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.
At The Grove we are officially launching Visual Leaders today.
This means that Amazon is shipping; it's in the stores at Barnes & Noble
and Books-a-Million. And one person wrote from Canada that he saw it in Toronto
in its "World's Biggest Bookstore." Richard Narramore, my Wiley
editor, writes that he's already let a contract for a Chinese translation. The
process is a bit like having a baby. In between the nine months gestation and a
life time of living with the result is this one moment in time. Print is
static. Life is dynamic. One has to imagine all this, whether reading words or
looking at pictures. This image from a Nike meeting captures a bit of this
feeling. Can you see the book as a satellite orbiting a fluid environment of
issues and challenges? So the book is now in orbit—but what does that mean?
The Grove's partner in Amsterday, Patrick Van der Pijl, founder and CEO of Business Model, Inc., has knitted together the approaches represented by the four best-selling books shown below in a service offering clients are clamoring to use. He was on the core team that created Business Model Generation, now in 25 languages and selling over 500,000 worldwide. He combined that with The Grove's Strategic Visioning Graphic Guides and translated Visual Meetings into Dutch. Visual Meetings has been a best seller and is now in 15 languages. Business Model You applied business modeling to individuals. Finally Gamestorming is Dave Gray's reframing of faciitation practices as games. This too has been very well received. Click here to see a nice video BMI put together from a recent symposium in Holland describing the integration. The Grove will be partnering with BMI to offer Business Model Visualization workshop in the SF Bay Area in the new year.
Visual Leaders, the capstone book in the Visual Leadership Series John Wiley & Company has supported (of which Visual Meetings was the first), will be in the stores the first week in January. Help spread the word. If you are planning on buying the book on Amazon, do it January 7 to help us get the most visibility.
A third book in my Wiley & Sons trilogy on visualization is nearing completion of its first draft. Wiley agreed to print the book in full color, and I am having a terrific time loading it with examples of how leaders of all kinds can take advantage of what I'm calling the visualization revolution. This cover image illustrates the big picture focus of the book. It's written to help leaders and managers increase their visual IQ, learn to work with visual practitioners, and guide their organizations in become more literate visually, in both face-to-face and virtual environbments.I making sure there are lots of practice exercises and suggestions for new leaders.
Wiley plans to have the book in the stores in January. We'll for sure have a link and other information at www.grove.com. In the meantime, I'd like to share the table of contents to give you a sense of what will be included. Any comments and feedback would be welcome.
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.
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 a consumer goods 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).
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).
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.
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).
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.”
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.
