David Sibbet

Facilitation Mastery: Experiencing the Four Flows

“I didn’t appreciate that we would be doing so much personal development” one participant said in our closing circle at the Facilitation Mastery Workshop, held recently at Islandwood Conference Center on Bainbridge Island in Washington. “The way you and Laurie showed up made it possible,” another said. “This was transformational for me,” another said.

I’m still deeply moved by the experience I just completed, and so is the group. We are all communicating still through a Base Camp web site Grove Sr. Associate Tom Benthin (who attended the workshop) set up for everyone. Poems and reflections are flying!

Fires, Family and the Fourth of July

I’ve been thinking a lot about fire this Fourth of July! Soot’s falling on my Santa Cruz friends from the Big Sur fire, called the Basin Complex fire. At only 5% containment it has already burned some 71,200 acres and is threatening the town of Big Sur itself, the Zen Center’s Tasajara Retreat Center, Nepenthe’s and other landmarks. As scary as this is, our morning Chronicle quoted some local residents as seeing the great cycle of renewal in this catastrophe. The coast will survive. These ecosystems are actually accustomed to burning, and many species depend on it. But what is renewal when one’s own house is at risk? What is change when one’s sacred memories and sacred sites are the ones changing?

Inventing the Future of Management--Initial Insights

I have a little distance on the amazing gathering that I facilitated recently with Gary Hamel and his MLab team called “Invent the Future of Management.” McKinsey, the strategy consulting firm, co-sponsored the event along with the London Business School, and MLab, Gary’s new non-profit venture focused on catalyzing collaboration and contribution to the field which has been his life— leadership and management of organizations—businesses in particular.

He gathered 30 leaders in management development, education, consulting, and the CEOs of Whole Foods, Gore, Ideo, Google, and HCL (one of the fastest growing IT companies in India). His gathering question was “why can’t we bring as much innovation, adaptation, and engagement to our organizations as we do to our development of products and technologies?”

Visual Intelligence: Using the Deep Patterns of Visual Language to Build Cognitive Skills

I have a cogent argument for the power of interactive visualizing as a way to build cognitive capability in the recent issue of Theory into Practice, a journal for educators from Ohio State University. It's a special Issue – Volume 47, Issue 2, called Digital Literacies in the Age of Sight and Sound. It was guest edited by Susan Metros, University of Southern California, and Kristina Woolsey, my friend and colleague from the New Media Thinking Project (and former head of Apple's SF multimedia center and its Advance Technology Labs). My chapter outlines how, when one thinks about drawing and visualizing as a process rather than an artifact, that the underlying grammar and structure of the visualization archetypes become clear. We are arranging for distribution of the chapter, but in the meantime you can get it by ordering the Journal with this Theory into Practice flier .

Download TIPFlier.pdf (160.3K)

Back in the Flows of the "Real" World

I’m on the lip of change this week watching my energy shift from vision quest in the desert to the world of meetings. I’m leading a new finance team in a midsized company through an alignment process on Wednesday, then into a seminar called “Inventing the Future of Management” co-sponsored by the MLab (Gary Hamel’s new non-profit venture), McKinsey, and the London School of Business, Hamel’s long time base of operation. Gary’s invited a who’s who in management thinking to come to Half Moon Bay and ask why organizations can’t innovate, adapt, and engage more inventively. “We innovate with everything else – why not management?” he wonders. We’ve been helping get the agenda, templates, meeting infrastructure and everything else in place for several weeks now and it all comes to a head.

It’s been an interesting process re-engaging myself from sacred space back to day-to-day realities. It’s helped to begin each day in meditation, as I have since returning. That practice is deepening. And it’s been interesting to see with new eyes how fundamentally the world is not as it seems. One of the conditions of Buddha hood is understanding that things are not as they appear and to understand the causes of appearances. Getting caught in our representations is getting caught on the wheel of “Samsara,” the wheel of illusion. So what does this mean in common language, really?

On the Sunday of my return I woke to a dream, and wrote it down. I’d like to share what I wrote for it may have some clues:

P&G's Visualization Wall Revolutionizes Retail Design Prototyping

Franz Dill, a Procter & Gamble colleague from the Groupware Users Project that The Grove and the Institute for the Future Conducted all during the 1990s, has been freed to write about P&G innovation center that he helped create in Cincinnati by the publication of AG Lafley's new book: 'The Game Changer: How You can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation ...' 

Franz describes a 24 projector wall that allowed P&G to simulate any shelving scheme for review by customers. You can be assured I can imagine all kinds of other applications for this kind of visualization!!! Enjoy Franz's post. He's also tracking a lot of other interesting things.

Click here to read Dill's "P&Gs Beckett Ridge Innovation Center"

Could "Slow Deep" be the Next Counter Culture?

In a recent post in the Future Commons, a blog supported by The Institute for the Future with which The Grove is an affiliate, Eileen Clegg asked a wonderful question about the speed of our current culture related to on-line worlds. I responded and thought the exchange was worth posting here. Eileen wrote:

It seems like most really great work happens in collaboration over a long period of time, through many cycles, as people bump up against differences (of perspective, personal style) and come to understand each other so that diversity becomes productive.

It’s frustrating that we have amazing tools to support deep collaborative work -- but instead of “going deep,” most of us are “spreading thin” --  multiple communities, frequent team changes, hundreds of online connections. Maybe we are (or at least I am) not smart enough to figure out how to engage in a steady, meaningful way across a universe of people and possibilities.

So I’ve been reflecting on loyalty, long-term work partnerships, authenticity, sticking-it-out, patience (personal aspirations...).   I’ve been thinking maybe “deep slow work” is the new counter-culture.

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?