How can we impact workplace performance? Perspective and Teamwork. The consideration of New Possibilities. Active engagement and active involvement with innovation. Implementation, (at last in many cases). And continuous continuous improvement. Captured in… Continue reading
GapingVoid had a nice image distributed through email with text that got me thinking about Square Wheels® and Agile Thinking that I reframed into my scheme of things. Their focus was on business… Continue reading
There is a lot of background around this new poster, and a few different versions of things. But the basic idea is about how ideas are handled. Here, a person (an outsider, an… Continue reading
It is oft-said that Time changes Things, and maybe there is some truth to that. The notion of entropy says that things eventually reduce themselves. But in the case of real people doing… Continue reading
There are all kinds of “contemplation figures” out there. I thought to add one more, this one around possibilities. Your thoughts? One needs to stop pushing and pulling, or at least ask… Continue reading
I’m going to be completing a complete redo of our Coaching Tools toolkit soon, one that embeds a series of our LEGO® Square Wheels® scenes and themes. So, I thought to warm up… Continue reading
The View at the Front of the Wagon is a very different one than The View at the Back of the Wagon. There is that old quote that if you don’t know where… Continue reading
Just a thought about how things could work better in some workplaces. We need to think about more possibilities, for sure: For the… Continue reading
A simply haiku about people and performance, teamwork and collaboration. For the FUN of It! Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since… Continue reading
Change is always an interesting process. So is innovation and creativity. Communications is such a critical factor. How are you doing with YOUR workplace communications and engagement? For the FUN of It! Dr. Scott… Continue reading
Thought you might like this simple view: Managing people and performance IS a juggling act, and there are always things that can be improved. But there are also number of factors that simply… Continue reading
Twenty five years ago, at least, I came across The Irish Prayer. I saw it again recently, in somewhat different form so I thought to share it reframed again. Sometimes, the apparent limping… Continue reading
Leading teams is about communications and shared missions and goals. Too often, wagon pushers are not involved and engaged nor do they have a clear sense of where they are going. The reality… Continue reading
Heavy drinking last night must have given me the idea of The Stairway Model of Team Building Success. You be the judge… The Stairway Model develops from the Escalator Model, which was built… Continue reading
Understanding the Lay of the Land is important, and also the reality of the journey forward. If all you do is pull, all you will see is forward. And while that might have… Continue reading
Ah, The Slackers! Let’s put the blame on the people for not being motivated, right? After all, the workplace itself must be motivating since at least one of our people seems motivated every… Continue reading
Possibilities and Potential. Ah, if we could only get there from here… I continue to think that improving active involvement and generating some positive Disruptive Engagement are pretty straightforward, at least insofar as… Continue reading
There was a Henry Ford quote that clanged with me so I popped it into my Square Wheels powerpoint master file and came up with an image for discussion. So, I got this:… Continue reading
Here are two new Haiku sprung from my newer Square Wheels images about how organizations really work. Your thoughts? If you have needs for more teamwork to generate better business outcomes, consider that… Continue reading
Yes, “work” can and does get old, especially when you choose to do the same things for the same reasons with the same results, day after day and week after week. On the… Continue reading
We working hard to illustrate a big bunch of things from my Square Wheels themes and quotes collections and to build a lot of scenes into my Lost Dutchman team building game. But,… Continue reading
It is August. How are you doing on your resolutions to improve your workplace now that it is Month Eight? There is still time to get things done more better faster. For… Continue reading
We need to better involve and engage people in our workplaces, and we cannot do that by implementing another survey or continuing to do things the same way. We need to Free The… Continue reading
This relates to a blog I posted up about really lousy customer service from the Taylors’ Branch of the Greenville SC Library System. I was shocked at the extraordinarily tight security on checking… Continue reading
“Change is Good. You go first,” was one of the quotes in The Dilbert Principle, a book on business principles and organizational improvement by Scott Adams. And there is something to be said… Continue reading
And Santa rolls now, more than he rocked before. You can see that those Square Wheels are being replaced by some round ones… For the FUN of It! Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer… Continue reading
Here is a haiku poem on Thoughtfulness and another on Consideration. In both cases, the focus is on making improvements in how things work to roll forward #morebetterfaster. The Round Wheels are already… Continue reading
Wagon pullers pull. They work hard to move their wagons fast forward. But wagon pullers could also benefit by involving and engaging their wagon pullers more effectively, by working to facilitate involvement and… Continue reading
Motivation comes from involvement and engagement and from allowing people to generate ideas for improvement. In The Square Wheels Project LMS, we gives supervisors tools to improve their facilitation skills. Fast. Easy /… Continue reading
Terry Lee was over here and we were listening to songs while we are painting my den and he mentioned Uriah Heep and one of my favorite songs is “July Morning.” So, I… Continue reading
Things are the way they are because they are what they are. We know that nothing made sense, because neither did anything else. So, instead of wondering why, wonder what. Wonder what you… Continue reading
I disagree with Twain. A lot of people have already started. The key is to make sure that you are doing things effectively and efficiently. Read more about it by clicking on the… Continue reading
It is Thanksgiving, and we need to take personal responsibility for the choices we make and what happens. So, maybe you can find a use for this little quote / poem from my… Continue reading
Teams are powerful tools for implementing changes and improving workplace performance. Teams also impact leadership and can work for you or against you, depending on the organizational culture. Sometimes, it pays to simply… Continue reading
I was thinking about the future a while ago and realized that, for many, it arrived last year or even many years ago, in regards to how they deal with change. In picture… Continue reading
My Square Wheels® cartoons are about getting things to change. One idea is to step back from the wagon and dissociate, giving you the opportunity to see things differently. Another is that you… Continue reading
For the past 20 years, I have been playing with the theme of managing and leading change. One reality is that you cannot push change onto someone else. In that way, it is… Continue reading
We spend a LOT of money on marketing, generally defined as the effort to attract new customers and retain new customers. But the reality is that we spend a LOT of that money… Continue reading
I am a big believer in continuous continuous improvement and workplace innovation driven by people who have their hands on the wagon and know what is not working smoothly. Innovation does not always… Continue reading
I love those Dr. Seuss kinds of rhyming so I thought to lay out one that focuses on continuous improvement, change and innovation and on the issues of personality. To generate change, you… Continue reading
When I came across the interesting thing about English words and the –dous ending, I immediately thought of the illustration of how things really work in so many organizations. Thought you might like… Continue reading
More to come on this shortly, but I have started rebuilding an old toolkit on Managing Roadblocks and will start using Susan and the LEGO to model the concept and the opportunities. Basically,… Continue reading
My belief is that innovation and improvement are incremental processes that generally occur in small, sometimes continuous steps forward. There may be occasional mistakes or failures but teams of people can often implement… Continue reading
I was in the middle of a response in one of my LinkedIn forums and thought to quickly put this together and up. We sometimes take work so deadly seriously, and we get… Continue reading
My “old” version of the new LEGO illustrations looks like this: and my son pointed out to me that this is NOT all “official LEGO pieces” like the smooth wheel in the middle… Continue reading
My son, whose old LEGO pieces I have been using, suggested that I make the Square Wheels wagon and scenes out of ONLY legitimate LEGO instead of the hybrid assemblies that I have… Continue reading
We like to think of ourselves as rational human beings, making good sense of everything that happens in our environment. The reality is that we are creatures bounded by our imagination and self-deceptions,… Continue reading
A similar quote to this turned up when I was reading Closing Time by Joseph Heller, the author of Catch 22. The latter is one of my favorite books of all time, so… Continue reading
I thought this might make a good one-liner on the theme of leading people and improving motivation. Reframe the “care” word to anchor it to the issues of people and performance. Caring is… Continue reading
