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.
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.
Carl Jung's famous Red Book, a 600 page large format journal chronicling his more adventurous explorations of the psyche, is now on display at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea: “The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology.” The New York Times has a nice article on their web site and an 8 image sample of some the images. They are very interesting to me as a long-time journal keeper and explorer of my own inner imagination. I think you'll find it interesting as well. Click on this link to get the article. (New York Times).
My Solstice pledge to begin each day orienting to spirit and what the Buddhists call “clear light mind” had a corollary commitment, and that was to lighten up on the material plane and drop some of the “stuff” I have been carrying. Well I took action on this last weekend and faced off against a large storage locker South of Market where Susan and I have been stowing things for nearly 20 years. We live in a flat in San Francisco that has limited garage storage, and felt like we needed this, especially when the kids left for school and didn’t want to carry their “things” with them. Well the kids are all married with their own kids so what are we doing with this held-over storage locker? It was paper, and dust, and mildew, and little black and white symbols, and old wood we thought. But oh no, it was part of our identity and shadow selves, and once in the light the surprises began.
My heart is still singing from the four-day retreat I and 35 other colleagues spent in the redwood forests of Ben Lomond this summer solstice. We met at Sequoia Retreat Center, a truly sacred place. It was my eighth year participating. Each time the experience deepens.
The energy in this year’s gathering went up an octave—perhaps because of the crises in confidence the world now faces, perhaps because a core group of us has stepped across a threshold of withholding into true ceremony, perhaps because of forces we cannot explain. But these two weeks after returning have been filled with reflections about all that happened, and especially the evening of Medicine Wheel dancing that is the turning point of the experience. I felt like our community reclaimed something deep and fundamental, and experienced true ceremony.
During one of my reflective times I drew this pen and chalk drawing of the dance, without thought of sharing, just so I could relive the experience. The image has come alive for me. There is something about the energy of line and patterns that re-evokes some of the magic. I have no idea if it will do that for you, but I feel called to try and bring it alive a bit in words. Something happened this time that all of us need more of. Perhaps in sharing those of you who feel called to similar experiences will step into them.
Every year at the Summer Solstice a growing network of us gather in a mountain retreat center near Santa Cruz and invite in directions for the new year. In preparing this weekend I was reading over my journals, and came across this collage I did a year ago at our Facilitation Mastery workshop at Islandwood Conference Center on Bainbridge Island, Washington. My colleague Laurie Durnell led the process, and I'd like to share it here so you could do something yourself around the Solstice if you wish.
I was very moved and challenged by the invitation from the 2009 Coro Fellows Class to be their graduation speaker. It said “we as a class have decided that we would like to have a speaker at our graduation that can represent our experiences as Coro Fellows.” I felt confident about this part since I was a Coro Fellow in Los Angeles in 1965, then on the staff from 1969 through 1977 in San Francisco, and on the Board in the 1990s and now again in the late 2000’s. I understand what it feels like to have a series of very disparate internship and projects experiences in government, business, labor, media, politics, and community organizations and try and make sense of the larger system. That’s what the 12 Coro Fellows do for nine months, along with the 66 different Tuesday evening and Friday seminars held to make sense out of it all.
But the invitation went on. “After more discussion, we decided we wanted a speaker that could address the crowd from a number of different viewpoints from within the program.” This was less clear. What did they mean by “different points within the program.” I immediately thought of the levels of experience the group of 12 invariably encounter. One is the diversity of points of view the different Fellows bring, gathered as they are from around the country. In this class Nicholas, who wrote the invitation, was from New York City. I knew another was from North Dakota, Andrea, who I talked to during the reception, was from Virginia. But they might have meant the different sector perspectives, or did they mean different levels of human perception—physically, mental, emotional, spiritual? Okay, I definitely could at least honor a multi-perspective perspective.
Otto Scharmer ignited the Thought Leader Gathering at Fort Mason, San Francisco, today with his sharing about the application of Theory “U” to social transformation. Craig and Patricia Neal, the Heartland Circle sponsors, expanded the meeting to 110 people because of the interest in Otto’s work. As conversation starter, Otto’s job was to catalyze our thinking and conversations in wisdom circles and a larger group circle dialogue that followed. He really delivered.(He's third from right)
Tiffany Forner, our art director at The Grove, has just released the Career Compass she has been working on with Mary Robins, a professional career counselor, for the last two years. It's a real leap forward for The Grove, in that the workbook is expressedly designed to integrate with all the standard kinds of evaluation and reference tools used in the field of career counseling. It contains 10 brand new templates for developing one's ideas. What I really love is the packaging format. It's in a white plastic box, with all the fold-out templates removable from a slick ring binder. The instructions sheets are also removable. All the pieces can be ordered in multiple copies for counselors who want to use them in classes. It's thorough enought that it can also be used without a counselor helping.
Could there be a better time to have this product come out. Check out a full description at the following link. Career Compass.
It’s New Year’s and I’m filled with hopeful stories I heard at a Compassionet gathering I attended this week. About 12 of us gathered with Srinivas Sukumar at Rudite Emir’s house in Mountain View. Sukumar was a client of mine at HP in the 1990’s—head of strategic planning for the labs, and is now the Community Program Manager for the CAL IT2 Institute at UC San Diego, having “retired” a few years ago. I went to India with him in 1998 to do strategic visioning for a Chinmaya Mission school in Coimbatore and we have been close colleagues ever since. Compassionet is a circle of his friends that all share an interest in spiritual matters combined with work in service of the community. We meet a couple of times a year when Sukumar is back in the Bay Area from San Diego, and are beginning to deepen the threads that connect us.
I’d like to share some of the things that inspired me.
I was in Copenhagen last week after VizThink, training our partner Strandgaard & Co in graphic facilitation. I was struck by how universal a language graphics has become. The fact that I don’t speak Danish meant that I was thrown back on these visual cues to make sense of what I was experiencing. My sense of this began as we flew in over Copenhagen and I saw the long line of wind machines in the harbor. How quickly these have become icons of change.
