April 2000
Volume 7 • Number 2

Contents

Games and group exercises can be used effectively to teach key principles of quality management. This paper presents a new game, TEAMusic, which has been found effective for teaching teamwork principles. The game has been used successfully in many types of class formats and with groups of different sizes. Points experientially obtained from field tests are provided to enhance the instructor/leader’s review of game results and lessons learned following the demonstration. TEAMusic is also compared to a popular alternative, Lost at Sea.

Key words: educational games, experiential learning, management education, TQM training

by JOSEPH G. VAN MATRE and DONNA J. SLOVENSKY, UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AT BIRMINGHAM

PURPOSE

This paper introduces what is believed to be an improved model for teaching teamwork principles. This new game, TEAMusic, is first reviewed. Next, useful points experientially obtained are offered to enhance the instructor/leader’s review of the results and lessons. Then, comparisons are made vis-à-vis a game titled Lost at Sea.

INTRODUCTION

A pedagogic history of quality management would reveal a rich tradition of using innovative games, exercises, and experiments to convey effectively key quality principles to participants. Such demonstrations go back at least to 1931 and Walter Shewhart’s bowl. Shewhart used the data of 4000 drawings (with replacement) from a bowl of 998 numbered chips to demonstrate the principles underlying his control chart. Deming, too, used games in his teachings, and, in his last book, The New Economics, two of the 10 chapters deal with games. His famous red beads taught “by experiment a number of important principles” (1993, 158); for example, the failure of bonuses to change worker productivity in a common cause system. His funnel experiment demonstrated the detrimental effects of tampering; that is, treating common cause variation as if it were due to an assignable cause. Recently, Peter Senge (1990) used the beer game to show system complexities in his book The Fifth Discipline. George Box (1991) and his colleagues at Wisconsin’s Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement use paper helicopters to physically demonstrate principles of designed experiments for quality improvement. And, Janelle Heineke discusses her successful use of paper puppets to “introduce the concepts of process observation, data collection, and process analysis” (1997, 33).

One basic principle of quality management is the use of teams to continuously improve products, services, and processes. Hackman and Wageman cite the “use of cross-functional teams to identify and solve quality problems as one of five interventions prescribed by authorities to realize the core values of TQM” (1995, 312). Similarly, A New American TQM: Four Practical Revolutions in Management names total participation as the third revolution: “All capabilities of all company members must be used if companies are to make continuous improvement...” (Shiba, Graham, and Walden 1993, 29). But of course, effective teamwork requires all team members to fulfill their roles and responsibilities, and this in turn often requires training to develop the appropriate skills and expectations. Even Baldrige Award winner Ritz-Carlton found that it “had to spend more time to allow the team members to... learn how to build and maintain support before they could really get the kind of improvement we wanted.... We learned how to better build and maintain our teams” (Partlow 1993, 414). Previously the company had been assuming that good Ritz-Carlton employees “would just naturally work together as a team and go forward.”

Given the high priority accorded to effective teamwork, and the innovative use of games and experiments in training for quality, it is certainly no surprise to find a number of existing demonstrations and exercises that are helpful in teaching the benefits of teamwork. Games such as Lost at Sea, Subarctic Survival, and other variations on this theme have been developed and used in a variety of organizations. In Lost at Sea, for example, team members work individually and then as a group to rank 15 items according to their value toward survival after a yachting accident. The major point of the exercise is to demonstrate that team decisions are almost always better than individual decisions. While undoubtedly useful, such games do still offer opportunities for improvement. For example, Lost at Sea requires participants to read several paragraphs on “The Situation” and assumptions before the real work can begin.