Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine is a fast-paced highly engaging activity that surfaces transformational questions, ideas, and insights for participants around issues of collaboration, productivity, drive for results and leadership. I have successfully used this exercise with sales people, mid level managers and senior executives.Andrew Miller, Director of Training,Sysco Canada(winner of the ICF 2008 Prism Award)
The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine sets up a journey to mine Gold in the Superstition Mountains of the American Southwest. It's based on a true story of Jacob Waltz and his gold mine, lost when he attempted to describe its location on his deathbed in 1892.
Participants play in teams of 4-6 players and are provided with a mission and a challenge, given resources and information and then asked to make a variety of choices to develop and execute their plan. Their assumptions, choices, agreements and decisions help them develop a strong sense of ownership and involvement in the exercise, allowing for a powerful and memorable debriefing focused on leadership, collaboration, communications and many other behaviors.
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.
This is a straightforward way to involve participants in behaviors focused on organizational alignment to overall missions, visions and goals. It is about involving and engaging players in an initiative much like the challenges faced when dealing with organizational improvement issues around themes of planning and inter-organizational collaboration. It is tightly linked to themes of collaboration and cooperation, with a variety of measurable behavioral outcomes that make debriefing engaging and real.
Below are specific points explaining how Dutchman works as a powerful leadership game.
1) The exercise models a variety of good leadership skills and practices:
- Sharing goals and missions
- Aligning teams for optimizing results
- Offering opportunities for coaching
- Providing feedback and measurement of game activities
2) The facilitator is "The Expedition Leader," who is put in the role of helping teams be successful and makes him/herself available to offer teams support and information if they ask for it. And, the goal is, “To Mine as much Gold as We Can.”
- Thus, the exercise is focused on success. the success of each team as well as the success of the group. The reality of play, however, finds that teams will not ask for help, will choose to compete versus collaborate and that they measurably limit the optimal Return on Investment (ROI) because of the choices they make.
3) This is a game of challenges. Tabletops are given sufficient but limited resources with a goal of optimizing results. They have a variety of decisions to make and have opportunities to change their plan as new information becomes available.
- How do they react, for example, when a team viewed as their competition, approaches them with shared resources?
- How do they respond when they discover that they have resources that can be shared and that will help improve another group’s results?
4) The debriefing possibilities are what make this exercise truly unique and extremely powerful as a tool for leadership, change and improvement.
- 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.
5) Many users integrate Dutchman into other training content on leadership, team building, personality styles, quality improvement and other organizational concerns.
- A complete training package, for instance, is available focused on project management. The exercise is metaphor-driven and these metaphors link beautifully to all sorts of training and learning paradigms.
6) Dutchman comes as a ready-to-play exercise that includes complete instructions, game materials and extensive debriefing ideas. It’s designed for flexible use and offers specific ideas for use as a Leadership Game.
- For example, in leadership training programs, the exercise is often played with tables of 4 people instead of 6. This allows all the players to be heavily involved and important to the overall outcomes. More tables in play increase the amount of information in the exercise that could be shared as well as the amount of competition between tables that is often observed.
7) The game is a one-time cost and offers several versions with each priced based on number of participants:
Generally, the exercise models:
- Teamwork, communications
- Collaboration, planning
- Organizational profitability
- The pivotal role of leadership
Lastly, unlike many other games, the Expedition Leader in this exercise is put in a situation whereby they are modeling good leadership behaviors.
The role is to "help teams be successful" and they act congruently with the mission of maximizing ROI and "mining as much Gold as WE can."
