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Square Wheels go Thump. Round Wheels already exist.
Some recent conversations convinced me to do one more post about the basic theme of Square Wheels and how the whole situation can be improved. It is not rocket science and the solutions are pretty...
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Implementing Round Wheels to fix the Square Ones
People often talk about things that do not work smoothly in their workplaces, the things that frustrate them and lower productivity. And this frustration and dissatisfaction about improvements causes...
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Daylight Savings Improvement Day – Spring Forward Monday
On Sunday, March 9, at 0200 hours in the early morning of 2014, most of the United States will engage in an exercise called Daylight Savings Time and we will move the clocks forward an hour, making it...
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National Day of Celebration in the workplace – Spring Forward Monday
In the past two days, we have had an interesting time discussing different thoughts around a Spring Forward Monday — it’s a great idea to celebrate what is normally a pretty rough day for many workers....
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Free Engagement Worksheet Tool for Spring Forward Monday
We’ve been using Square Wheels as a simple tool for employee involvement and engagement for 20 years and in our attempt to help get Spring Forward Monday started, I offer up a free handout worksheet...
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Alternate Versions of our Spring Forward Monday Square Wheels engagement tools
We have created some alternative versions of our toolkit and handouts for employee engagement. One way to acquire the free handout shown below, one that uses a different version of our Square Wheels...
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Can Creativity be Taught? Illustrated Thoughts
My thought was to add a couple of thoughts to the blog I posted up yesterday about asking whether creativity can be taught. I guess the old phrase is, “Begging the question…” You can find that other...
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Decision Making, Creativity, and Implementation
Maybe the title should be, “Engagement, Creative Problem Solving, Designing Solutions and then Not Failing to Implement,” but that seems a bit long. It is probably more realistic, though, when we look...
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Facilitation? Me, a Facilitator? Me, a MOTIVATOR??
I haven’t checked lately, but 50 years of watching what people say they fear has kept as the number ONE fear of most people, including most workers. Okay, so now we make a good worker into a...
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Fear is The Mindkiller – Thoughts on Facilitation and Engagement
In writing about facilitation and how it seems that some people want to make this simple concept into a horribly complex pedagogical framework understood only by experts (like me, but certainly not...
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LEGO, Square Wheels, Innovation, Leadership and stuff
How do you represent good ideas for improvement? How do you make things actionable and memorable and engaging? How do you generate ideas for improvement? A recent series of events was actually pretty...
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Which is Innovation Reality? You make the choice…
A cartoon of Håkan Forss generated a few reactions about which might better represent organizational reality. It is a good question so I thought to post up this “Discussion Blog” that is a bit...
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On Teamwork, Trial and Error Improvement, and Blame Frames
Organizational improvement and teamwork. The ideas are pretty simple but the reality of actually designing and implementing workplace improvement tends to be a little difficult. When we add in issues...
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Teamwork and Politics, Alligators and Sharks and Fear as a Motivator
Organizational Improvement and Performance Management and Innovation and Teamwork. These are real issues and represent improvement opportunities in most every organization. To some people, it’s “Bring...
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Moron ENGAGEMENT, is it even possible today
The conversations about time availability for coaching and team building by supervisors continue to get interesting. There is an interesting article at the Washington Post called, “How a company weekly...
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The Actual Impossibility of Engagement – An Organizational Reality
Check me on this if you can, but we keep talking about improving workplace performance by the active involvement and engagement of people doing their jobs. There are lots of reasons as well as lots of...
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Getting Things Done – Herding Frogs and Herding Cats
A couple of really good discussions on facilitation and implementation reminded me of the theme of reality: Getting things done around here is a lot like herding cats. For that phrase, I am always...
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We CANNOT expect involvement and engagement if we play the Blame Frame Game
How can we motivate people when we make them defensive? How can we expect innovation and process improvement if we are not actually encouraging people to share their thoughts and try new things? Attack...
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A Dance of Change – something new?
It was funny to read a little blurb in the ASTD Training & Development magazine about an article to appear next month. The abstract said that 70% of change initiatives continue to fail (which is on...
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Debriefing Team Building Games – Some Ideas and Reactions
A few weeks ago, I posted up a 35-slide Slideshare compendium of some of the main debriefing themes we use, anchored to our teambuilding exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. The goal...
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