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.
Summary: Visual Teams will explore the way in which truly high performance teams work and how they use visual tools to support their communications. It will make the case that learning to work like creative designers is effective across a wide range of types of teams, and is a key to innovation and productivity. It will build on Visual Meetings by showing users how to knit together best practices described in the first book, and turn them into strategies that work across the whole arc of a team’s work life. It will also introduce new practices that are specifically designed to support team creation and ways of getting group commitment to common goals, innovation when implementing, and high performance and great results over the long term.
While the overt purpose of the book will be to share visual practices for teams, it will also explore how visualization can help teams and team leaders gain insights into the dynamics of teams in general, introducing to a broad public the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model and related tools — a system used throughout companies like Nike, Genentech, Becton Dickinson, Chevron and others. Visualization emerges as a power tool for thinking about processes that move across time. As I pointed out in Visual Meetings, 80% of the tools developed for Total Quality Management are tools for literally seeing workflows across functions.
The book will also bridge from the old paradigm of thinking of teams as face-to-face and co-located to one where distributed teams and networks are an integral part of the contemporary teaming. As teams become more and more virtual in today’s global organizations, visualization is even more necessary for providing another channel of communication across distance and culture. It is visual language that opens up the group mind to thinking about systems, relationships, interconnections, big picture contexts and consequences.
The book will conclude with a rich resource section linking to leading tools and methods in team development.
VISUAL TEAMS Table of Contents
I. What is a Visual Team?
1. Working Like Designers: Why Visual Teams Get Results
2. Why & When Should Teams Work Visually?
3. A Graphic User Interface for Teams: The Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ Model
II. Leading Visual Teams
4. So You’ve Just Been Promoted; Understanding Your Purpose as a Leader
5. Managing Four Flows of Activity: Attention, Energy, Information & Operations
6. Providing Visual Tools & Supporting Innovation
III. Visual Team Startup: Creating Trust, Focus & Commitment
7. Visualizing Your Purpose & Mission
8. Seeing Yourself as a Team & Building Trust
9. Clear Goals & Graphic Action Plans
10 Deciding to Commit: Consensus or Command?
IV. Sustaining Results—Innovating for High Performance
11. Graphics for Implementation & Project Management
12. High Performance Presentations: Getting Buy-in & Support
13. Sharing-Rallies & Team Based Learning
V. Growing a Visual Team Culture
14. Using Visualization Throughout Your Organization
15. An Operating System for Visual Organizations
16. Supporting Ongoing Learning and Development
VI. High Tech Tools for Visual Collaboration
17. Visual Tools Come of Age: High Performance at The Institute for the Future
18. Web & Teleconferencing On Distributed Teams
19. iPads, Smartphones, Video & Other Groupware Tools
20. Team Rooms & Studios—Physical Places or Virtual Spaces?
21. Teaming & Social Networks
VII. Links, Books and Other Resources
22. How You Can Develop Visual Team Proficiency
David ... I just sent to you an e-mail w/ four SLIDES which I think might fit into this book quite nicely. Yes, yes there's a bit of editorial decision-making for you to do. But my excitement stems form the fact that we've been using graphic facilitation and graphic recording here w/in District 27 of Toastmasters International for several years now. And if the proof is found in the pudding, well, we're about to strategically re-form the district and create two new districts from the over 240 clubs and 4,500+ members who live and work near the nations capital and surrounding geography (DC-SE & SW + Southeastern Maryland + Northern Virginia). Let's talk. John Lesko
Posted by: John Lesko | May 06, 2011 at 08:42 AM