David Sibbet

Fires, Family and the Fourth of July

I’ve been thinking a lot about fire this Fourth of July! Soot’s falling on my Santa Cruz friends from the Big Sur fire, called the Basin Complex fire. At only 5% containment it has already burned some 71,200 acres and is threatening the town of Big Sur itself, the Zen Center’s Tasajara Retreat Center, Nepenthe’s and other landmarks. As scary as this is, our morning Chronicle quoted some local residents as seeing the great cycle of renewal in this catastrophe. The coast will survive. These ecosystems are actually accustomed to burning, and many species depend on it. But what is renewal when one’s own house is at risk? What is change when one’s sacred memories and sacred sites are the ones changing?

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?”

Could "Slow Deep" be the Next Counter Culture?

In a recent post in the Future Commons, a blog supported by The Institute for the Future with which The Grove is an affiliate, Eileen Clegg asked a wonderful question about the speed of our current culture related to on-line worlds. I responded and thought the exchange was worth posting here. Eileen wrote:

It seems like most really great work happens in collaboration over a long period of time, through many cycles, as people bump up against differences (of perspective, personal style) and come to understand each other so that diversity becomes productive.

It’s frustrating that we have amazing tools to support deep collaborative work -- but instead of “going deep,” most of us are “spreading thin” --  multiple communities, frequent team changes, hundreds of online connections. Maybe we are (or at least I am) not smart enough to figure out how to engage in a steady, meaningful way across a universe of people and possibilities.

So I’ve been reflecting on loyalty, long-term work partnerships, authenticity, sticking-it-out, patience (personal aspirations...).   I’ve been thinking maybe “deep slow work” is the new counter-culture.

TED BIG VIZ Book and Movie are LIVE!!

You can download the TED2008-BigViz Book and see an amazing Movie of the 700 plus illustrations Kevin Richards and I did for Big Viz (see stories below). It's a BIG file, but amazing to see. Enjoy.

Yang Ming and The Labyrinth

New Year’s Day is a special mirror for me of what could be in the next year. This one was quite special. It began having my first South Beach Diet meal with Susan – two little onion, pepper, cucumber and egg quiches with tomato juice and three cherry tomatoes. I’m not the cook in the family, and this change is big for my wife, Susan, but we has plunged into it and both of us are learning about what our body does in response to all the highly processed carbohydrates, we like many others, have become accustomed to eating. It felt like the right thing to begin the New Year with. So what goes with right eating I wondered?

“Can we walk to the labyrinth this morning?” I asked. After a moment hesitation, for that hadn’t been part of Susan’s thinking, a smile came and she said, “YES!”

Before long we were hiking out the coastal trail at Land’s End at the northwest tip of San Francisco. It was a spectacular, crisp day. The trail is being extensively improved by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, with wide walks and stone-ringed cutouts. This first day of the year there were more people than we have ever seen, of all ages and ethnic groups it seemed.

Leading Change: The Role of Serious Play

2007 is almost over, and a weaving of insights for the new year is already beginning, fueled by a good studio day of just letting things arise, and several visits with good friends and counselors. The twin themes of “prototyping” and “leadership” are starting to dance together in a wonderfully hopeful way.

Simulate to Innovate
Let me start with the prototyping theme. Casting over my library (the one I keep at my home studio focused on the projects I am developing) Michael Schrage’s book on Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) popped into my hand. My colleague, Ed Claassen got it for The Grove library several years ago. I took it home, knowing that there was a connection between prototyping, play, and what we do at The Grove with interactive graphic communications and groups.

The Story of Stuff

This holiday was a complex time of joyful immersion in family and community and sober reflection on the course of our consumer society. I felt good about spending much more time on relationships and less time on shopping this year. But we did give some gifts, heartful expressions of love... and in the back of my mind I rationalized that I was helping support what is clearly a challenged economy. I asked all the clerks I saw how things were going and they said OK, but slower than last year. I know Grove clients are starting to slow down on their bill paying, an early indicator of recession. I wrote earlier about a client who is experiencing unprecedented fuel driven commodity price hikes and is VERY worried.

Is it possible that our society, like the stock market, needs a "correction" like this, as painful as it could be? A got a confirmation of that perspective in an e-mail from my colleague Diana Arsenian, a gifted graphic facilitator and designer who is part of The Grove network. She included a link to "The Story of Stuff," and really encouraged me to watch it. Coming from her, and supported by two other friends who I remembered has also pinged me about it, AND having some time the day after Christmas led me to watch. It's a 20 minute, beguilingly simple, clever, graphically animated  story narrated by Anne Leonard, linked to a very rich web site encouraging involvement and action. 

The Story of Stuff is a powerful example of visual storytelling (supported by our neighbors at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability, The Tides Foundation) and took me into thining how we at The Grove might start using our visualizaiton expertise.

So there I was, fully implicated, considering the impacts of my (and most of the rest of our) chosen lifestyles. I'm still roiling with the impact. Could this year be a time when we make a turn as a society toward more sensible thinking? Will I be a part?

Do take the 20 minutes to watch this. It should shake you into some deep reflection if not change. We all need to do both!

It's a Casino Out There

I’m flying over this country again to a client in Boston and I can’t shake out of my head a conversation I had last night with the President of a mid-sized company in the baked goods industry. His company buys millions of tons of flour, sugar, eggs, and other commodities every year. He knows the markets like a sailor knows the seas, and he’s scared.

“I used to be able to see the cycles, but its Las Vegas out there now.” He said. I asked him what he meant. “Well, last year the price of flour was about $13-14 a pound. Now it $26. Eggs have tripled in price since last year. It’s a disaster.”

“Why?” I asked. “Ethanol” he answered. The rush to look green and look like we are doing something about energy security has resulted in ethanol producers buying all the corn they can get. “There are 60 more plants on the drawing boards.”

The Joy of True Community

I come into the workweek renewed by a "corn feed" at our Argonne Community Garden autumnal equinox work party. The garden has 70 plots, and is next door to our place in San Francisco wrapping around the Argonne Children's Center, the first solar public building in San Francisco. It was built thanks to the focused effort of our garden community and leader Ed Dierauf back in the 1980s when the District thought about selling the land. Our network is strong and came out in force, with politicians in tow! Two young architects threw themselves into the project and instead of more apartments we have a wonderful children's center--AND community garden.

This weekend we were welcoming a group of new members, several of whom are biodynamic gardeners we were thrilled to discover. Two years ago I was elected President of the garden, succeeding Ed, and help "facilitate" the major events we hold. It's unlike any other facilitation I do. This is community, and I'm a part of it. It's more like just showing up and being me! Our gardeners come to the garden for refuge and renewal, not more organization--but there are things we need to attend to.

Synchronicities

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.