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.
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 experimented with a new presentation platform called Prezi to give a talk recently at the Organization Development Network Annual Conference in New Orleans. The presentation was about how graphic facilitation is evolving at the intersection with new technology. I give illustrations of how visual meetings support imagining, engaging, thinking and enacting —the full cycle of action— and then provided examples of how combination with new tech is pushing the envelope even further. This image is the entire Prezi presentation.
When you click on The Future of Visual Meetings Prezi Show., it will connect you to the Prezi presentation I gave, stored on my account in the Prezi cloud. It will take a good 5-10 minutes to load all the images so be patient.
Eilif Trondson, a colleague working at SRI on their Virtual-Worlds@Work project, let me know about an article Jon Brouchoud wrote recently about emerging 3D browser-based worlds. He reviews MellaniuM, 3Dxplorer,Unity3D, and ExitReality from the perspective of someone supporting architects using virtual worlds for collaborative design. I think he's scouting a phenomenon that will reach far beyound that field. Check his review at The Arch.
(Keystone Bouchard is his Second Life name).
At the same time Eilif send his e-mail I heard about another 3D concept about to launch from the UK called me2everyone.com. Our South African colleague Helene Kieser of Inside-Out informed me of this one. It looks like a virtual version of a multi-layered marketing company, viral-on-viral. Check it out. Meanwhile Second Life continues to attract more day-to-day users—50 to 80,000 logged on at any one time (discounting a growing number of "bots" that are parked to create the illustion of activity. Oh well.)
Check out The Grove blog for a post about the tuned up Virtual Learning Center we've created in Second Life. Here's a picture to whet your appetite. It has galleries that cover the full body of The Grove's work, all accessible by teleport maps from the pier that you land on when you click this SLURL.
Here is a short little tour of my White Mountain Studio. I made this to test out how to get video into this blog!! I also have a new gallery show in our Third Life Galleries in SL. Just search for Third LIfe, and at the Pier teleport up to the Galleries.
If you want to catch my free VizThink webcast on January 4 at 8:00am PST, on the topic above, register by clicking here. Register. I'll be answering some of these questions. How did National Semiconductor get 95% vision recognition worldwide during its turnaround in the 1990s? Why did HP train its engineering consultants worldwide to use Graphic Guides? Why did Adobe and Macromedia commission a graphic history when they merged two years ago? Why did Alias (now Autodesk) bring David in to teach their visual planners how to work the boards? How did he get 50 NGO and 8 foundations to collaborate in cleaning up the energy system in the upper midwest? What in the world is The Grove doing in Second Life? I'll be working on the tablet and sharing some graphics-- so come join in the fun. it's free.
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.
Recently I returned from a trip to England where I led a workshop on Expert Facilitation with our partners, Meeting Magic, and conveyed our first ever Grove Worldwide Network Meeting with six partner firms that are using our products and methods in places like Australia, South Africa, Denmark, Sweden, and England. This post is not about that directly, but about some reflections I had on the way to those events that crystallized some clarity about my purpose and intention for doing this collaborative work that has been my passion for more than 30 years now.
I have finished building out a Grove Gallery on an island sim in Second Life called Third Life Lab. The Grove is collaborating with Gary Merrill, one of our consulting associates to create this space dedicated to exploring the relationship between virtual worlds and real life, with an eye toward increasing our sense of interrelatedness and appreciation of natural systems.
This year is the 30th anniversary of becoming an independent organization consultant and information designer. Thirty years! As this new years begins it’s triggered some reflections about what it means to be in “business” and where we are going with The Grove, the worldwide network of people who are working with the many methods and tools we have developed over those years. What does it mean to be in business? What does it mean to be in business for oneself, which is the way it’s put when a person gets a “DBA” (doing business as) registration and prints business cards? What does it mean to be deeply in service using business as a medium for contribution?
