Square Wheels is a great engagement tool and we strongly believe it is the world’s BEST facilitation tool, one that works for professional facilitators as well as supervisors to involve and engage on process improvement.

We’ve been selling and supporting the use of Square Wheels® images and toolkits since 1993 and I’ve delivered workshops in 49 countries to every possible audience including 12-year old kids and lots of senior managers.

And I have written about their potential uses a lot (300+ blogs?) and have also gone through three different iterations of how we present the theme. Many still like and use the original line art (at left below) while I still love the LEGO ones because we can so easily “stage themes” and do stop-motion animations and get hands-on play for those Serious Play people. And the ones on the right are all new.

And the discussion about which version to use still generates no solid answers. Ali Thaib and I are writing a book on Sales Management and we are still discussing whether to use the original line art versions of the new colored ones on the right. And my colleagues in Japan uses completely different ones. But the METAPHORS really work!

The NEW ones consist of about 50 different key images about, “how organizations really work.” All of these images are used to “ASK” people about their organizational issues and possibilities. And all of them generate active involvement, disruptive innovation and help change the language around thinking about performance improvement.

Recent discussions about including embedding Square Wheels into a leadership development and facilitation skills AI-aided brainstorming and implementation package (Stormz) keep me thinking that more people might be interested in working with me to develop some materials for their use as consultants and for organizational development purposes on an LMS or similar. I’ve been working on better explaining possible uses and why these images are so uniquely effective.

After all, they are just cartoons, right?

Why use these images and metaphors?

Audiences of all kinds quickly get very involved and engaged in discussing issues and ideas about their workplace, the world at large, and even about their personal development — and there are a number of solid psychological underpinnings as to why. People will remember these sessions 25 years later!

My goal here is not to get into the neurophysiology and behavioral psychology of how all this works within the brain, but to try to offer some simple thoughts on different aspects of learning and behavior that really work to impact thinking, behavioral change, teamwork and collaboration. Active involvement is a given, as is divergent thinking and cognitive dissonance.

Fundamentally, the Square Wheels images work in a way similar to a Rorschach Test (or Inkblot Test), where individuals are shown images and asked to respond to them. These images are called “projective psychological tools” because people will project their beliefs onto the images, which have no reality in their construction. A typical inkblot might look something like this:

Different people see different things. One’s personal history comes into play.

What materials exist?

Ten years ago, I started using more colorful and interactive approach, using LEGO blocks and building on the above theme. Here is one of a series I call Draggin’ Slayer because we slay what is dragging us down with active engagement and a Think Different approach.

First we engage them and then we get them actively involved in making changes for improvement

And now we have the new ones…

With the Square Wheels tools, we focus more on organizational issues and opportunities, working on themes of teamwork and continuous improvement and other workplace themes.

The approach is very simple: we encourage a group of people to consider the image individually and generate their thoughts on, “How might this represent how things really work?”

What is the Collective Engagement Process?

After some silent contemplation, you ask the tabletops to share their different perspectives and ideas amongst themselves, so you generate both an active involvement by the individual and the tabletop. Then, you do some things with the collective group, generating consensus as to what the image represents.

If there are more than 6 people in your group, you engage them in small groups of 4 to 6 —  and there are approaches for actively involving and engaging even VERY large groups of 100s of people in highly interactive participative ways.

Our key anchor points are simple:

• Square Wheels represent things that work, but that do not work smoothly.
• Round Wheels represent ideas for improvement that already exist and that could be implemented

Discussions generate Cognitive Dissonance between the way that things are right now (as perceived by individuals or small groups) and the potential solutions to close that gap. People are motivated to close the gaps and we have developed some team / tabletop support for working to address that issue. Some of the overall impacts are as follows:

1. We get people actively involved in generating ideas for improvement that can be anchored to organizational development or quality / process improvement.
2. We get individual as well as collective tabletop ideas about issues and opportunities.
3. We generate discussions about what might be done differently, giving participants an active involvement that generates engagement and ownership.
4. We generate a collective broadly-based set of perspectives on issues impacting performance.
5. We generate individual ideas, anchored to best practices, for what they might do differently to make improvements.
6. We get a collective discussion and generate peer support around certain ideas that have “weight,” that are substantially impactful and the deserve to be addressed and implemented.
7. People LIKE being involved and engaged in generating team-based ideas for improvement, much more so than they like being simply told what to do. Change is often resisted when forced on people, while active involvement generates motivation and engagement.

A pretty normal example of workplace performance, with teams competing without much collaboration or teamwork between teams.

We can readily link the issues of Square Wheels back to the organizational or work group mission and vision, helping to readily impact the peer support for alignment and generating discussions as to where expectations and measurement / feedback systems do not align. You can read a short article on assessing feedback systems by clicking here.

We can open up discussions of best practices by sharing ideas for Round Wheels. And by requesting that 3 Round Wheel ideas be generated for each selected Square Wheel to be addressed, we can force more creative thinking for solutions to common problems.

Are these illustrations too silly or too simple? My thought is that they ARE simple and that is one of the reasons that they are so engaging. You will look at the illustration and have only a few thoughts, but once the ideas begin to be shared with others at the tabletops, the ideas will flow and the perspectives will shift significantly.

At that point, the general cartoon of issues is often transitioned back to the actual workplace, as people begin to see the issues they face in the context of the image. Problems take on a Square Wheels label, and once something is labeled a Square Wheel, it will always exist as something that NEEDS to be addressed and solved; after all, the Round Wheels already exist.

The simple concept and the Square Wheels images are powerful tools for brainstorming and creative problem solving, also, since it detaches the issues of ownership and politics from the issues of performance. Calling something a Square Wheel is not viewed as a personal attack on the person or originating department; it is merely something to address and improve.

Here is an old but good 90 second video of me talking about using SWs

It also links beautifully to ownership engagement for problem resolution. A reality is that:

Nobody ever washes a rental car

and that active involvement generated by the process links neatly to the issues of active workplace engagement. Get people to stop, step back, and do some disruptive engagement to get them thinking differently about how things could be improved. Give them the ownership involvement needed to want to make changes.

Let this blog represent a starting point for addressing why Square Wheels images work so well in situations to generate active learning, active involvement, teamwork and pragmatic ideas for organizational improvement. Performance improvement is a difficult thing to accomplish, in so many situations, and these very simple tools and a simple approach to involving and engaging people works seamlessly and elegantly.

What are YOUR thoughts on why this works or some thinking
about the issues that using it might generate?

—

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.

Square Wheels® are a registered trademark of Performance Management
and cartoons have been copyrighted since 1993,

© Performance Management Company, 1993 – 2025
LEGO® is a trademark of The LEGO Group

#SquareWheels  #InnovationAtWork  #TeamEngagement  #FacilitationTools  #WorkplaceImprovement  #EmployeeEngagement  #CreativeProblemSolving  #OrganizationalDevelopment  #LeadershipTools

 * Please note that I have a doctorate in behavioral neuropsychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and have completed NLP Master Practitioner certification, along with being a Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) from the International Association of Facilitators and a Certified Professional Trainer (CPT) from the International Association for People and Performance. So, I do have both an educational background for understanding the neurophysiology of learning as well as the professional experienced in changing organizational behavior. These tools WORK!