DavidSibbet.com

Sibbet Family Art Show

My brother James, a graphic designer who lives up in Northern California (Comptche near Fort Bragg to be prescise) called recently to say he was participating in an art show of Mendocino artists that would include art from the artists AND their families. He asked if he could include two of my pieces and I agreed enthusiastically. The show is called Generations and will be all February at the Oddfellows Hall in Mendocino. James' painting of a seated woman is on this flyer on the middle right.

Visual Leaders Launches: New Year Begins

At The Grove we are officially launching Visual Leaders today. This means that Amazon is shipping; it's in the stores at Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million. And one person wrote from Canada that he saw it in Toronto in its "World's Biggest Bookstore." Richard Narramore, my Wiley editor, writes that he's already let a contract for a Chinese translation. The process is a bit like having a baby. In between the nine months gestation and a life time of living with the result is this one moment in time. Print is static. Life is dynamic. One has to imagine all this, whether reading words or looking at pictures. This image from a Nike meeting captures a bit of this feeling. Can you see the book as a satellite orbiting a fluid environment of issues and challenges? So the book is now in orbit—but what does that mean?

How to be a Buoy in a Sea of Possibilities

Fast Company excerpted my new book Visual Leaders (out January 7) in their recent on-line edition. They liked some observations I wrote about how to deal with social media by thinking about messages as being buoys in a foggy sea of possibilities. I shared a set of principles that are elaborated on in the article. To see more click here.

 

Visual Leaders is Back From the Printers!!!

I just got a note from Lydia Dimitriadis at Wiley saying "Just wanted to let you know that some advance copies of the new book came in today!  It really looks fantastic- great job on the design! Thanks, and congrats on another beautiful book!"  If you are planning to order it on Amazon, please do it the first week in January. It will help with ratings. In the meantime enjoy this little intro video that will greet you there. I'm excited. This one is in four color!!

 

Business Model Visualization

The Grove's partner in Amsterday, Patrick Van der Pijl, founder and CEO of Business Model, Inc., has knitted together the approaches represented by the four best-selling books shown below in a service offering clients are clamoring to use. He was on the core team that created Business Model Generation, now in 25 languages and selling over 500,000 worldwide. He combined that with The Grove's Strategic Visioning Graphic Guides and translated Visual Meetings into Dutch. Visual Meetings has been a best seller and is now in 15 languages. Business Model You applied business modeling to individuals. Finally Gamestorming is Dave Gray's reframing of faciitation practices as games. This too has been very well received. Click here to see a nice video BMI put together from a recent symposium in Holland describing the integration. The Grove will be partnering with BMI to offer Business Model Visualization workshop in the SF Bay Area in the new year.

Visual Leaders, the capstone book in the Visual Leadership Series John Wiley & Company has supported (of which Visual Meetings was the first), will be in the stores the first week in January. Help spread the word. If you are planning on buying the book on Amazon, do it January 7 to help us get the most visibility.

TEDx Copenhagen - Draw More, Together with Olé Qvist Sorenson

My friend and colleague Olé Qvist Sorenson presented at a recent TEDx conference in Copenhagen. His video is wonderful. It's a simple, inviting, clear demonstration of why visualizing in groups is so much fun and so helpful. Enjoy a look. Olé's company Bigger Picture, regularly creates large-scale visualization for clients, as well as white board animation movies and many other visualizations. He's been a very inspirational example in a growing, world-wide network of visual pratitioners.

 

Rachel Smith's "Drawing in Class" TEDx Talk Makes the Case for Visual Thinking!!

Rachel Smith, The Grove's Director of Digital Facilitation Services, spoke at a recent TEDxUFM gathering, organized by Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatamala City. The presentations were simultaneously translated for the bi-lingual audience. Rachel really makes the case for visual notetaking in education. Her story about her niece Elizabeth is very inspiring. Enjoy!! 

Visual Leaders is Happening

A third book in my Wiley & Sons trilogy on visualization is nearing completion of its first draft. Wiley agreed to print the book in full color, and I am having a terrific time loading it with examples of how leaders of all kinds can take advantage of what I'm calling the visualization revolution. This cover image illustrates the big picture focus of the book. It's written to help leaders and managers increase their visual IQ, learn to work with visual practitioners, and guide their organizations in become more literate visually, in both face-to-face and virtual environbments.I making sure there are lots of practice exercises and suggestions for new leaders.

Wiley plans to have the book in the stores in January. We'll for sure have a link and other information at www.grove.com. In the meantime, I'd like to share the table of contents to give you a sense of what will be included. Any comments and feedback would be welcome.

Knowledge Navigation: Apple's Preview of the Future

I’m all stirred up from reading Walter Isaacson’s richly reported biography of Steve Jobs— half in the large, 650-page book and half in my iPod, downloaded to the Kindle app.  (I’m VERY curious about the rise of e-books and learn by doing).

Steve Jobs is the first biography of this caliber where I have some ground truth. I’ve lived the Apple revolution. I consulted to the company all during the Scully years. I count Alan Kay, the original conceiver of the “Dynabook” when he was at Xerox as a friend and colleague. I worked closely with Gil Amelio at National Semiconductor. I think I’ve owned, used, and depended on just about every product they’ve made since the Mac SE. In fact I created my own book, Visual Meetings, on the Mac and opened with a chapter about how we used visualization to guide the Leadership Expedition we conducted for all of Apple’s top management during the 1980s. Apple’s example has shaped our visual practice at The Grove. The idea of doing for group process what Apple did for computing—i.e. provide a graphical user interface—has been a guiding vision. So I’ve had a VERY interesting time following this story.

I no sooner finished than I came across a link to an article in Forbes magazine called "For a Preview of the iPad3-Watch this 23 Year-oldApple Video" about a classic video created at Apple during the 1980’s by John Scully and his higher education marketing team called “The Knowledge Navigator.” It was created for a presentation he gave at EduCom about Apple’s product vision in 1987, a couple of years after Steve was fired and left to start NeXT. Here’s a screen grab of the beginning. 

Visual Teams Has Arrived—What's New About It?

My second Wiley book, Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, & High Performance, arrived in a box at the precise moment we finished a review of our Team Performance System at The Grove’s Quarterly meeting! Needless to say I and our team was pretty exited. Everyone wanted to know what was new in this book that they could talk about. 

 Here is my answer.

 1. New Success Stories: It tells the stories of many high performance teams that used visualization extensively to achieve results. These stories from HP, Otis Spunkmeyer, RE-AMP, Agilent Technologies, the DLR Group, and Gary Hamel’s MLab demonstrate how visual meeting methods can be used over the whole arc of team’s life.

Advice to Beginning Graphic Facilitators

I received a note from an experienced architect looking to get into the field of graphic facilitation, inspired a bit by another practitioner and my book Visual Meetings. I took some time to respond to his questions and thought I might share them more generally here.

Dear Robert,

Thanks for your note. I was planning on being an architect myself back in my 20s, even enrolled in school, but another job opened up and I went in another direction, the but the architectural field is really the source of our approach at The Grove—in that designers have always worked visually and interactively. Let me try and answer your questions.

RE TRAINING: Our Principle of Graphic Facilitation workshop is for people who want to be professionals, and is filling up rapidly these days. We have another one day workshop on Visual Meetings on September 27 that is more of an overview. It still has room. It’s designed for a bigger group and focused on builidng awareness of all the possibilities.

"Visual Teams" Writing in Progress

Wiley & Sons has contracted for a second book in the Visual series that began with Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity. It is due to be published in the fall of 2011 and is titled Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation & High Performance. The cover and table of contents are shown here for those of you who are helping with stories, references, and other support. It's due out in the Fall. Any comments or feedback at this point would be welcome.

"Visual Meetings: A Revolution in Group Productivity" Lunch & Learn Webinar Available Here

Pierre Kwand of People On-The-Go, a company that provides webinars for breaking business topics, interviewed me recently for one of his Lunch and Learn Programs. The presentation used Prezi to review the key concepts in Visual Meetings: How Graphic, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Productivity. I'm happy to report that the book is still selling at the top of its categories on Amazon--so well, in fact, that Wiley & Company are signing me up for a sequel called Visual Teams: Designing for Commitment, Innovations and High Performance (due out in the fall). If you would like to listen to the Lunch and Learn talk just click here. The talk is in three segments.

 

Love & Forgiveness

It’s Sunday. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King day and love & forgiveness are on my mind. Why this year, you might wonder? I, like many in my generation, was shaped by the life of our young, hopeful President John F. Kennedy, and by Rev. Martin Luther King, spokesperson for our cultural consciousness. When they were killed the web of trust and security bubbling over our post WWI cohort of young people exploded.

I drew these portraits of these men in the 1970s when I was working with Coro training young people for public affairs and they live on my studio wall over my books on leadership. Their hope sparked mine. The glittering name is a card from an early associate who believed in me as a carrier or this fire. I work to remember these messages from the edges of my consciousness. Today I’m the President of a successful consulting company, back on the board of Coro, and supporting many organizations that are reeling under the economic turmoil of our times. It’s my turn to serve.

Thanksgiving

"Oh my!" came Susan's cry from the front room. I could tell from her tone it was something wonderful. It was 7:00 on Saturday morning and one of the first full weekend's lay out in front of us. I was intending to sleep in. But her call pulled me to the living room on the west end of our flat, and there, stretched over the entire sky was a full rainbow. The sun was just rising, and cutting under the clouds, turned millions of droplets into prisms of light. My heart soared.

I'm not sure why my body responds this way to beauty. Perhaps my eyes trigger endorphins? Or could it be the cascade of associations with rainbows, or the story of God's covenant of hope after the flood. I ran for my camera, knowing this bow was ephemeral. And of course my "camera mind" was now looking at the all the wires! What a metaphor for our lives now, I thought. Wired we are, and looking through all this maze for rainbows.

Visualizing Change Webinar

I'm fascinated with the role visualization plays in our view of organization and what is possible during change. I received an e-mail to update my VizThink data on VizThink.com and rediscovered a webinar I gave prior to a big VizThink conference held in San Francisco in 2008 that deals directly with this subject. It's an hour long dialogue with Tom Crawford that includes a very thorough exploration of how The Grove uses Storymapping for visioning and alignment, and what kinds of explorations I was making in Second Life at the time. Now with Visual Meetings being so well received, it seems more relevant than ever, and addresses interesting questions of methodology. So, if you are interested, here is the link.  VizThink.com/Visualizing-change-webinar. The references to the conference and other programs are not current, of course.

OD Network Notes—Taken on the iPad

I went to the Organizational Development Network annual conference in New Orleans this week and overlooked the fact I was on the very last page of my journal, a constant companion. This forced me onto the iPad for notetaking and I really had FUN! I used Sketchbook Pro app for the iPad, saving them to iTunes and then to a folder I could upload here. I of course attended only a few of the dozens of superb workshops and talks. If you are interested in either OD or iPad noteaking you might check these out. You can click on the images and they will pop up large scale on your screen. This one is choreographer Garth Fagan's keynote. Since I experience facilitation as a dance it was one of my favorite. The rest of these will be posted column width.

Visual Meetings Presentations at the 2010 OD Network Conference in New Orleans

I experimented with a new presentation platform called Prezi to give a talk recently at the Organization Development Network Annual Conference in New Orleans. The presentation was about how graphic facilitation is evolving at the intersection with new technology. I give illustrations of how visual meetings support imagining, engaging, thinking and enacting —the full cycle of action— and then provided examples of how combination with new tech is pushing the envelope even further. This image is the entire Prezi presentation.

When you click on The Future of Visual Meetings Prezi Show., it will connect you to the Prezi presentation I gave, stored on my account in the Prezi cloud. It will take a good 5-10 minutes to load all the images so be patient. 

Future Talk TV Show Features David Sibbet & Mei Lin Fung Talking about Visual Facilitation Applied to Complex Social Problems

Recently I met Mei Lin Fung, producer of Future Talk, a monthly TV show produced in Silicon Valley. She works visually herself and when she hear about Visual Meetings she invited me to be on her show. We produced a half hour session on visual facilitation and its application to complex problems in government. It was a three camera, eight person, all volunteer crew—producing live and unedited from Palo Alto's Community Media center. It is now available permanently on FutureTalk.blip.tv. I talked about my work with visual meeting, showing some examples, and then demonstrated by taking notes on my IBM Thinkpad tablet when Mei Lin was talking. Enjoy!

Check my Interview with Cheryl on Visual Meetings: 20/20 Vision for your Organization

Cheryl Esposito has been hosting an internet radio program called Leading Conversations, for several years, featuring thought leaders in the area of organization transformation and development. This Friday, September 24, at 10:00 PST I shared insights about the process of writing Visual Meetings, the impact of visual language on meetings and organizations, and what it means to work with a full range of visual styles--as mirrored in the Graphic Language Keyboard. 

Click on this DAVID ON VOICE AMERICA link to hear the show. Cheryl is part of the SF Bay Area Thought Leader Gathering and shares my sense that when humans work with ALL their faculties -- spirit, soul, mind, and body - that wonderful things can happen.