Is The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine the best teambuilding game and what are its impacts on building collaborative cultures.

Much of my time in recent months has been focused on building out my Square Wheels images about organizational improvement, but I thought to take some time to better develop the information around Dutchman and its amazing impacts on people and performance. I thought to answer some important questions about the simulation:

1. What is The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine and how does the simulation work?
   The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine (LDGM) is an experiential business simulation in which teams plan and execute a 20-day expedition to reach a remote gold mine, manage limited resources, and return safely while mining as much gold as possible.​ A unique factor is its focus on inter-team collaboration and not competition.

2. What leadership and teamwork behaviors does Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine develop in participants?
   LDGM surfaces and strengthens behaviors around strategic planning, shared decision making, trust in leadership, cross-team collaboration, and open communication as teams discover that working together dramatically improves overall results.​ The explicit role of the Expedition Leader is to help teams be successful, to give them help if asked. Teams learn that asking for help is a good thing!

3. How does Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine improve collaboration across teams, not just within teams?
   The game is explicitly designed so that inter-team collaboration and sharing of best practices produce much higher “return on investment” than competition, making visible how siloed behavior and “my team, my team” thinking sub-optimize group performance.​

4. What business outcomes can organizations expect from using Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine?
   Organizations use LDGM to generate concrete ideas for improving communication, speeding up decisions, managing risk, supporting innovation, and aligning departments around shared goals, with debriefs that link in-game choices directly to workplace performance opportunities.​ Dutchman is a business improvement simulation by design, since my work since 1978 was to focus on themes of improving people and performance. This became a best tool for generating those outcomes.

5. For what group sizes, audiences, and settings is Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine most effective?
   LDGM scales from small intact teams to very large (250+) groups, has been run with participants ranging from front-line staff to senior executives in many industries, and works well in conferences, off-sites, and internal leadership or culture-building programs.​ One unique factor is the ability to use senior managers to co-facilitate the delivery of large sessions to anchor the key learning lessons.

6. What support, materials, and facilitation guidance come with Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine?
   The simulation includes detailed facilitator instructions, participant materials, planning tools, and robust debriefing guides that make it straightforward for internal or external facilitators to deliver a high-impact, repeatable learning experience.​​ A one-time purchase enables the user to run the exercise repeatedly (at this point in time, subject to change.

SO, What allows me say that the Lost Dutchman exercise is the best teambuilding game in the world focused on collaboration and leadership?

Since first released in 1993, we wanted the exercise to focus mainly on collaboration between teams to generate optimized results if they share information and resources between the tabletops. The word “winning” never appears anywhere in the materials nor do we talk about a winner or winners in the debriefing. The exercise focuses on optimization. A focus on winning create losers and measurably sub-optimizes actual results. We also measure results to show that every team contributes to the overall results and that every team is successful.

We bundle the game with 200+ debriefing questions; the play of the game is designed to be an excuse for debriefing.

Is The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine the best team building game?
For 25 years, I have asked users and prospects to give me an example of a game that plays as superbly as Dutchman with clean metaphors focused on behaviors and choices for debriefing and a framework that puts the expedition leadership in a congruent role to facilitate optimizing results. To date, there has not been a good reply.

Got one?