Here is an Animated Square Wheels^® Icebreaker for team bonding and engagement, a simple-to-use, engaging, experiential framework to generate active involvement in workplace innovation for in-person and virtual use. The idea is to show a very short animation and then get people immediately talking about innovation and culture.

And you can download the little toolkit of video and debriefing slides for free from our website — I am looking for some feedback about the designs and about the impacts, so if you download it, please expect me to ask for a testimonial. (And please note that this will not always be free — sorry about that.)

You will find this LEGO stop-motion animation about people and performance engaging. Show it to facilitate your people thinking about workplace improvement and then generating innovating ideas about workplace issues and opportunities.

This is a very simple discussion tool, one that operates very differently than most warm-up routines that focus on funny name tags or some silly effort to “warm people up for something.” This “icebreaker” is a much more practical approach to filling this valuable time with workplace-relevant interactions and a generated focus on your desired outcomes.

Getting people focused on possibilities of implementing change and improvement has been the main focus of our Square Wheels^® illustrations for the past 30 years. We give supervisors and managers, executives and trainers a bombproof and simple metaphor to enable people to share their ideas about what issues are at hand and what improvement ideas might be considered as alternatives to the way things work now.

How does this work?

At the core of the concept is the simple idea of a wagon rolling on Square Wheels with a cargo of round tires. It sets up the idea of choice and choices and considered alternative ways to doing things. PMC started with a line-art image in 1993 and have evolved to using LEGO^® as a way of enabling discussions since animations were so easy to do. Note that we have now moved to a third phase with our colored images on the right.

We would show the image and ask people, “How might this represent how organizations really work.”

Viewers would then project their beliefs onto the image and consider a wide variety of different possibilities. Collectively, a small team of people would share very diverse views, which made discussions useful for team bonding as well as generating requisite team building if one moved to defining specific workplace Square Wheels and finding some Round Wheels to attempt to implement. Implementation of ideas is always a key to effective team building initiatives.

The FIX:

We developed with a simple stop-motion approach with LEGO is a 35-second story, a story that has no actual reality but one that would be interpreted differently by people viewing the scenario.

Pulling individual and group thoughts together through a simple facilitated discussion process is easy, and the projective aspect of different perceived realities dramatically broadens the ideas. They are quickly generating shared beliefs about what is happening, with shared thoughts on workplace improvement opportunities being one desired end result. What we did in the toolkit is add some content and context that makes this short video a very useful tool around themes of innovation and teamwork and engagement.

Watch the animation by clicking on the image below:

What do YOU think happened? 

Understand that the richness of thinking best shows when groups of people discuss their individual perceptions and thoughts about what transpired.
–  A single person will tend to have a single view.
–  A group will generate a shared consensus of what happened. (Note that this is a scenario and there is no reality!)
–  A team may project their issues around their shared challenge onto the image to help problem solving.

Note that there are common general themes and reactions around:

• Visions and Missions
• Change
• Resources utilization
• Innovation and Creativity
• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Technology
• Communications and Motivation
• Trust
• Coaching and Facilitating

and that the facilitator’s comments and questions can push the group to focus on different aspects of this animation, depending on your initial framing of the video and on your desired outcomes.

Some examples of introductory, set-up comments might be:

Teamwork and Change: “I want to show you a very short video about a work team and I would like you to look for some key themes about how organizations really work to implement change.”

Setting up a Training Program: “Here is a short video. Let’s watch it and discuss. After we make some comments, we can look at it again. My goal is to relate the happenings in the video to our training…”

Innovation and implementing improvements: “In this short video, you are going to see a variety of things happening. Let’s talk about implementing improvements and change after you look at it.”

General warm up: “React to what you saw, let’s discuss those perceptions and then let’s show the video clip again…”

If you wanted to debrief this video into some actionable kinds of thinking or desired outcomes, you might prompt participants with some open-ended questions such as:

• How did the action start? 
• What might have caused them stop pushing and pulling, initially?
• How did the action end? What was the last thing that happened?
• What were their reactions to what happened? What did the Pushers see and do? What did the Puller see and do?
• When did they feel most successful?
• When did they feel most challenged?
• What important things happened? What were the key points in the learning process?
• What happened with the Square Wheel at the back of the wagon?
• What might some of their insights have been?
• What was the Wagon Puller’s reaction?
• How might the people have felt about their efforts to replace a Square Wheel with a round one?
• What was the Ranger semi-truck about? / What were their reactions to the truck?
• What other possible endings were there? What might happen next?

You will find powerpoint slides that are useful for the above purposes free in The Fix Toolkit.

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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 link to a press release about The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine teambuilding exercise and its 30 years of positively impacting people and performance.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a trademark of Performance Management Company
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