Team Building Programs
The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine A proven, powerful and flexible tool for team building events, leadership training, retreats, management training and organizational development training.
This is a powerful exercise focused on how people, teams and organizations perform. It is about motivation, optimization and results. It sets up a wide variety of debriefing opportunities which make it a powerful exercise.
The teams are to have fun, return home, and optimize results. Planning and collaboration are beneficial. The Leader is supportive. Motivation is high. And the goals are clear.
Yet teams often compete instead of collaborate. They plan to fail by not planning and using all the information and resources available. It is a powerful learning opportunity for teams and individuals that has been played worldwide for over 10 years.
The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine
Learning Applications
Dutchman is a great way for teams to experience issues of communication, resource management and team dynamics common to the workplace. During debriefing, team behaviors are linked to opportunities to improve collaboration, leadership, teamwork and communications critical to optimizing results. Participative, visual and interactive, it produces an excellent learning environment in a high-impact and memorable way.
Benefits include:
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★Plays in 2-4 hours, allowing for a very full and complete debriefing in a morning or afternoon session.
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★Works with groups from 9 to 18
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★Clearly shows the value of cross-functional / interdepartmental team work and process improvement.
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★Provides simple metaphors about how things really work, including a series of Square Wheels cartoons directly linked to the simulation and metaphors.
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★Allows for powerful debriefings and interactive discussions focused on leading organizations, motivating people, risk-taking, communications and systems thinking.
Applications include:
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★Team building, innovation and creativity
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★Realigning missions and visions / how to motivate people and organizations
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★Leadership training and supervisory skills development
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★Communications skills training (direct links to personality styles, etc.)
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★Continuous quality and service quality improvement
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★Energizing of existing quality programs and SPC training
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★Executive Development Retreats
The simulation is high-powered and fast-paced with visual and kinesthetic aspects making it an ideal tool for learning and organizational development. Complete with its own set of Square Wheels illustrations, debriefings are very flexible and easily linked with desired learning outcomes.
Extraordinarily useful for single or multiple day retreats and for week-long management development programs, it presents an assortment of metaphors that can be easily linked to critical organizational objectives of team work, quality, leadership, missions and alignment and many other issues facing organizations today.
People play a game and then learn through a facilitated discussion about motivation, leadership, collaboration, communication, systems, resource management, problem analysis, competition and other factors that relate closely to their behavior. Many of our users are directly linking the simulation to the personality inventories and decision-making models.
A few of the 100s of testimonials about Dutchman's effectiveness:
This is the perfect retreat exercise that stimulates self insight and broader thinking while helping to breakdown the barriers to collaboration."
Denise Voncannon, University Medical Center
"When you need to discover what needs to be done for improvement, I suggest people start with The Dutchman. An outstanding exercise."
Karl Closs, Chad's Ford, PA
"Best of all, the learnings from (the exercise) are easily transferred to the workplace – in short, the simulation is value-added to the bottom line."
Robert Staub, Staub - Peterson
"Several people saw the mistakes coming but still made them. A marvelous learning and bonding for a new company formed out of 3 old ones."
Robin Restall, J. Walter Thompson
"The Lost Dutchman game is dynamite. The game is eloquently designed -- simple and quick to play yet packed with explosive power. The Lost Dutchman is unquestionably the best training game I have ever seen for teaching teamwork. In the written evaluations, over 80% of participants stated we should use it with other groups in the hospital. This is quite an endorsement of your creation."
Sam Tolbert, Director of Planning, Self Memorial Hospital
"This is not just a game! Our opening to Applebee University proved to be an enlightening experience, more than we expected from a game. Your astute guidance and keen insight made our Sunday evening opening a true hit. Best of luck with The Lost Dutchman and my unqualified recommendation goes out to any organization."
Matt Carpenter, Executive Director of Training, Applebee's
