Warp Speed Simulations: Fast Track Learning for Management Training and Development

Our on-line simulations provide a wonderful supplement and indeed an alternative to the traditional learning methods most commonly employed in management education today. The Warp Speed approach to training capitalizes on the strengths of different delivery methods, including presentations, exercises and discussion, while countering the weaknesses of each.

Warp Speed Simulations

Our Warp Speed series of on-line simulations are designed to teach and reinforce the concepts of business strategy and change management.

Change-O-Meter

Panorama at the Crossroads

Harmon Health

To inquire about our dynamic simulations, call us at:
(613) 531-0462
or email:

What are the advantages of well-designed training that incorporates simulations? 

Accurate, timely feedback: Our simulations incorporate the computer's capability to provide accurate, near-immediate feedback.
Cost-effectiveness: While simulations are expensive to develop, they can be used again and again with any number of participants, thus lowering the cost per person. What’s more, technical platforms enabling new forms of simulations are becoming ever faster, cheaper, more pervasive, and easier to program.
Practice and development of managerial skills: Participants can shorten the typically long learning cycle in such areas as strategic thinking and planning, change management, negotiations skills, etc. by using simulations as a way of developing judgment. Simulations can compress months or even years of cause-effect dynamics into a few short hours and allow participants to receive feedback about their judgment and competencies.
Richer, deeper learning experience: Simulations can take the case study, a foundation of management education, to the next level in terms of realism, intensity and interactivity. Participants in simulations can more easily recall lessons learned from these intense, interactive learning experiences.

Click here to receive a free report on simulations, their advantages and their use in corporate training.

Building Smart Teams at Warp Speed: Fast Track Learning for Management Training and Development

Outline of the Two-Day Program

Day 1

Welcome and Introductions

• Orientation to session and modules

Introduction of the Team Effectiveness Model

• Four hour house§ Building the team model
• Presentation of research and methodology

Introduction to Team Management Practices

• Mini Lecture § Building the Smart Team
• Learning Experiment: Grid Maze
  • Debrief: Application to workgroups and your challenges
  • Form, storm, norm, perform
  • Exercise: required behaviours for group success at each stage.

Lunch

Introduction to Charter: A tool to help build effective Team Management Practicess

• Elements of the Charter

Development of Team Mission and Vision

• Trends mind map
• Which trends do you want to impact with your team?
• Creation of mission and vision, and priorities.
• Application to your teams

Personal key learnings and sharing of key learnings.

Day 2

Intro to Problem Solving Module

• Group dynamics
• Definition of the problem solving success factor

Developing Communications Patience\

• Mini Lecture focusing on listening for understanding, speaking for understanding and exploring assumptions
• Exercises to support concepts

Learning experiment: The blind square

• Debrief to focus on communications patience skills
• Application to your teams

Lunch

Synergy Skills

• Mini lecture and exercises to explore team synergy skills:
  • Data not hunches
  • Generating and building on ideas
  • Evaluating ideas
  • Leveraging a problem solving process

Learning Exercises to foster team synergy:

• Consider All Factors
• Brainstorming
• Concept Challenge
• Consequences and Sequels
• Plus, Minus, Interesting Points.

Introduction to Conflict Handling

• mini lecture to introduce the concepts of:
• Group conflict handling style
• Conflict analysis
• Conflict handling protocols

Learning experiment: Win all you can

• Debrief: What happened?
• Circle of conflict to analyze the causes of conflict. Exercise to reinforce.
• Exercise: What suggestions would you make to change the rules of the game so that you played more collaboratively?

Action planning and next steps

• Applying the lessons learned to your teamwork.

To find out more about this dynamic program, call us at:
(613) 531-0462

or email:

Appendix 1: The Team Effectiveness Model

Today, most organizations face the difficult challenge of regaining or maintaining a competitive advantage. With intense global competition and deregulation, organizations must respond to the specific needs of their customers, and deliver high quality products and services at a competitive cost .

To do so, organizations must become flexible and adaptive, collecting information, analysing data, making good decisions and implementing them quickly. This means everyone’s knowledge must be integrated to solve complex problems and create the flow of information necessary to come to good decisions.

However, many organizations are not structured to respond to our turbulent environment. Scientific management theories were adopted for decades based on the assumptions that (1) organizations operate in a relatively stable and predictable environment and that (2) organizations can plan and control their futures. These assumptions led to formal hierarchy designed to control the flow of work and ensure the efficient operation of the status quo. The emphasis was on order, stability, consistency and harmony. Analytical techniques such as step by step thinking, incremental change initiatives and long range planning were stressed.

These assumptions are no longer serving organizations well. Increasingly, even the largest organizations are becoming vulnerable to take-overs, downturns in the economy, and competition from new entrants with newer technologies. Only five years after Peters and Waterman had identified a selection of the "most excellent companies", a whopping two-thirds of these companies had fallen off of the list. In 1983, Shell conducted a survey of how long business organizations survive. This survey revealed that organizations live about one-half as long as individual human beings. That means that you will most likely outlive your organization!

So what does this mean for organizations and their structures? As organisations become leaner, flatter and more project driven, employees at all levels are feeling the intense tension of needing to shift from a culture driven by formal authority and hierarchy, with set roles, responsibilities and boundaries, to one driven by flexible roles, goal driven performance, innovation and continuous learning. Success goes to the nimble, quick and innovative organizations, those that accelerate organizational learning and continue to learn and adapt.

If accelerated organizational learning is a critical determinant in organizational success, then organizations need to create favourable conditions for people to spontaneously come together to share and learn as they solve organizational problems and identify innovations. Skilled teams can facilitate the transition to this new way of working.

Teams formed with a specific and measurable purpose, involving members with the right skills, knowledge and perspectives from all levels and functions can provide the flexibility, speed, expertise and commitment needed to make continuous innovations in quality and service. These teams need to be "real teams" with members encouraging open dialogue, fostering divergent perspectives, questioning assumptions, and evaluating ideas with the aim of creating synergistic solutions. As power and responsibility shift to the team, managers are freer to assume more strategic work, leaving most of the day to day technical details with the team.

Apart from the many performance benefits, working in teams can also facilitate employee satisfaction; in fact, our research shows that team performance and satisfaction are highly related (Beatty 1997). As employees continue to seek meaningful and developmental work opportunities, teams can provide a powerful avenue for learning, flexibility, job enhancement and empowerment. Real time learning occurs as members expand their expertise, knowledge and experiences. Not surprisingly, teams have been identified as an integral ingredient in developing and sustaining a high performance work culture.

In summary, effective teamwork at all levels of the organization provides a solid foundation for the flexible, empowered and high performance culture that organisations are desperately seeking to create. Teams can foster job satisfaction, job involvement and organisational learning to create sustained organisational health and bottom line financial performance benefits.

So what can leaders do to enhance teamwork and learning? Our Team Effectiveness Model identifies the critical processes and skills that team members need to form quickly and excel at accomplishing their objectives.

The Team Effectiveness Model

We’ve all been part of successful and unsuccessful teams, and as such, have first hand experience of the benefits and frustrations of team membership. While some group experiences are very fulfilling, with members becoming highly skilled at working together, others are frustrating, with members developing interpersonal conflicts that are counterproductive to team progress.

These experiences have taught us that participating on a team is not necessarily easy and for many of us does not come naturally. Team success depends on a number of factors from attracting the right people to work on a common goal, enabling them to begin working together well and quickly, setting and adhering to performance schedules and inevitably handling the interpersonal stresses that occur when people work together closely.

Being part of a team requires members to work collaboratively, by challenging one’s own assumptions and beliefs, involving others in making important decisions, sharing critical information openly, and at times, sacrificing one’s personal aims for the good of the team. The challenge is to harness the group creativity that comes from an open exchange of ideas and opinions to produce an integrated solution that builds on the best of the individual thinking. Maintaining the balance between fostering diverse thinking and controlling these differences is often easier said than done). So, despite the many potential benefits to effective teamwork, team membership requires a new orientation to working and most members need to learn how to be part of a team.

We believe that most individuals can learn to be good team members and reap the personal and professional rewards of team membership. Our research suggests that organisations, by undertaking several key activities, can give their teams a strong foundation for success.

Since 1993, I have been involved in an ongoing study of effective teams, both in academic and business settings. I have collected extensive data on over 80 academic and 200 industry teams. In all, more than 350 individuals in MBA learning teams and close to 2000 members of work teams in both the public and private sectors participated in this survey. This research has helped pinpoint the critical success factors of high performance teams. And the good news is that all of these success factors are either skills that can be learned, or structures or processes that can be put in place.

The Critical Processes and Skills

The model has narrowed the key success factors of high performing teams to three critical sets of process and skills. These key process and skills predict both team performance – how well the team performs its assigned tasks - as well as team satisfaction – the extent to which members enjoy and derive personal gains from their team experiences.

They are:

• Team management practices,
• Conflict handling skills, and
• Problem solving skills.

Think of building these skills as base camp for teams; that is, the work involved in developing effective team management practices, problem solving skills and conflict handling skills is akin to base camp for mountain climbers. Just as successful mountain climbers must spend sufficient time preparing for their assent by planning their route, testing equipment, delineating roles and responsibilities, and stocking supplies, teams must devote sufficient time and energy to developing effective team management practices, problem solving abilities and conflict handling processes. As teams spend time building these essential skills they create a strong foundation for working together effectively.
Team Management Practices
Team management practices refer to the overall level of team commitment, social functioning and task approaches of the team. With effective team management practices in place, the team has:

Task Processes:

1. A common purpose with set goals, priorities and task strategies.

2. Defined tasks with clear authority and responsibilities assigned to members.

Social Processes:

3. Protocols and norms for working together – that is, processes for problem solving, conflict handling, evaluation, inclusion and so forth.

4. Clear roles and responsibilities to ensure members' talents are fully utilized.

Commitment:

5. Committed members who are willing to pull their share and exert extra effort to ensure that the team tasks are completed on schedule.

Good team management practices are very important to establish in the early stages of team development. As such, we highly recommend that team-building efforts begin with the team defining their purpose and goals, followed by roles and responsibilities, and norms and protocols. As the team develops and works together, commitment and motivation should naturally follow. Later on, the team management practices may become second nature to the high performance team and may even go unnoticed and unappreciated. However, establishing these practices early on, can ensure that the team gets off to a good start.

Problem Solving Skills

Teams with strong problem solving skills possess the communication and interpersonal skills necessary to work collectively. Team members are patient communicators; they work hard to understand each other and make themselves understood. Difficulties in understanding are attributed to the communications process in general, not to other members’ failings. Group members follow an agreed upon problem solving process for defining the problem, collecting information, exploring options and evaluating and selecting the best solution. It is the combination of these skill sets that foster synergistic decision - making, whereby the team together develops solutions that are better than the sum of individual ideas.

Not surprisingly, we found that the team’s internalisation of positive group norms and their ability to resolve conflicts using collaborative and accommodating styles were strong predictors of a team’s problem solving abilities.

Conflict Handling Skills

Conflict handling skills refer to the group’s ability to resolve conflicts as they occur. High performance teams do not avoid thorny issues. They work to identify and understand the underlying issues and to deal with them effectively. In dealing with the conflictive situation, members do not let issues fester and grow into interpersonal stresses between members. They handle the issues and move on, putting in place a protocol for resolving similar conflicts in the future.

Team members’ preference for a collaborative conflict resolution style was found to be a reliable predictor of effective team conflict handling skills.

The Smart Teams Clinic: Fast Track Learning for Management Training and Development

Introduction to the Team Effectiveness Model

• Building the team model
• Presentation of research proof of the team model 

Introduction to Team Management Practices

• Mini Lecture
• Learning Experiment: Grid Maze
• Debrief: Application to workgroups and your challenges
• Introduction to Team Charter: A tool to build Team Management Practices
• Development of Team Mission and Vision

Lunch Break

Problem Solving Group dynamics

• Developing Communications Patience
• Synergy Skills
• Learning Exercises to foster team synergy

Introduction to Conflict Handling

• Mini lecture to introduce the concepts of group conflict handling style and conflict handling protocols
• Learning experiment: Win all you can
• Debrief: What happened? 

Action planning and next steps

• Applying the lessons learned to your teamwork.

To find out more, phone us at:

(613) 531-0462

 or email:

Background on Team Effectiveness:

Organizational Leaders require teamwork. In today’s complex organizations it’s simply no longer sufficient to have one person orchestrating change from on high. Rather, successful organizations bring together people in teams to consider organizational challenges and create workable solutions. 

So, how do we create the conditions for effective teamwork? While most of us at one time or another have been part of a great team – working together to produce truly synergistic results – we’ve also been part of team disasters - experiencing first hand the frustrations associated with incompatible goals, roles and working styles. In our *research and practice we have identified three critical process skills that lead to enhanced team performance. 

Developing team management practices is like base camp for teams. Just like mountaineers plan for the many scenarios they may face during base camp, effective teams define their purpose, working strategies and roles and responsibilities before embarking on their challenge. 

Problem solving skills enhance team IQ. The discipline of team problem solving starts with communications patience skills – the capacity of team members to suspend assumptions to learn from each other and ultimately enhance their ‘thinking”. Members listen for understanding, build on ideas, evaluate options and develop synergistic solutions 

Conflict handling skills keep the team whole. Teamwork is a myth when cliques form. Effective teams encourage diverse views, surface team irritants and put protocols in place to manage conflicts as they occur. *Our model has been validated with over 200 industry teams and we are very confident of its ability to predict over 80% of the variance in team performance (adjusted R2=.82) and over 60% of the variance in team satisfaction (adjusted R2=.67). 

Learning Objectives: Team members will experience and practice the skills and processes of effective teamwork. Our learning by doing approach enables you to experience powerful lessons and transfer them to your everyday work environment. As a take away, participants may elect to receive our book, Building Smart Teams: a Roadmap to High Performance, detailing many exercises that you can use with your teams.

To find out more, phone us at:

(613) 531-0462

 or email:

Building Smart Teams at Warp Speed: Fast Track Learning for Management Training and Development

Teamwork is the only way to accomplish great things in our organizations today. When teams have the right skills and are effectively organized, they can generate dramatic improvements in productivity, morale, customer service, innovation, job satisfaction, and financial performance. These “smart” teams bring together people with the right skills, talents, experience, and authority to work on tough organizational challenges. But when people lack the skills to work collectively, frustration rules.
What makes for overachieving teams? We know because we have studied and surveyed more than 200 industry teams from across Canada. This research has narrowed the key success factors of high performing groups to three critical process skills: team management practices; problem-solving skills; and conflict-handling skills.
Click here to read more about this research

Do you need this seminar? The answer is yes if you are a:

Team leader, facilitator or coach who wants to learn a proven methodology for creating and supporting teams that excel. Or if your organization is looking for results-oriented training to help your people work more collaboratively. This seminar will help you:

• diagnose the effectiveness of your teams
• design effective training programs to promote collaboration in your organization
• accelerate your teams’ progress towards high performance
• determine your organization’s crucial role in creating and supporting teams

Click here for a detailed outline of this program

‘Smart Teams at Warp Speed’ is loaded with useful tips, techniques, and exercises for developing teams in today's workplaces. To make sure you take away enduring lessons, we offer stimulating exercises, role plays, Facilitator Kits, and a free diagnosis of one of your organization’s teams using our ‘Team Benchmarks Assessment’.
Click here for more information

Bonus: What are your Take-aways?

You will leave this seminar with a complete methodology for creating smart teams in your organization, including:

• Access to a diagnostic survey of up to three existing teams in your organization. What are their strengths and what skills do they need to work on?
• A bank of dynamic and fun exercises that illustrate vividly what your teams needs to do to communicate effectively, become more creative, solve problems effectively, surface assumptions and create group norms, etc.
• Models for analyzing and dealing with intra-group and inter-group conflict
• The latest advice for improving the results from virtual teams
• A copy of the book ‘Smart Teams: a Roadmap to High Performance’

Click here to read more about this book
We truly want to make a difference to your organization’s well-being. After our skills-building training, you will take away all the knowledge and materials you need to lead teams and to facilitate a team skills workshop in your own organization.

Want a really fast introduction to this topic?

We also offer a shortened introductory “clinic” for newly forming or already existing teams.
Click here for a more detailed outline of this seminar

Custom Courses

We can customize a training program to realize the learning needs of your organization and your group.
Call us directly to inquire at:

(613) 531-0462
or email:

What previous participants have said:

"An amazing program packed with outstanding real-life examples and tools. I learned a lot and had fun. The week flew by!"