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?”

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.

Srategizing with Visual Metaphors

As the rain and winds ripped trees down in our backyard and beside the Grove in our first serious winter storm, I ended up my VizThink web-conference exhilarated, and thinking a lot about visual analogies and metaphors. (To hear the entire program click “Visualizing Change: Creating the Future One Vision at a Time” here). My reflection was sparked by a question moderator Tom Crawford passed along from one of the 53 people participating. “What role does the third dimension play in your Storymaps?” I illustrated my answer with the tablet sketch below, but let me elaborate.

Leading Change: The Role of Serious Play

2007 is almost over, and a weaving of insights for the new year is already beginning, fueled by a good studio day of just letting things arise, and several visits with good friends and counselors. The twin themes of “prototyping” and “leadership” are starting to dance together in a wonderfully hopeful way.

Simulate to Innovate
Let me start with the prototyping theme. Casting over my library (the one I keep at my home studio focused on the projects I am developing) Michael Schrage’s book on Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) popped into my hand. My colleague, Ed Claassen got it for The Grove library several years ago. I took it home, knowing that there was a connection between prototyping, play, and what we do at The Grove with interactive graphic communications and groups.

The Story of Stuff

This holiday was a complex time of joyful immersion in family and community and sober reflection on the course of our consumer society. I felt good about spending much more time on relationships and less time on shopping this year. But we did give some gifts, heartful expressions of love... and in the back of my mind I rationalized that I was helping support what is clearly a challenged economy. I asked all the clerks I saw how things were going and they said OK, but slower than last year. I know Grove clients are starting to slow down on their bill paying, an early indicator of recession. I wrote earlier about a client who is experiencing unprecedented fuel driven commodity price hikes and is VERY worried.

Is it possible that our society, like the stock market, needs a "correction" like this, as painful as it could be? A got a confirmation of that perspective in an e-mail from my colleague Diana Arsenian, a gifted graphic facilitator and designer who is part of The Grove network. She included a link to "The Story of Stuff," and really encouraged me to watch it. Coming from her, and supported by two other friends who I remembered has also pinged me about it, AND having some time the day after Christmas led me to watch. It's a 20 minute, beguilingly simple, clever, graphically animated  story narrated by Anne Leonard, linked to a very rich web site encouraging involvement and action. 

The Story of Stuff is a powerful example of visual storytelling (supported by our neighbors at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability, The Tides Foundation) and took me into thining how we at The Grove might start using our visualizaiton expertise.

So there I was, fully implicated, considering the impacts of my (and most of the rest of our) chosen lifestyles. I'm still roiling with the impact. Could this year be a time when we make a turn as a society toward more sensible thinking? Will I be a part?

Do take the 20 minutes to watch this. It should shake you into some deep reflection if not change. We all need to do both!

Did You Know 2.0

I was going through my back e-mails and came across a link from Lisa Kimball of Group Jazz (also the Organizational Development Network Board) to an amazing little video called Did You Know, created by a high school education project in Colorado with the help of Xplane. It's a powerful example of how simple graphics can communicate a staggering amount of information, and pose some sense shaking challenges to conventional wisdom. When I question my own attempts, at age 63, to try and understand the new media and web 2.0 environments, I'll just need to play this as a reminder. Click HERE to see it.

Second Life Retrospective

I just completely a 40 page illustrated retrospective on my learning from an initial year and half exploring Second Life. I've focused on 12 themes that have posed the most interesting questions and learning in this new medium, which increasingly represents an integrated experience in self-organizing, web 2.0 phenomena, all embedded in a 3D dynamic environment. The paper is too long to include here, but you can down load it by clicking on this link. I would love to hear your comments and reactions here however. The picture below is my SL self, Sunseed Bardeen, contemplating all this in my Deimos studio.

Download SecondLifeRetrospective.pdf (2518.2K)

Seeing Patterns That Connect

A couple of days ago Chrissa Merron called from the OD Network to talk about the fireside chat that I and five other award winners would have at the upcoming Organization Development Network Conference in Baltimore. “I’m interested in topics and themes that might be interesting to discuss,” she said. The question challenged me. What do I think is the most important thing to be thinking about as a profession?

What jumped to mind immediately were the deep roots the ODN has in systems thinking and looking at organizations as organic, alive entities. I then mused on why the network would give The Grove the Members Award for contribution to the field. What does visualization have to do with OD? A lot I thought.