Powerful and obvious links to performance and motivation

I designed Dutchman to be a fun excuse to do a debriefing on behavior, motivation, goals and collaboration between teams. My initial idea was to use a metaphor of mining gold, get people to compete even though I strongly suggested they collaborate, and have a way of making every team successful while allowing teams that worked well with other teams to optimize their results. We seem to have done that pretty elegantly.

Play is described elsewhere. But these behaviors are fairly common to most sessions:

• Players bond quickly into a focused team
• Teams don't plan well and resist spending time on planning and information-gathering
  
• Teams do not share information or ideas with other teams
  
• Teams do not ask for help during planning, nor will they ask for goals or possibilities
  
• Teams will do bartering and take advantage of other teams
  
• Teams do not ask for help during play, generally choosing to sub-optimize results
  
• Teams choose to compete, even though collaboration is stressed and rewarded
  
• Players are highly motivated to succeed (but winning generates competition)

But the good news is that there are solidly collaborative team behaviors occurring during the exercise and that some teams do communicate and cooperate with others, strategically planning and then sharing useful information and resources. Generally, some players on some teams often try to help other teams. This mix of behaviors allows for a really solid debriefing of practical ideas for improving workplace performance and the themes of competition versus collaboration for motivation and optimization of results.

Dutchman is packaged with extensive debriefing materials.

Even our small versions of the game have large compendium files of questions and debriefing ideas. The game is built around metaphors like Mining Gold and themes of mud and Square Wheels and maximizing ROI (of the Expedition Leader, not so much each team!). It allows for a lot of team choices regarding risk and routes and resource management and every team is successful.

As an effective Certified Professional Facilitator, Scott designed the game to allow for insights and ideas, engagement and involvement and our debriefing approach supports insights and adaptations.

Typically, we start with a cartoon show of some of the general characteristics of play, followed by tabletop discussions such as:

• What did you learn from your experience?
• What made the game energizing? (What are the motivational factors in the design)
• What does, "Mining as much gold as WE can" mean to our organization (insofar as collaboration and change)
• Why do teams choose to complete rather than collaborate (when collaboration improves results)
• What might we choose to do differently in the workplace?
  

We also include "The Perfect Play," a PowerPoint file showing optimized results based on planning and collaboration for an individual table as well as for a pod of 3 collaborating teams (best), as well as other ideas for discussing individual, team and overall group performance.

This debriefing material is what Dr. Scott Simmerman, who designed Dutchman, actually uses in his deliveries and, therefore, it incorporates over 19 years of his input and experience with facilitating and debriefing this exercise. A number of possibilities are included for you to define and refine to your needs and the game is sold fully supported by Scott.

Many users integrate Dutchman into other training content on leadership, team building, personality styles, quality improvement and other organizational concerns. Our Pro Version also has a complete training package available focused on project management, designed by Paul Bryan (formerly with EDS). The exercise is metaphor-driven and these metaphors link beautifully to all sorts of training and learning paradigms.

Some specifics of the design:

There are a variety of simple design features that are congruent with positive leadership and intrinsic motivation in the workplace.

For example: When mining, teams get 10 ounces of Gold for each day in the mine; thus, managing resources and information to spend as many days as possible mining gold in the Mine is a primary objective. Teams can maximize their results when they collaborate and share information and/or get the Expedition Leader involved in helping them. "Mining as much Gold as We can" is a great metaphor for maximizing organizational effectiveness and cooperation.

Teams are told that they can acquire additional information at the cost of one or two days of time. If teams thus plan, they can acquire Turbochargers -- a best practice metaphor -- which enable them to move twice as fast. They can also share Turbos with other teams if they so choose; this generates more Gold. overall. Often, however, these resources are unused and results are sub-optimized. We can measure this result and provide that analogy to the group for discussion of similar opportunities in the workplace.

Play, generally, will find teams competing much more than collaborating; they find that they work together as a tabletop team quite well but that they want to act now rather than plan. Their competitiveness minimizes planning as they rush to get going. They focus on only their own team and its productivity rather than developing a collaborative approach. This, and many other factors, causes them to lose sight of the larger objective of maximizing overall results.

Debriefing can be for 30 minutes or for two days:

The Expedition Leader/Facilitator has many choices as to the focus of the debriefing and can readily link the behaviors in the exercise to situations for workplace improvement. The exercise can be debriefed as a stand-alone exercise, such as at a large team building or organizational development event. Or, the content can be readily integrated into multiple-day programs. All of the metaphors and the basic overall design are "clean" from an instructional viewpoint.

The debriefing possibilities are what make this exercise truly unique and extremely powerful as a tool for change and improvement. The different metaphors built into the exercise will allow you to link to themes of leadership, planning, motivation, teamwork, collaboration and performance improvement - this is an obvious strength of our program in comparison to so many other team building activities and there is no comparison between the behaviors generated in a program like this and the results of "ropes courses" and similar soft activities.

We guarantee you will find powerful and effective links from the play of Dutchman to actual workplace improvement themes that will lead to purposeful discussions of possible improvements and tactics for implementation. Using an experiential learning activity, such as Dutchman, is supported by learning theory and brain research as it helps re-energize learning sessions and is structured to address critical issues or strategies that participants face in their work environment. Dutchman's facilitator can easily link participants' play to personal and organizational performance in the workplace.

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