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?
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.
I received the following note recently about the passing on of Russell Ackoff from Bo Ekman at Tallberg Foundation. Ackoff was a legend even to those of us who never met him. His systems view is one I fully embrace. Bo's remembrance touched me and I wanted to share it. For an overview of Russ Acknoff's life and work check this link to his Wikipedia biography.
Dear Friends,
Recently the news reached us that our dear friend and inspiration Russ Ackoff passed away on October 29th. Russ was a truly humble and generous person allowing everyone and everything around him to grow. He was a master of mind but also a master of unpretentiousness.
I had the privilege to stumble across Russ' writings already in the early 1960's. We met at an international conference in Tel Aviv in 1974 where I gave a paper on "How to create problems through long-term planning." He liked the twist and we became friends for life.
He has over the years, singularly been the most important inspiration to the evolution of the Tällberg Foundation and its activities. From the very start, we chose the Tällberg approach to be a systems approach. He said that: "The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers that have simple problems have simple minds. Problems that arise in organizations are almost always the products of interactions of parts (of a system), never the action of a single part. Complex problems do not have simple solutions."
