Training games and interactive tools energize training sessions, motivate attendees and enhance the learning experience! The need to use interactive tools in training for organizations making the change to Total Quality Management or Self-Managing Teams should be self evident to anyone involved in the process. Many trainers, or training programs, however, often fall into the trap of being too "content oriented" versus "interactive oriented." Probably the number one shortcoming of TQM training and team training directed at both front-line employees and, yes, management level personnel, as well, is the lack of interactive learning tools and a "fun and games" approach to learning. After all, if the attendees all have bruises on their foreheads from dozing off, how effective has the "content heavy" training been?

The foundation of this paper will be highly experiential, rather than academic. The various training tools, games and exercises discussed have been sourced, or used, by the author in providing Total Quality Management training and Self-Managing Teams training to organizations all across North America. As a trainer providing this extensive training, and attempting to be as effective as possible in incorporating interactive tools, games and exercises, it is becomes painfully obvious that there are limited sources for these types of training enhancers. As well, it is critical that these tools be used properly, at the right times, in appropriate proportions, and with the most effective lessons being gleaned by participants.

This paper discusses the various types and categories of training games and exercises used for TQM and Self Managing Teams training. It addresses proper uses of training and gaming tools. It will also describe several highly effective gaming tools and give sources for trainers looking for additional gaming tools.

Types of Interactive Tools

First, let us examine the various types of interactive tools that trainers have at their disposal.

Anecdotes, Interactive Exercises, Games, Case Studies, Role Plays, Simulations, Illustration Tools, Puzzles & Brain teasers

Anecdotes: Whether it is in politics or training, Malcolm de Chazal, the French author, described the key to effective communication, when he said: "The man who can make others laugh secures more votes for a measure than the man who forces them to think." This may rub against the grain for purists in technical training, but this certainly hits upon one of the foundations of effective interactive training, and that is very simply: when you've got them laughing ... you've got them!" As any comedian knows, humor is an art form, and the key lies in the "ART" of using anecdotes, jokes, one-liners, and humor in general:

A - Appropriate - The humor must be appropriate for the audience, it must be in good taste and it must not be directed at your audience. Rather than directing a laugh at your audience attempt to direct the laugh at yourself, if possible. For example, rather than telling a group of accountants that the definition of an actuary is "someone who didn't have the personality to be an accountant" you may say something like "I had a hard time initially putting consultant on my business card because I had always been told that the definition of a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is and then walks off with the watch."

R - Relevant - Too often trainers have a great anecdote that isn't relevant to the topic. Relevance in an issue with many training tools such as games, brain teasers and puzzles. The inexperienced trainer will often toss in a game joke or puzzle "just for fun" or to entertain the audience. The best interactive trainers fine tune their material so that it is specific and relevant to the topic and group they are talking to. Often, you can take an anecdote, change descriptions and customize it to your particular audience. This customization can be accomplished by an effective set-up that positions the anecdote specifically for the audience and the topic.

T - Timely - How much is too much? When should and shouldn't you use these tools? Unfortunately there is no easy answer to these questions. Each audience is different and it is critical for the trainer to gauge the time and amount of interaction that is proper and effective for the audience. A good piece of advice is to practice what we preach and to use the TQM adage of: "What gets measured gets fixed." Ask your audience, as part of the follow-up evaluation, was the amount of humor used appropriate, too much, not enough? Ask them was the amount of interaction too much, appropriate, not enough?

A rule of thumb that has proven itself many times over, is to use more interaction than you might otherwise when dealing with front-line personnel. In a recent team dynamics session to over 240 front-line manufacturing employees, when asked, less than 10% said they had ever sat through a full day seminar. By any standards, the amount of interaction used was high, and the overriding opinion at the end of the training was that they had fun, that they didn't fall asleep (a major concern prior to the training) and, almost as an afterthought, that they had learned at great deal, too.

The "ART" acid test is one that can and should be used for all of your interactive tools. Ask yourself: Is this material Appropriate, Relevant and Timely to my audience?

Interactive Exercises: This heading incorporates a broad body of potential definitions. In the context of this paper, this term will be defined very simply as: "the opposite of lecture mode training." Interactive exercises may include breaking-up into groups and brainstorming on a given topic. It could include soliciting audience feed-back or experiences on a given topic, such as asking who has experienced the "Storming" stage of team development and how did they deal with it. ("Storming" refers to Dr. Robert Tuckman's terminology for one of the predictable growth stages of teams.)

Games: Games can take on various forms and can be used in a variety of situations. Audiences may break into groups and play board games. Volunteers may be solicited from an audience to participate in a game in front of the group. Games may also be used for individual teams in the classroom or in a "retreat" setting in the outdoors.

Case Studies: While these may not fit into the traditional mold of interactive games or exercises, cases studies are an invaluable verbal illustration technique that connect the audience to the topic and paint a vivid picture of the case in point. The most effective presentation of a case study relates back to the audience and their own work situation and serves to stimulate understanding of the learning point. This may be done by asking a rhetorical question such as "Can you see how the situation at _____ is similar to what we are trying to accomplish in your work area?" or something such as "Notice how in this story the team had a very clearly defined goal; to fix the worst piece of equipment in the plant. That kind of clearly defined goal is critical to the success of any team. The question now is, can you define your team's goal as clearly?"

Role Plays: These can be extremely effective training tools, particularly for some of the "soft skills" associated with team dynamics training in TQM and Self-Managing Teams. Role plays are most effective when they are set up with a description of a background situation that is relevant and tangible to the trainees. Ideally, they have experienced the situation presented from one side of the interaction or the other and can specifically relate to the concerns that need to be dealt with in the interaction.

The participants then divide up into the assigned roles and are each given specific objective to accomplish within the parameters of the given situation.

Role play situations are often used in interactive management training. Their greatest effectiveness, however, is often seen in providing front-line employees with the soft skills training and experience to deal with interpersonal or conflict situations that often arise in team situations, particularly in developing teams who are in the early stages of team growth.

For example: The learning point might be a five step approach to dealing with one-on-one confrontations.

1. Identify the problem and give specific examples.

2. Ask input as to what is the root cause of the problem.

3. Listen to the response with empathy.

4. Solicit potential solutions and be prepared to provide your own if necessary.

5. Agree on a solution, action plan and follow-up, and identify consequences.

With the above as the learning goal, the employees would be directed to break up into groups of three. One person would play the role of the leader giving the feedback, the second person would play the role of the "bad guy" and the third person would act as an observer and note-taker for the interaction. The three participants would rotate roles so that all three have the opportunity to give, take and critique. If you provide three separate situations, the participants can choose which they prefer and all three interactive role plays are then unique. The situations can be customized to the organization's training objectives or specific concerns, but good common issues include: dealing with a employee who is always late for a meeting, dealing with a team member who is constantly making derogatory and negative remarks, or dealing with a team member who is being overly dominant in meetings, just to name a few.

Adequate time should be provided for the participants (both the giver and receiver of the feedback) to prepare. The receivers should be cautioned about being too difficult, but encouraged to be creative and have fun. Observers should be briefed about being too critical and are encouraged to identify good aspects of the interaction, in addition to identifying areas for improvement.

Simulations: Simulations can take a variety of forms and impart a multitude of learning points to a group in a fun, dynamic and effective manner. Simulations usually differ from the role play in that we usually describe a situation and environment with a given set of circumstances or parameters and a desired outcome or goal. You may be a start-up company, you may be marooned on a desert island, lost on the moon, or stranded with your group in a life raft in the middle of the ocean. These can be done in two ways, depending on the size of the group and the nature of the simulation. One method is to solicit volunteers to the front of the group and have the team then go through the given simulation. You can also have the entire group break up into their own teams for greater participation.

A common simulation is one where the team is faced with a "stranded on the moon" scenario and are given a choice of survival tools and strategies. The team members then individually rank the importance of the survival tools and determine optimum solutions. A second part of these types of simulations have the team as a group do the ranking and finding the solutions. The desired outcome of many of these types of exercises is to illustrate the enhanced results that a team enjoys, particularly when compared to the results of the individuals.

Illustrations: In developing many of the concepts associated with quality processes or teams, an invaluable tool is the ability to paint a clear picture by using interactive illustration techniques. This is a broad category to define. It would best be described as illustrating a concept or learning point by involving your audience.

For example, the learning point might be the quality credo: "replacing opinion with data." An interactive illustration would be to solicit an audience member to provide a quarter for you as the trainer. You then proceed to flip the quarter a number of times involving the group in what the outcome will be. After several flips you solicit an audience opinion on what the measured results would be for an infinite number of flips. This seems like a rhetorical question with the audience's consensus opinion agreeing upon an answer of 50% heads and 50% tails. The point you make as a trainer, however, is that an American quarter, when flipped one thousand times, will turn up heads 51% of the time and tails 49% of the time. The learning point of "replacing opinion with data" is punctuated with this sort of interactive illustration.

Puzzles and brain teasers: These are probably the most entertaining and universally enjoyed exercises for audiences and trainers alike. Unfortunately they are also the most misused and abused tool in the trainer repertoire. Trainers who use these without a specific purpose, often for pure entertainment value, risk diluting their program content and their own credibility. When used properly and with purpose, they can be relevant, entertaining and, most important, they will serve to enhance the program and the learning experience, rather than undermine it.

Puzzles and brain teasers are particularly effective in illustrating how easily we develop mind sets or get locked into our initial paradigms. For example, you might place the following diagram in front of the group for fifteen seconds and ask how many squares do they see?

 insert diagram

The answer seems painfully obvious. There appear to be sixteen squares. But as you wait out the full fifteen seconds you will start to hear the audience's answers changing. "There are seventeen!" "No, there are twenty!" Once the time has elapsed, you announce and explain that there are, in fact, thirty squares. An overhead projector is useful in illustrating this diagram. The debriefing should include discussions of paradigms and mind blocks to solving problems. You might ask if they have been situations where you where sure of the answer and a better answer was, in fact, discovered?

 Keys To Using Interactive Tools

1. Interactive tools must, first and foremost, be relevant to the group. Relevance falls into several categories. Your exercises must relate back to the topic at hand (See Number 2 on the following page). They must relate to the type of business or industry being addressed. For example, it is not relevant to the audience to have an exercise that discusses the profit motive as a major component if the audience is a non-profit entity or possibly a government entity.

2. Careful set-up of your exercise is crucial to its success. Some of the key aspects of your set-up include:

• Describe sequentially what they must do. The goal is to avoid someone raising their hand half-way into the exercise asking "Could you please explain what the question was again?"

• For more complex exercises, with many steps, it is better to have the group complete one step before moving on to the next. For example, you may have them break up into groups and pick a leader and a recorder, and only once they have completed this step would you move on to describing the group's assignment or exercise.

• Describe why you are doing the exercise. When you look at adult learning models, an important component is explaining why. Adults need to understand how they will be benefiting from the exercise. It is difficult to "over-explain" an exercise, and a good framework to always keep in mind is a variation on the theme of: "Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them." So then you must try to:

Explain to them what the benefit of the exercise will be. Then have them do the exercise and tell them what the benefit or learning point is. And when you are done debriefing the exercise, tell them what the benefit or learning point was again.

• Transition or segué into your exercise. Try to avoid just saying: " And now let's do an exercise." You will enhance your effectiveness if you can transition smoothly to the exercise by tying it in to the previous topic. You may say something like: "Now we've talked about the three key areas of communication in teams and in organizations. With the help of a few volunteers, now I would like to show you the importance of communication, as a group tries to accomplish a specific goal while they only have a limited ability to communicate!"

3. As the name implies, interactive tools must involve the audience. This becomes a challenge when you have large groups to deal with. An effective way to involve the whole group, even when you have only a small number participating, is to give the rest of the audience a title, "observers", and an assignment.

Example: "Now, while the team at the front of the room has a specific task, it is also important that the rest of the audience has a task as well. What I would ask the rest of you in the audience to do is to be formal observers of the team as they approach their task. Specifically, try to identify three characteristics or behaviors of this team that you observe as they tackle this task."

4. Be involved in the exercise yourself. As a trainer it is easy to think of the time a group spends in an exercise as a break for you, the trainer. You will enhance the learning effort for the participants if you mingle with the groups, clarify expectations, share in an occasional discussion, and make notes of key learning points that you observe while mingling.

5. Debrief the exercise. Effective debriefing of an exercise is the "make or break" element. The secret of interactive exercises is to involve the participants as much in the debriefing of the exercise as in the exercise itself. The debriefing should serve to reinforce the "Why are we doing this?" issue, the "What did we really do?" issue, the "Why is this important?" issue and the "How does it affect me?" issue. The debriefing should analyze the exercise from a stand point of what happened in the exercise and how did the participants feel before, during and after the game. A valuable connection between the exercise and the real world can be achieved during the debriefing by relating the exercise, simulation or game the audience's frame of reference, by asking: "Has this ever happened to your in your work situation? If so, how did you deal with it? How would you have handled it differently?"

6. "Back Door" the learning point. "Hit 'em while they're laughing" is a great adage. Some of the most effective learning points occur while participants are laughing, are feeling frustrated, or are experiencing concern, just to name a few situations. But the one thing that these scenarios all have in common is that the game or interactive exercise has elicited an emotional response. And once you have attained that level of emotional receptiveness, you must "back door" the learning point. That is, you must slide the learning point or the concept summary into the story, anecdote or debriefing, as part of the structure of that exercise. The best trainers are masterful at this technique. They make you understand and experience the lesson, and most importantly, you experience and remember the learning point and how it applies to your given situation.

Any time that an interactive exercise is used, it should be used with a specific goal in mind. Just as teams need a clear, specific goal to be successful, so do effective interactive exercises and games. The crucial question you need to ask in incorporating an exercise of any sort is very specifically: "What do I hope to achieve with this exercise, game or activity?"

The following list describes a variety of desired outcomes for exercises. There are obviously many more than can be listed. The key is, once again, understanding specifically what you want to achieve in incorporating the exercise.

1. Warm-up exercises: Warm-up exercises fall into primarily two categories. Those that a group or team uses to "warm-up" their own meeting and those exercises that a trainer uses to warm-up the audience for the training encounter that will follow. One of the best trainers at warming-up an audience is Loren Ankarlo, President of the Ankarlo Training Group out of Broomfield, Colorado. He is the author of a best selling video series on self-directed teams for the CareerTrack organization of Boulder, Colorado and is one of the acknowledged international "gurus" in the area of self-managing teams. He describes the warm-up exercise this way: "When a trainer gets up at the front of the room at the beginning of the day there is a glass partition that separates the trainer from the audience. It is the job of the trainer to break down that barrier with the audience as quickly as possible. I take it as a personal challenge to remove that barrier from the first moment I enter a room." That is a challenge that Loren never fails to accomplish, he truly is a master trainer!

2. Synergy Demonstrators: Synergy can be described as 2 + 2 = 5, or it can be described as the sum of the parts equaling more than the whole. The most effective way That it can be described to an audience is through the use of exercises or games that demonstrate interactively that a group of people working as a team will do better at accomplishing a task than a group of individuals.

3. Concept Illustrators: Trainers can often describe a concept with a clear definition, and explain exactly what actions are needed in a specific situation. But until the audience experiences that "Ah ha!" moment, when they truly grasp the significance of the concept, a trainers task is uncompleted. Concept illustration games ideally give the audience that "Ah ha!" feeling where they know that they have truly grasped the idea being presented.

Dr. Larry Johnston, faculty member at the University of Colorado at Denver's School of Business, describes the "Ah ha!" moment best when he says: "It's that moment in learning when you know that in your own mind that you have converted a concept from a "fuzzy" idea to a crystal clear thought!" Dr. Johnston is untouchable in painting vivid, interactive pictures for his audiences and students. Look at it this way. If he can make advanced financial concepts interactive and entertaining, it certainly puts an onus on TQM and team trainers to at least do that much in this arena!

4. Skills Enhancers: Skill enhancing games and exercises are based on the premise of: "Tell me and I'll nod my head. Show me and I'll understand. Make me do it and I'll truly have learned." Creating an exercise or a game that allows someone to practice and experience the use of skills that have previously only been described, takes the training effort to an entirely new level.

5. The Wake-Up Call: All trainers have run into that training situation where, after a large lunch, the room temperature has heated up to 84½F and, to make matters worse, you have a room full of active professionals who can barely sit still long enough to take a phone call, let alone sit through a full day seminar. As Murphy's Law will have it, this usually coincides with the driest, most complex part of the program material you have to cover. The best veteran trainers all have a few tricks up their sleeves to combat these "lulls," and they're usually some sort of game or exercise that physically commands the audience into a participation mode.

Sometimes the best policy is honesty. The trainer can very simply call a break or even just lead a group stretch, not unlike the seventh inning stretch in a baseball game.

One trainer who is particularly good at interactive exercises is Melanie Mills, a former Colorado "teacher-of-the-year," now a principle of Higher Ground training in Aurora, Colorado. She prefaces this sort of interactive wake-up call with the battle cry: "Hey, the only way you'll look silly doing these exercises is if you're the only one not participating!" She's incredibly effective at training and her secret is in her use of effective interactive exercises.

6. Group or Team Dynamics Facilitations: Sometimes a primary goal, or sometimes a secondary result, many games and exercises stress the problem solving, decision-making and creative thinking process that must occur in a team for it to function effectively. These sorts of games and exercises are often introduced by the trainer with a statement such as: "The reason we are doing this exercise is to not only identify the optimum solution to our problem, but to also look at how do we go about solving that problem in the context of a team structure, with a team of individuals who each have their own unique point of view."

Some of the team dynamics issues that are developed and enhanced in a team game environment are: