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X-Teams and Team Building to Improve Organizational Performance

Written by: Scott Simmerman

Article Overview: X-Teams is a concept that strongly supports the idea that a team needs to look OUTSIDE the team in order to optimize its performance for long term impact. In this article, some common links to issues of collaboration and improvement are linked to a specific team building exercise, The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine and ideas for connecting play in a game to behavior in the workplace are discussed.

X-Teams and Team Building to Improve Organizational Performance

X-Teams and Mining More Gold
Building Teamwork and Collaboration and Optimizing Results

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine team building exercise is all about people working together on common goals to maximize overall results. The choices players make in the exercise align with choices made in the context of their business, a concept repeatedly demonstrated across cultures and companies. Thus, this exercise is an excellent way to “smoke out” behaviors that may be suboptimizing organizational results and offer a simple way to generate discussions about the choices being made and what might be done differently. The Goal of the game is to Mine as much Gold as We can, an excellent optimization and development metaphor.

Increasingly, companies are using teams as a means of improving productivity and performance. Results are clear: effective teamwork is a proven strategy to decrease employee turnover as well as improving innovation and workplace quality. Teams provide a collective intelligence and a motivation to look for and implement systems and processes as well as providing some peer support for individual change and improvement. But not every company has successful experiences with teams in the workplace.

Ancona and Bresman’s book (X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed, 2007) offers some excellent insights into why some teams perform at very high levels and why others fail. Essentially, the authors believe that teams that focus more externally get better information and operate more effectively than teams internally focused, a belief that is at odds with how most teams are trained and supported. The book offers many examples of this dichotomy, which clearly shows itself in the play of Lost Dutchman with its alignment to good inter-team communications, organizational improvement and leadership development.

The “X” in the X-team concept means being externally oriented, with people working both inside and outside the boundaries. As the authors state, “While managing internally is necessary, it is managing externally that enables teams to lead, innovate, and succeed in a rapidly changing environment.” This is the differentiating driving force for maximum success.

An X-team finds it necessary to go outside the team to create effective goals, plans, and designs and must have high levels of such external activity. A focus on the customer and their expectations is important, noting that expectations will often change continuously. X-teams combine productive external activity with extreme execution within the team, developing processes that enable a high degree of coordination and effective implementation. Examples used include meetings and presentations to and discussions with senior managers of their organization, combined with feedback to all members of the team about reactions and necessary changes.

A readiness to change was a primary success factor; situations would change and the team would need to change with it. X-teams are also flexible in their approach, engaging in exploration, exploitation of talents and information, and exportation where they transferred their learning and experiences to other teams. (Yeah, the authors did get crazy with their x’s!).

Together, these elements of external focus and activity, extreme execution and flexibility form the principles by which such teams guide themselves – and teams do take a significant amount of autonomy in how they approach and attain their desired outcomes. It is an ongoing focus on optimizing results plus the realization that others can provide valuable insight and information.

Three “X-factors” provide the structure and support they need to operate. These include extensive ties to useful outsiders, expandable resources of people and information, involved as needed by the core team, and exchangeable membership, the ability to add new people who come into and who leave the team as warranted by the situation. The authors liken the effective teams to externally focused operational groups, who work together cross boundaries and get access to the people and resources they need to be successful. These teams must be action oriented and willing to take risks as well as continually gather information.

Why this exercise works to generate workplace collaboration and results optimization:

- The specified role of the Expedition Leader is to help teams be successful
- The specific goal of the game is to “Mine as much Gold as we can” and thus maximize overall return on the investment (ROI)
- The Expedition Leader is providing teams with a map, sufficient resources, information and support for the entire journey - effective leaders manage resources effectively
- The Expedition Leader has additional information that teams find useful, but that will take time to access. People seldom ask for advice and help in the workplace.
- Collaboration between teams is suggested and one person is assigned this task
- Teams have fixed times in which to plan the work, execute the plan and complete the exercise - teams facing time limits are more motivated
- All results and outcomes are measurable and "players" are held accountable


The Expedition Leader charters each team with the goal of managing resources, information and time to optimize results. Teams are given a clear goal with a measurable outcome and a deadline for getting this project accomplished. Teams are given sufficient time and resources to accomplish the task.

Teams can access additional information but this requires them to not take immediate action but to first plan the journey – we find that the impetus to get going generally overweighs the desire of gathering information external to the team. Teams can talk to other teams that have additional information, but the reality is that teams with this information may choose not to share it freely, keeping it for their own competitive advantage.

Leadership in the exercise is highly supportive by explicit design – The game’s Expedition Leader has information that the teams do not have and which is highly beneficial in planning and operating. But leadership involvement is often rejected by the team. There is often a developing, “My Team, My Team, My Team” consensus among players that tends to create an Us / Them type of atmosphere -- there is that tendency for the teams not to include “outsiders” even though these people can provide additional perspective as well as other resources of information and value. This goes so far as to often reject the Expedition Leader from team communications, even though the expressed role of this person is to help teams be successful. Teams appear to want to avoid any semblance of “Command and Control” from the outside, and thus put the Expedition Leadership people at arms length rather than including them in the team activity. The act of involving external leadership requires some additional dialog and possible realignment caused by new information and thus might appear to be in conflict with what the team already knows and wants to do, thus causing that outsider to be rejected, even when they can add great value to the task.

Good teams will fail to optimize results when they are not aware of all the information available and when they reject the support offered by or available from outsiders to their team. Results of collaborative, externally-focused teams are often double those of successful, but low performing teams (all teams are successful but to different degrees). And “My Team, My Team, My Team” is a powerful motivator of teamwork, good performance and member camaraderie, but it is not the strategy that high-performing teams need to survive and prosper in today’s rapidly changing performance-based landscape.

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a great tool to generate the process and discussion of these issues and the possibilities for improvement. It is a powerful learning exercise, one that enables a facilitator to discuss themes of choice, planning, motivation, communications and decision-making as they relate to teamwork and problem solving. It has been certified by the Project Management Institute for the teaching of project management and is used as a tool for teaching strategic planning skills as well as instruments such as DISC and MBTI.

But its alignment to themes as expressed in the X-Teams book give it a very unique place in the organizational development field. People will better understand how a successful and productive team works as well as how their own behavior contributes to this. They will have experienced memorable learning and have an opportunity to discuss what they can choose to do differently in the future. This works elegantly.

There are other tools and games in the marketplace that can also be adapted to generate some of these same desired outcomes.



For the FUN of It!


Scott J. Simmerman, Ph.D.

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Article Tags: alignment, ancona, book x, boundaries, collective intelligence, dichotomy, dutchman, effective teamwork, employee turnover, gold mine, improving productivity, leadership development, metaphor, organizational improvement, peer support, performance results, quality teams, team building exercise, team communications, x team



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