Are you ready to
"Mine the Gold" in your organization

The Search for the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine workshop is widely acknowledged as one of the worlds best experiential learning exercises. We are proud to be able to deliver the experience to our clients in Australia. This action-packed and fun-filled simulation is a dramatic and powerful experience which demonstrates how missions and goals can motivate teamwork and collaboration to optimize group performance.

The exercise focuses on collaboration as its main outcome but also provides many insights and understandings with respect to the important role of leadership on the team, communication, consensus building, working under stress, resolving conflicts, and continuous quality improvement.

Team size is 5 or 6 people and there is no limit to the number of participants. The program has been successfully delivered world wide for groups of 6 and groups of 600, from 11-year olds at a YMCA to top managers at multi-national corporations to shopfloor personnel in manufacturing plants to executive secretaries at international conferences.

It's outstanding for a highly interactive morning or afternoon event. The group gets to play and then fully debrief the experience and discuss real opportunities for improvement. It functions very well  within a conference or as a specific training event on team building, leadership and collaboration. Many organizations use it in multi-day training and leadership development programs.

Perfect to kickoff a Strategic Planning Event, Goal Setting or Executive retreat.

Details

"Dutchman" is a fun teambuilding simulation for groups from 6 to 600 that focuses discussion on mining gold within the organisation. Generally, it focuses on improving leadership and interdepartmental collaboration, and there are a variety of connections to team-based issues. Over the past 10 years, Dutchman has entertained and enlightened participants worldwide.

The simulation is a powerful and proven teambuilding event that plays with organizations of all kinds. Feedback from sessions is extremely good (generally rated 4.5+ on a 5 point scale) due to the energy the play creates and to the outstanding debriefing qualities of the exercise. Players leave with tangible ideas for better communications, teamwork and leadership.

Dutchman takes about 2 hours to play, although we suggest you allocate 3 hours for full discussion and debriefing. Sessions using teams of 6 people and 3 or more teams are optimal, allowing for intra-team communication and planning as well as themes of collaboration between teams.

The setting is modern-day Southwestern United States in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. Teams go on a search for gold from the famous Lost Dutchman's Mine.

Participants join others at tables set for 6. On the table is a map, Grub Stake of resource cards, planning tools and other information about the exercise. Putting on cowboy hats and colorful bandannas (which add visual impact and energy), the group settles in to hear the history of the Lost Dutchman Mine and to learn the mechanics of the challenge.

Teams have 20 days of 2 minutes each to manage their journey to the mine and back home. They can choose from 3 paths with varying risks, planning for weather and for optimal use of resources.

Once the introduction is concluded, teams have 15 minutes to plan. We then begin play (roughly 40 minutes), take a break and then begin what is a very flexible and powerful debriefing. Generally, we complete the entire activity in 3 hours but many users integrate the game into other training content on leadership, team building, personality styles, quality improvement and other content. The exercise is metaphor-driven and these metaphors link beautifully to all sorts of other training paradigms.

More Information on the Benefits of
The Search for the Lost Dutchman's Goldmine
and a listing of just some of the International Corporations
that use the Simulation to bring out the best in their people!

MORE INFORMATION

Note - March 2005

Try "The Search for the Lost Dutchman's Mine" for free!!

1/ We will be running a series of Dutchman information nights
during the year in all capital cities.
If you would like to be invited to one of these free events, to see if the simulation
would be suitable for your people, please send us an email
and we will provide details closer to the date.

Conference & Event organisers, HR & Training managers.

      All of our Team Building Ideas will be
themed and adapted to meet your objectives.
They can also be delivered together in different combinations
to provide a powerful full or multi day event!

Please visit the CLIENTS page to see the sort of result that you can expect
when you book Timothy Hyde & Achieving the Impossible for your next event.