David Sibbet

Seeds of Light

Can I walk each day in a sacred way? Can I start each day in the clear light mind? Can I have my work and play circle around my spiritual practice rather than fitting my spiritual practice into my day? These are the questions that are front and center on returning from my Joshua Tree Vision Quest. The deep nourishment I received from my reflective time on the desert feels almost like waking up again from a long sleep. I want to stay awake. And I want to stay engaged! I feel like I am watering little seeds of light.

At Joshua tree I connected deeply with what I consider to be my real work, which is to plant and nurture seeds of hope, and to awaken myself so that who I am and what I do supports others waking up. This work is most engaged with my extended family, and the staff and clients I work with through The Grove, many of whom have left The Grove to start their own businesses and take their learning and insights into new jobs. I spent hours thinking about how the desert plants seed themselves, and appreciated that we humans seed our lives through our projects and stories. When we work side by side with another, we learn from the way they are in life, and these experiences are the deep templates that guide our development.

Returning from Joshua Tree

I’m back at “work” from my “vision quest” in Joshua Tree National Monument. I promised to share some of the experience. This one was a big one for me, my seventh with a group, my sixth with Chayim Barton and Brian Winkler, two gifted group leaders. The experiences are cumulative, and now spiral into my life as a central orientation. I have discovered it takes time to appreciate what happens in a time like this, for it takes place at a deep, cellular level as well as in my thoughts and journals. This one is “working me” as we say in our Pathwalkers group (a deep dialogue circle of peer consultants that I have been with for six years). One of them, Vivian Wright and her friend Laurie Luker, both students of Chayim Barton, rode down to the desert with me. This envelope of support may be why this particular quest has been so powerful.

I went into the desert this time holding my intent as a question—“what am I to contribute to my communities these next years?” I sought a vision about how to respond to the many changes all of us are facing. I intended to ask for guidance about my own purpose and direction as I more fully embrace an elder role. These are not simple questions.

Why I Go On Vision Quests

For many years, since I turned 43, I have taken time every couple of years to go into the wilderness and seek guidance. In my work, exposed to so much that is complex and sometimes troubling, and in these times, which are truly unparalleled in their challenges, I need the deepest inner guidance possible. So I am going again this next week, returning to Joshua Tree National Monument to spend some time alone in the desert.

TED BIG VIZ Book and Movie are LIVE!!

You can download the TED2008-BigViz Book and see an amazing Movie of the 700 plus illustrations Kevin Richards and I did for Big Viz (see stories below). It's a BIG file, but amazing to see. Enjoy.

The Artistry of Leadership: The Role of Design, Participation & Community"

Late February I traveled to Minnesota to be a conversation starter at the Heartland Circle Thought Leader Gathering on the topic, "The Artistry of Leadership: The Role of Design, Participation & Community." I was very stimulated by this invitation, and found myself reflecting on some important topics. If you would like to hear this 40 minute talk, check out the Heartland web site. My talks are available in the left-hand column. A pdf transcript is available here.

Download TLGArtistryofLeadership.pdf (185.8K)

Here is a photo of me after dinner (on a crisp winter night) with (from left) Patricia and Craig Neal, founders of Heartland, and Paula Ray, a fellow Californian and Thought Leader who traveled out to the event.

Vision 2020—The Bifurcation of Business

I'm getting ready to go on a vision quest at Joshua Tree National Monument this April, seeking guidance in these challenging times. In the process I stumbled across a podcast I made for Firehawk Hulin and Bill Veltrop and their Vision 2020 series with Stranova. I was in a flow that day, talking as if I was in 2020. It's a fun listen!!! Can you imagine returning to localized agriculture after peak oil? Can you imagine visual literacy and multi-touch walls commonplace? Can you imagine children's creativity being held in public trust? Can you imagine the West Coast's major industry being health and tourism? Can you imagine re-embracing indigenous wisdom and having a different dream in the north, which honors the long cycles?  Click here to listen to The Coming Bifurcation of Business.

TED2008-BIG VIZ Production

Here is a short video of the work I was doing at TED2008 with Tom Wujec, Kevin Richards, and  John  Schmeir of Autodesk and Phil Davidson of Perceptive Pixel. It was a tour-de-force of documentation, where we graphically illustrated all 50+ speakers on the topic of The Big Questions. The illustrations were created by Kevin and myself on Wacom tablets, and then accessed from our hard drives by the Perceptive Pixel-Multitouch wall shown in two posts ago. I made this video from photos and videos I took at the event. Tom Wujec is now making an on-line book of all our drawings that will be available at www.autodesk.com. If you want to start seeing some of the talks live, click here.

White Mountain Studio Tour

Here is a short little tour of my White Mountain Studio. I made this to test out how to get video into this blog!! I also have a new gallery show in our Third Life Galleries in SL. Just search for Third LIfe, and at the Pier teleport up to the Galleries.

TED2008 Is Complete

650 images later Kevin Richards and I have finished our illustration of TED2008. Tom Wujec is now creating the book (and a video). All the TED talks will be posted on their web site soon. I'm exhausted,  very inspired  and wanting to share a couple photos of the Perceptive Pixel-MultiTouch Wall that we used, and some of the drawings. I plan to write a nice piece about the substance of the conference this week.

TED2008: The Big Questions

I'm down in Monterey at the TED conference about to plunge into a visualization challenge of expansive proportions. The agenda goes like this: Who are we?—What is our place in the universe?—What is life?—Is beauty truth?—Will evil prevail?—How can we change the world?—How do we create?—What's out there?—What will tomorrow bring?—What stirs us?—How dare we be optimistic? Fifty speakers will talk 18 minutes each about these subjects, in four courses of talks, with lots of networking and entertainment woven in between. Can you guess how much fun this is going to be!!!

The Grove's client Autodesk, is supporting this year's event with a BigViz project where two of us, Kevin Richards and myself, led by Tom Wujec, an Autodesk Fellow leading their visualization initiatives, will be documenting the ENTIRE conference.

We'll be doing this using the latest Wacom Cintiq tablets and beta versions of Autodesk's Alias Sketchbook Pro. Our drawings, some 5-15 for each speaker, will be saved and accessible on a huge portfolio wall using a prototype combination of Perceptive Pixel and multi-touch technologies If you've seen the movie Minority Report,or used an i-phone, it allows that kind of manipulation of imagery. You can pinch-reduce pictures, rotate them, sort them, move them around -- all by touch.

I don't know what we will produce, but it will be integrated into a book about this year's TED, focusing on the theme The Big Questions. We're calling ourselves "visual cartographers," and I'm focusing on making not only the big questions, but the patterns that connect these ideas visible.

If you want to follow the conference, it will be blogged and accessible at the TED.com web site. I probably won't be posting much during this period, but will inevitably reflect on our learning afterwards. Click on to see some of my practice warmups.

VizThink Was An Inspiring Experience for The Grove

I’m happy to report that the recent VizThink conference, an ambitious attempt to take the visualization field to a new level by inviting practitioners from across the visualization spectrum, succeeded wildly! Over 380 people traveled from all over the globe to the Westin in San Francisco, following the siren song of VizThink Tom Crawford’s web 2.0 marketing and XPlane’s sponsorship and promotion. We all showed up and had a complete blast. Here is The Grove’s little booth, organized and manned by Callie Bloom, our marketing assistant. She’s sitting in front of Tiffany Forner’s wonderful graphic showing how The Grove’s Graphic Guides® create a panoramic effect in a meeting room. We were surrounded by digital tool makers--Brain, Mindjet, Autodesk, Wacom and others and totally held our own. Of course having Second Life up on our display, and our cool new Visual Planning System Agenda Planning Cards didn’t hurt. The deep excitement for me was seeing how our Grove team pulled together in the two sessions we ran.

Tom Hood Uses Second Life for CPA Training

Tom Hood is an innovative leader in the CPA field who is now the CEO and executive director of the Maryland Association of CPAs. The Grove worked with him and other leaders to create a vision for the American Institute of CPAs several years ago, and have had a partnership offering our Strategic Visioning workshops on the East Coast through Tom's Business Learning Institute. He wrote me recently to share a link to a thoughtful piece he wrote in response to my Second Life Retrospective (see articles list to download it). It's a nice extension of those ideas. Click HERE to link to his reflections.

Brilliant Web 2.0 Video by Kansas State Cultural Anthropolgist

Watch this one and put on your seat belt. Who's Teaching Who?

Srategizing with Visual Metaphors

As the rain and winds ripped trees down in our backyard and beside the Grove in our first serious winter storm, I ended up my VizThink web-conference exhilarated, and thinking a lot about visual analogies and metaphors. (To hear the entire program click “Visualizing Change: Creating the Future One Vision at a Time” here). My reflection was sparked by a question moderator Tom Crawford passed along from one of the 53 people participating. “What role does the third dimension play in your Storymaps?” I illustrated my answer with the tablet sketch below, but let me elaborate.

Vizualizing Change: Creating The Future One Image at a Time

If you want to catch my free VizThink webcast on January 4 at 8:00am PST, on the topic above, register by clicking here. Register. I'll be answering some of these questions. How did National Semiconductor get 95% vision recognition worldwide during its turnaround in the 1990s? Why did HP train its engineering consultants worldwide to use Graphic Guides? Why did Adobe and Macromedia commission a graphic history when they merged two years ago? Why did Alias (now Autodesk) bring David in to teach their visual planners how to work the boards? How did he get 50 NGO and 8 foundations to collaborate in cleaning up the energy system in the upper midwest? What in the world is The Grove doing in Second Life? I'll be working on the tablet and sharing some graphics-- so come join in the fun. it's free.

Yang Ming and The Labyrinth

New Year’s Day is a special mirror for me of what could be in the next year. This one was quite special. It began having my first South Beach Diet meal with Susan – two little onion, pepper, cucumber and egg quiches with tomato juice and three cherry tomatoes. I’m not the cook in the family, and this change is big for my wife, Susan, but we has plunged into it and both of us are learning about what our body does in response to all the highly processed carbohydrates, we like many others, have become accustomed to eating. It felt like the right thing to begin the New Year with. So what goes with right eating I wondered?

“Can we walk to the labyrinth this morning?” I asked. After a moment hesitation, for that hadn’t been part of Susan’s thinking, a smile came and she said, “YES!”

Before long we were hiking out the coastal trail at Land’s End at the northwest tip of San Francisco. It was a spectacular, crisp day. The trail is being extensively improved by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, with wide walks and stone-ringed cutouts. This first day of the year there were more people than we have ever seen, of all ages and ethnic groups it seemed.

Leading Change: The Role of Serious Play

2007 is almost over, and a weaving of insights for the new year is already beginning, fueled by a good studio day of just letting things arise, and several visits with good friends and counselors. The twin themes of “prototyping” and “leadership” are starting to dance together in a wonderfully hopeful way.

Simulate to Innovate
Let me start with the prototyping theme. Casting over my library (the one I keep at my home studio focused on the projects I am developing) Michael Schrage’s book on Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) popped into my hand. My colleague, Ed Claassen got it for The Grove library several years ago. I took it home, knowing that there was a connection between prototyping, play, and what we do at The Grove with interactive graphic communications and groups.

The Story of Stuff

This holiday was a complex time of joyful immersion in family and community and sober reflection on the course of our consumer society. I felt good about spending much more time on relationships and less time on shopping this year. But we did give some gifts, heartful expressions of love... and in the back of my mind I rationalized that I was helping support what is clearly a challenged economy. I asked all the clerks I saw how things were going and they said OK, but slower than last year. I know Grove clients are starting to slow down on their bill paying, an early indicator of recession. I wrote earlier about a client who is experiencing unprecedented fuel driven commodity price hikes and is VERY worried.

Is it possible that our society, like the stock market, needs a "correction" like this, as painful as it could be? A got a confirmation of that perspective in an e-mail from my colleague Diana Arsenian, a gifted graphic facilitator and designer who is part of The Grove network. She included a link to "The Story of Stuff," and really encouraged me to watch it. Coming from her, and supported by two other friends who I remembered has also pinged me about it, AND having some time the day after Christmas led me to watch. It's a 20 minute, beguilingly simple, clever, graphically animated  story narrated by Anne Leonard, linked to a very rich web site encouraging involvement and action. 

The Story of Stuff is a powerful example of visual storytelling (supported by our neighbors at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability, The Tides Foundation) and took me into thining how we at The Grove might start using our visualizaiton expertise.

So there I was, fully implicated, considering the impacts of my (and most of the rest of our) chosen lifestyles. I'm still roiling with the impact. Could this year be a time when we make a turn as a society toward more sensible thinking? Will I be a part?

Do take the 20 minutes to watch this. It should shake you into some deep reflection if not change. We all need to do both!

Did You Know 2.0

I was going through my back e-mails and came across a link from Lisa Kimball of Group Jazz (also the Organizational Development Network Board) to an amazing little video called Did You Know, created by a high school education project in Colorado with the help of Xplane. It's a powerful example of how simple graphics can communicate a staggering amount of information, and pose some sense shaking challenges to conventional wisdom. When I question my own attempts, at age 63, to try and understand the new media and web 2.0 environments, I'll just need to play this as a reminder. Click HERE to see it.

Visual Thinking Conference Brings Together Renowned Leaders In Visualization Techniques

The VizThink ’08 Conference - San Francisco January 27, 28 and 29, will bring together leaders in visual thinking for the first time in one location. I will be presenting on "Panoramic Visualization: A Mind Gym for Group Intelligence" in the context of a very distinguished group from across the visualization spectrum. It's billed as an opportunity for executives to understand ways of incorporating visualization processes into business, learning and communications strategies to gain faster and more effective results. Hosted by Portland, Ore. based VizThink LLC, the conference will include breakout sessions and forums facilitated by some of the most recognized names in the visual thinking space, including the distinguished Bob Horn from Stanford University, renowned author and artist Scott McCloud, award winning designer Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, most notably known for her work in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and Nigel Holmes formerly with Time magazine.  The conference will be held at the Westin San Francisco Market Street hotel from January 27-29.  Registration is open now. (Click HERE).