the game’s instructional overview materials as well as new ways to frame ideas.
I wrote about how clients innovated the game in other blogs. The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) neatly reframed our Best Practice metaphor of the TurboCharger to better emphasize the strategic planning theme for their desired outcomes, for example. And they also turned me on to the basic benefit of having a designated Devil’s Advocate to client teams to help an organization see other sides of the issues to improve implementation.
We’ve been playing with the design of Dutchman for over 35+ years now and the metaphors in the design are pretty well-polished. One of the metaphors ties into planning and resource management issue. (You can find a detailed blog about issues of planning and optimizing here.)
As part of their resources, we make a Spare Tire available, with the storyline that it helps protect their vehicles against “Ice Shards,” sharp spikes of ice that can damage their tires. They are also told that, “Ice Shards are very rare.”
The reality is that Ice Shards never occur, and that the cost of that Spare Tire is the same as the cost of resources to manage one day in the Mine. Having a Spare Tire then actually costs them a full day of mining gold, since their resources are, in fact, “sufficient but limited.”
We also play with a FAKE Arctic Blast on Day 17. Teams can discover that there will be TWO Arctic Blasts that occur in the middle of the game. These cost the teams extra resources, which is no big deal if you plan for these to occur. With me tossing in that FAKE extra one on Day 17, nearly every team would run out of resources and die. They simply do not have sufficient cards to get back.
The idea I got from Jessica and Natasha was that I could add Ice Shards to that fake Arctic Blast, at least temporarily making a team feel that having that Spare Tire was a benefit. That feeling would be short-lived, though, as the Just Kidding words scrolled onto that slide, but it would also add a tidbit more to the potential discussions around strategic planning and resource management and similar.
The insight is that ideas for improvement are ongoing. One might think that, after 20+ years of designing and refining something that you would have taken care of all the different possibilities. But no, there are always new ideas and new ways of doing things. And work in the real world has even more of these, if we simply open our eyes and listen with both ears.
So, I share this idea for our existing LDGM customers who can email me and ask for updated slides and new ideas or ideas to create your own in the powerpoints). We have some great learning points that can be discussed post-play:
And, I share this thought for those of you who are looking for a Most Excellent experiential team building exercise, one that focuses on collaboration between teams and that works with any size group.
(In this blog post, I get into a number of nuanced delivery ideas.)
You can see a bunch of our user testimonials in this slideshare program
Let us know if we can help your organization in any way. Our tools are simple to use and highly effective and you will find our pricing to be really reasonable.
—
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 who is trying to retire!! He now lives in Cuenca, Ecuador.
You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.
Here is a 2-minute overview of the virtual team building game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE6gDtZymwk
0 Comments