Here is information about the virtual version of The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, our fantastic team building game.

This is not so much of a blog post as it is an overview of progress about the conversion of our board game version of Lost Dutchman into an online version. It has been hard work doing the conversion and we are now in over a year of development and polishing the details. My son Jeff has been overseeing this with an amazing amount of creativity and focus. It is something that I could never have accomplished. He has built a really solid interface for game play online, with many opportunities for strategic planning and inter-team collaboration, with the Facilitator screen giving a solid overview of actions and progress.

The game is completed. Now, we are developing the supporting / training / debriefing materials and a network of users to share their ideas.

An irony is that the leaders of the software development company in India actually played the board game version of LDGM long before we engaged them in the design and development process. They were aware of the exercise before our collaboration because it addressed a lot of the issues they had within their company about a lack of collaboration and the alignment to key desired outcomes.

So, we ran the exercise with them to build teamwork and demonstrate the design requirements of this new virtual, online version of our old board game.

OUR goal was to have the LDVirtual game have much of the same look and feel of the board game, since we will continue to sell both versions.

• (Running the debriefing of the game with them as an actual team building exercise was useful, since they played the game before and should see improvements in their internal collaborations and their play. But my guess is that their initial debriefing did not generate much action and followup, since it seems to have been played more as a team bonding event than one for teambuilding. The leadership could have chosen to do things differently. And maybe they will this time.
• There is nothing wrong with having fun but I really think we can always generate improvement it the debriefing is done well. But this delivery was run as a diagnostic of the design, rather than as a teambuilding event, and I do not think they actually worked on teamwork and collaboration after play…)

What we do even better with the virtual version is to anchor more specific followup and organizational development activities as part of the initial, overall delivery. We can play with 24 people, in 6 teams of up to 4 people each so we can include a good size group of people for actionable change and improvement.

And instead of playing and forgetting which is so normal for so many such events, my goals for any LDV delivery is to generate a very solid debriefing about collaboration, communications, alignment and change, and then to have structured followup with the group in the weeks after the play to anchor in some of the ideas raised in the discussions around themes of motivation, dis-un-engagement, alignment to existing goals and objectives and to promote implementation of ideas for improvement.

With the online design, we can accomplish that by making a “game discussion” part of the following week’s followup and to help the group implement ideas for improving communications and teamwork that fall out of the discussion around the play of the game. It will be much more of a series of discussions around issues and opportunities rather than some single fun learning event.

For that long-term development purpose, we would love to have a partner organization for more experience customizing the supporting materials and developing training processes.

Scott’s OPTIMAL Design would be to collaborate and put supportive training materials on facilitation skills on an LMS and then develop the LDV materials to integrate tightly with these training materials for supervisors. A pair of supervisors could then work together to deliver a powerful team building event to impact the interdepartmental collaboration aspects of how they really work and to generate the support for followup and implementation of the ideas coming from this session. There would be the support materials on the LMS to do a series of meetings and even teach project management, agile or similar frameworks to support implementation.

Ideally, the collaboration might be with one of our old board game customers looking to refresh the learning and reach out to their remote workers more effectively, but working with a new client would also work since the exercise design is so straightforward. The design of the game would easily allow a supervisor to run all their people in a single session, for example, because it can play with 3 or 4 teams of 2 to 3 people (we think!) and have the same, effective interactions.

The game design is 99.9% completed and the debriefing rolls out from what we’ve been doing since 1993 with our board game. Designing the weeks-after followup needs to anchor to some real-world improvement opportunities, I think, and also have the buy-in of the managers involved to insure it aligns with their goals and objectives.

We do NOT want the game to be only a game, and we DO want the play to be an excuse to do an interactive debriefing, accomplish the goal of generating ideas for organizational improvement, and to provide a mechanism for easy followup on ideas and needs. The manager will have to learn some facilitation skills and we would need to develop some simple processes for followup and implementation.

Interested in collaborating? Ideally, we could work with a team of HR / Training people to tightly link the play of the game to the debriefing on critical, current issues and opportunities. You would work directly with me on this development, I think. We would support the licensing of game facilitators as well as support their training and development around delivery of the game.