DavidSibbet.com

Danone's Virtual Victory—Six Cities Without a Hitch!

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 Danone—the water, yogurt, and baby food 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).

Group Learning Interview With Sibbet

I was interviewed for Gordon Rudow's web radio show Fired UP recently on the subject of Group Learning. If you can ignore the over-the-top intro music and rah rah framing from Webmaster Radio, it's a great interview. Gordon began his own consultng business Bonfire Communications back in the 1990s and I was one of his mentors. I'm increasingly impressed with how different speaking in the moment in direct response to other people is from composed writing or designed presentations. I always find myself saying things that surprise, and in this case, delight me. Have a listen. I'd love to hear your reaction. (You might also check Gordon's other interviews. The one with Dawna Markova and Terry Pearce are excellent).

New Career Compass Published

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.

Freedom and Constraint: Insights from Singapore

I’m less than an hour from landing in San Francisco and the two weeks I spent in Singapore are still very much with me, as is my anticipation for returning home. As the two memories mix like the ocean currents beneath me I find myself wondering about this brave new society being created at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, just north of Indonesia.

Singapore has been a regional center and principle port for a long time. When British rule ended in the 1940s it was part of Malaysia for a while, then was “kicked out” as locals say, in 1965 over Lee Kwuan Yew and others unwillingness to accept laws favoring Malays over other nationalities. Since then it has focused on becoming a leader of the ASEAN region, competing hugely with Hong Kong, and no doubt with all global megacities.

If my first impression of Singapore was of the huge Integrated Resort construction and a rather gray, torn-up place, I now have many more images of the gleaming, tidy modern metropolis they are creating. This image from the Urban Redevelopment Authority model of what the Integrated Resort should look like finished captures some of the feel (It’s the foreground).

Ferries and Flows: Seeing the Future From Kowloon

It started in Shenzhen, this feeling I had that something very different is going on over here in China. But I couldn’t get a sense of it. The obvious differences from the States are abundant, but that wasn’t what was bugging me. It was something about the cities, and the way they seemed to be working. And the insight came from not having my usual moorings.

I was finally knocked off them good as I stepped out of the Four Points Sheraton into the little limo—to Hong Kong I thought. But no, it was a limo to customs! There was an Arab from Los Angeles in the front seat and a Chinese couple from Singapore behind me. The driver didn’t speak English, but we soon realized that the traffic wasn’t working the way he wanted. He started trying different detours, with police blocking one way, and traffic the next. He got on the phone, yelling loudly in Cantonese. But we did finally arrive.

Then I realized we had to all get out, with luggage, and queue up inside a building as big as an airline terminal, with as many people – all queuing to get through Chinese customs. “Do you have your Hong Kong arrival card,” the Arab fellow asked? “No, just my China departure card,” I answered. “Well, I happen to have one here – and he dug in his wallet. “You’d be hung up a while if you came up without this. It’s all bureaucracy but they stick to it.”

Can We SEE Progress on Global Warming?

Since late 2004 The Grove has been supporting an ambitious RE-AMP project in the upper Midwest to clean up the energy system there. Its goal is to reduce global warming pollutants 80% by 2030 from a 1990 benchmark. When we started there were six foundations and 27 NGOs who wanted to approach the problem with systems thinking and collaboration, funded by the Garfield Foundation. Now in 2008 the project has 15 foundations and over 93 members organizations, expanded beyond environmental groups to faith and youth groups, and 140 were showing up to Ames, Iowa for the annual meeting. In talking over the design, Rick Reed, one of the initiators of the project at Garfield, posed the challenge. “We’ve got to see what we are doing and where the gaps are. How can we possibly do this at this scale?” Last year we added Michigan and a transportation focus to the original six states (North and South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois) with Ohio and Indiana teeing up to join and sending representatives. The Steering Committee has raised a $4 million strategic action fund to help with the expansion. It is without question the most organized effort in the country at the moment.

But are we making progress? It’s challenges like this that always push us to something new… and this time our solution was a breakthrough in visualization at the system thinking level.

In this picture of me introducing the agenda I’m neatly covering up the part of the meeting that was pivotal. Before I reveal what we designed, let me explain a little more about the challenge Rick laid out.

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!

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?”

P&G's Visualization Wall Revolutionizes Retail Design Prototyping

Franz Dill, a Procter & Gamble colleague from the Groupware Users Project that The Grove and the Institute for the Future Conducted all during the 1990s, has been freed to write about P&G innovation center that he helped create in Cincinnati by the publication of AG Lafley's new book: 'The Game Changer: How You can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation ...' 

Franz describes a 24 projector wall that allowed P&G to simulate any shelving scheme for review by customers. You can be assured I can imagine all kinds of other applications for this kind of visualization!!! Enjoy Franz's post. He's also tracking a lot of other interesting things.

Click here to read Dill's "P&Gs Beckett Ridge Innovation Center"