Only Connect... the process learning workshop is an interactive process learning game successfully tried and tested over the past years with employees from all levels of manufacturing and service industries. It has two objectives: 1) to give hands-on experience of the benefits of a process approach to work, and 2) to introduce participants to the benefits of deployment flowcharting as a problem solving and business improvement technique.

Only Connect... provides organisations with a convenient half-day introduction to process. It relies for its success upon learning by doing. Experience has shown that after one session of Only Connect... teams can return to work and start running their own process improvement programs with a minimum of external support.

The game, designed for a group of eight participants, consists of five uncoupled rounds of related precision activities simulating the assembly and delivery of either a product or a service (depending upon your point of view). The early rounds are run by the group along what are in effect conventional financial management lines. There is little learning and much blaming. Losses mount.

The facilitator then introduces the team to deployment flowcharting as a way to consolidate and share their learning and prepare, in an orderly manner, for the coming rounds. The flowcharting exercise highlights opportunities for both radical change as well as progressive improvements. There is much learning and no blaming. Profits flow. The group is now a team able to complete the remaining rounds of the game with significantly improved results. Since the game was first presented the average improvement in performance following deployment flowcharting has been better than eight-fold.

"The five Only Connect... workshops you ran covered everyone in the department and, apart from being fun, 'loosened' the way of thinking for many. After the workshops we embarked upon our process redesign . . . and benefitted from the workshops. We used the 'game' to good effect."
Bernard Smith, Manager, Accounting Development, NPI.