An Interactive Exchange with Grove CEO, Gisela Wendling, Ph.D.,
and Grove Founder, David Sibbet
The Grove’s Seven Challenges of Change: Origins & Theory
“How can diverse perspectives be in genuine dialogue and the patterns that drive change be made visible? How can consultants stimulate and harvest the collective intelligence of a group? These (models) convey with practicality and clarity how leaders can use the powers of imagination and collaboration in service of engaging complex challenges.”
Aftab Omer
President, Meridian University
In 2016 the chancellor of the University California at Merced announced the campus would double in size by 2020. The school needed support in making this transformational change and engaged The Grove. Soon after, Gisela Wendling and David Sibbet designed and led a year-long Leading Change intensive for the Environmental Services (ES) division of the Met Council in Minnesota. ES wanted to prepare 20 middle managers to become expert process leaders for its internal and inter-agency change work.
During this time, Gisela and David evolved a new Grove model called the Seven Challenges of Change™ (7COC) that now guides The Grove’s organizational change practice. It is an integration of Gisela’s Liminal Pathways Change™ Framework (LPF) with an earlier approach based on Arthur Young’s Theory of Process. Both Gisela and David have deep experience with principles and practices arising from the discipline of organization development (OD). Earlier in her career Gisela, for example, headed up the masters program in OD at Sonoma State University and has worked with organizations as an internal and external consultant over the course of three decades.
Following the Leading Change program, which was organized around the new model, Gisela and David published Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change. They vetted the language of the model and practices supporting critical action through a series of exchanges with a group of experienced consultants. During COVID, Gisela researched the efficacy of the LPF and published The Liminal Pathways Study detailing why practitioners find it so useful. The 7COC and the LPF are the core models of The Grove’s Designing & Leading Change workshop.
The call will unpack this origin story and explore how the Theory of Process and the Liminal Pathways Change Framework guided the design of the 7COC model. This is not a training workshop, but a sharing of the core ideas that shaped The Grove’s current work with change. You will receive relevant materials and a video of the call.
More About Transformational ChangeÂ
Transformational change requires a system to undergo a radical shift from one status quo to another. For organizations, this may mean moving from an old way to a new way of working, committing to new operating principles, and following a new north-star vision that is as different as a caterpillar is from a butterfly. These radical shifts require making intimate friends with the unknown and embracing being in the crucible between the old and new as illustrated in Liminal Pathways Change Framework.
Leaders can also benefit from recognizing that a reliable yet flexible outer support structure is needed as the change moves from inception to being actualized and those in the midst of it do the “inner” work of changing. This is illustrated by the blue and orange bands of beads suggesting that attending to the outer support and inner process are the DNA of change. What Gisela and David chose to emphasize in the Seven Challenges of Change Model is that the crucible and DNA patterns repeat and unfold over and over during longer processes as the work at hand evolves.
What is not featured in the architecture of the model is the visionary and inspirational leadership that is needed to catalyze the change and the process know-how to guide the change to completion. These leaders need to be able to hold a north-star direction and invite people into and through a journey that moves from relative certainty into uncertainty and back to relative certainty. Without conviction that inspiration, alignment, and commitment will arise through successive dialogues and engagements, transformation change will not take place.Â
The Grove’s approach is based on a deep respect for the power of involved stakeholders to step up to dramatic change with the embrace of visionary leaders who have maps to the territory of change.