President and Founder of The Grove Consultants International—organizational consultant and information designer, building on years of experience in leadership development, strategic visioning, organization change, and futures study—author of leading-edge group process tools and models for facilitation, team leadership, and organizational transformation. These reflections are for Grove colleagues worldwide.
I selected the following large Storymap's as representative examples of my information design work at The Grove where I was a lead designer on the project. Each of them were critical in moving us to another level of confidence and excitement about this big picture way of working. What these photos do not show, of course, is the rich process of facilitated design meetings that we led as a way of generating this material.
I've included this photo album of some of the people in The Grove's associate network that use our facilitation and Strategic Visioning methods integrally in their work. They are my teachers and I theirs. Collaboration networks are behind most truly innovative, robust methodologies, and our is no exception. Claiming credit as an individual would be like a tree claiming credit for the forest. If you aren't here and know that you should be, send me you picture and a writeup and I'll post it.
These are two supportive visuals for a Partners for Change model I co-designed with Sissel Waage and Ruth Rominger. It shows how we would bring multiple sustainability researchers and activists together around critical issues and support them to create collaborative efforts in media and tool creation.
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?
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.
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, 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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
