Performance Management Blog

Team Building Followup – Maximizing Impact with Cartoons

This is our 20th year of selling team building games and we are pleased to have so many great customers. In particular, we get tremendous feedback about The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. This focuses on leadership and inter-organizational collaboration as well as anything we have ever encountered. And we have the testimonials to prove it.

teambuilding image

Another one of our special tools revolves around our Square Wheels illustrations and the toolkits that we developed for facilitating organizational improvement. As many people know, we started up a separate blog just for cartoons and poems — that has been FUN!!

square wheels image of how things work

These two things came together when a good customer asked if we had used any of the Lost Dutchman cartoons as poems for followup with individual participants, since so many of the debriefing discussions focus on themes of, “What will you do differently when you get back on the job?” and similar questions. Good question, the result of which is me playing with illustrations and doing more rhyming. I never thought of myself as a writer, much less a poet.

The result is that I am building up a big base of poems around all sorts of issues of organizational behavior. My goal is to have a complete set of illustrations that users could grab to send in regularly scheduled followup with clients or that clients could use with the game participants themselves as a way of throwing some mud at the fence and getting people to continue thinking of the choices they make around collaboration and problem solving.

I thought to share a few of the ideas here. Research has shown that images are retained better than words AND that simple poems and phrases add to the impact. So, the idea was to combine the images and some poems into a graphic that users of the game would be able to embed in followup emails or use in other ways,

Here are some of the first of these illustrated poems:

Dutchman Game Followup 1

Dutchman Game Followup Jeep 3

Dutchman Game Followup Teams 4

Dutchman Game Followup music 5

Dutchman Game Followup Top 6

Dutchman Game Followup Mud 7

Dutchman Game Followup Mud 8

One of the things that has been amazing is the quality of user feedback and testimonials we get about the overall effectiveness of the exercise. You can see some of what our users say in this blog post summarizing our owner survey.

 

Lots of times, we generate Action Plans from the debriefing in our sessions and we can all be pretty assured that we can do some things to improve on the likelihood of implementation because of the nature of the comments that are generated. I am hoping that cartoons, poems and questions might be another tool.

I hope that you find these of some interest; we are always looking to collaborate as well as to optimize the impact and effectiveness of our materials,

For the FUN of It!

square wheels author

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.

Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Follow Scott’s posts on Pinterest: pinterest.com/scottsimmerman/
Scott’s blog on Poems and Quips on Workplace Improvement is here.

 

Dr. Scott Simmerman

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of the amazing Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine team building game and the Square Wheels facilitation and engagement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced global presenter. -- You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com and a detailed profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsimmerman/ -- Scott is the original designer of The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine teambuilding game and the Square Wheels® images for organizational development.

Subscribe to the blog

Tags

Categories

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may also like