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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine a three channel, six city, tele-computer-graphics meeting with over 40 people involved and lasting four hours. I can and actually helped facilitate one recently when a consumer goods company from France decided to review its plans for talent management in Asia with its teams in Tokyo, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore and San Francisco in a virtual rather than face to face setting. Here’s a picture of our video link (I was represented only by my graphics).
