DavidSibbet.com

Visual Teams Has Arrived—What's New About It?

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.

"Visual Teams" Writing in Progress

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.

Choices

For months I’d been looking forward to a special meeting in New Mexico at the Village of the Shining Stones near Abiquiu called the First Peace Gathering. It promised to be a very unique and inspiring event, initiated by an organization called Ehama, the teaching vehicle of two traditional elders named Rainbow Hawk and his partner Wind Eagle. They anticipated elders from the Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, and Native traditions plus youth from Europe to explore how their traditions have been evolving toward a common interest in peace. There would be lots of meditation, story telling, ceremony, and of course eating and social time.This photo called Skypainting by Sabrina Whitelynx reflects the beauty of NM that was calling me.

My good friend Pele Rouge and Firehawk studied with Rainbow Hawk and Wind Eagle for ten years in the 1980s and have gone on to be facilitators of some of the most powerful circles in which I am a member—the Bay Area Thought Leader Gatherings, the Summer Solstice event in Ben Lomond, our Second Life Medicine Circle, and the Pathwalker group. They would, for the first time with their teachers, be co-leaders of the event. I wanted to go and support them. In fact five of our nine Medicine Circle group were going. I also hungered for the desert, the big sky, the monsoon weather, and connecting deeply back into my own indigenous roots as a mountain man from Bishop, California in the Eastern Sierra.

As I have written about in Touching and Technology, my wife Susan was diagnosed with uterine cancer and underwent a full hysterectomy three weeks before I was to leave. Our psyches resisted interpreting this development as truly life changing, and figured she’d be well enough to have me go to New Mexico. “I’ll go to Arizona and see Jerda and Jamie’s little Reilly while you are at First Peace,” she planning.

But at week two and half it as clear that the new journey we were on was going to be one with surprises. While laparoscopy is cosmetically less invasive, a hysterectomy is major surgery, and the removal of the lymph, ovaries, and uterus left Susan in pain, and not able to move around very well. She wasn’t supposed to lift things either.

I realized that I faced a choice, between supporting my community and my own practice and supporting Susan, my beloved.

Thinking About Frames: Is Process a Swoop or an Arc?

Upon reading a George Lakoff critique of the “framing” in eco America’s new report on global warming (see recent post) I experienced a flash of insight in regard to a puzzle that’s been nagging at me since hearing Otto Scharmer talking about Theory U at a recent Thought Leader Gathering in San Francisco (see my post on Theory U). The graphic visualization of Theory U is what I would call a “swoop”, a compelling little visual shown here. Why did Arthur M. Young, my teacher about Process Theory, insist process should be visualized as a “turn” or “V?” as illustrated below? In our study group with Arthur we would often argue with folks who wanted to visualize it as a smooth arc rather than 90^o

This may seem like an abstract puzzle, but Lakoff’s article suggests otherwise. He states without qualification that cognitive scientists agree that “frame circuits” in the cortex and nervous system guide our sense perceptions, and that these are held in place by values. The frames that keep getting reinforced in our experience become hard wired. They become the window through which we look through when we see—the directional microphone through which we hear—the guide to what we touch and sense. (Of course “frame” itself is a frame, or what many would call a metaphor). A common sense interpretation is that we assess the value of a painting or picture as much by its setting, its “frame,” as by the work itself.

Connecting With Source—Experiencing Theory "U"

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)

VizThink Berlin — A Feast of Images

VizThink Berlin (October 12-14,2008) is still bubbling up images for me. Berlin itself is vortex of creative design, art, and architecture, having resurrected itself from both WWII and the unification effort. Seeing 100 designers and visualizers from across Europe at VizThink’s second conference was also provocative. Dave Gray, Aric Wood, and Parker Lee from XPlane and I were the only people from the USA. There were two Canadians and everyone else was from Europe.This post captures highlights from both Berlin and the conference.

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!

Visual Intelligence: Using the Deep Patterns of Visual Language to Build Cognitive Skills

I have a cogent argument for the power of interactive visualizing as a way to build cognitive capability in the recent issue of Theory into Practice, a journal for educators from Ohio State University. It's a special Issue – Volume 47, Issue 2, called Digital Literacies in the Age of Sight and Sound. It was guest edited by Susan Metros, University of Southern California, and Kristina Woolsey, my friend and colleague from the New Media Thinking Project (and former head of Apple's SF multimedia center and its Advance Technology Labs). My chapter outlines how, when one thinks about drawing and visualizing as a process rather than an artifact, that the underlying grammar and structure of the visualization archetypes become clear. We are arranging for distribution of the chapter, but in the meantime you can get it by ordering the Journal with this Theory into Practice flier .

Download TIPFlier.pdf (160.3K)

Back in the Flows of the "Real" World

I’m on the lip of change this week watching my energy shift from vision quest in the desert to the world of meetings. I’m leading a new finance team in a midsized company through an alignment process on Wednesday, then into a seminar called “Inventing the Future of Management” co-sponsored by the MLab (Gary Hamel’s new non-profit venture), McKinsey, and the London School of Business, Hamel’s long time base of operation. Gary’s invited a who’s who in management thinking to come to Half Moon Bay and ask why organizations can’t innovate, adapt, and engage more inventively. “We innovate with everything else – why not management?” he wonders. We’ve been helping get the agenda, templates, meeting infrastructure and everything else in place for several weeks now and it all comes to a head.

It’s been an interesting process re-engaging myself from sacred space back to day-to-day realities. It’s helped to begin each day in meditation, as I have since returning. That practice is deepening. And it’s been interesting to see with new eyes how fundamentally the world is not as it seems. One of the conditions of Buddha hood is understanding that things are not as they appear and to understand the causes of appearances. Getting caught in our representations is getting caught on the wheel of “Samsara,” the wheel of illusion. So what does this mean in common language, really?

On the Sunday of my return I woke to a dream, and wrote it down. I’d like to share what I wrote for it may have some clues:

July 4th Reflections: Freedom and Creativity

The Buddha sitting at the base of our old ceanothous (native lilac) east of my backyard medicine wheel spoke to me this morning during meditations. “Freedom is living your life guided by spirit.” This post is dedicated to exploring what this might mean.

Today is July 4th, 2007, Independence Day, and the 30th anniversary of my striking out in business for myself back in 1977. I’m taking what I call a “studio day” to reflect on this. My studio looks out on this back yard, and is a fully equipped creative space, the original home of Sibbet & Associates when we moved here in 1982 from 6th Avenue in San Francisco. It is where I do my creative work. It is my sanctuary in a busy, busy world.