Best Practices and Insights for Facilitating Creativity, Alignment & Organizational Results

Author: David Sibbet

Is it possible that we are entering a truly new era of organization change? Many believe that the shadow side of the pervasive mechanistic paradigm that underlies corporate strategies has led to a crumbling of confidence in traditional responses to change.

Our equating success with the ability to extract value from the earth, from less powerful nations and peoples, and from our very children through the attention economy has left us reeling with problems. When objec...

Author: Joran Slane Oppelt

I recently visited St. Cloud, Minnesota, for a three-day Team Performance workshop with a group of HR/Learning and Development leaders that put my COVID-polished hybrid facilitation learnings to good use in surprising ways. 

When I landed in Minneapolis, it was sunny and warm, and I had no idea I would soon be experiencing 10 inches of snow, scraping it off my rental car each morning with a visitor badge, and facing a work-related pivot that would have me seeki...

Author: Gisela Wendling, Ph.D.

This post introduces several important distinctions regarding types of change that are explored further in The Liminal Pathways Study, Chapter 5: Patterns of Change. You can download the full chapter here.

Whether we work with a team, individual leaders, or whole organizations, supporting their performance, helping them realize visionary futures, or simply facilitating an offsite, the underlying process they are going through is one of change. Because of th...

Author: Gisela Wendling, Ph.D.

As The Grove steps into its own visionary future, I have been turning my attention to what it truly means to commit. The picture above is from an early meeting in this process when I was talking with Erik Rolland, Grove senior consultant, and Nevada Lane, Grove partner.

I know that empowered enablers of positive change require an approach that values high engagement, visionary leadership, shifting fundamental assumptions and committing to a new future. Whe...

Understanding your organization’s environment and how this environment changes is critical for success in your planning process. This is a perfect time to have a visual planning session, using templates to provide a high-level view of all the factors that affect your situation. 

In this article, we provide a step-by-step process for using The Context Map, one of 20 different graphic templates that we use repeatedly with our clients to support their strategic planning. This visual template pr...

The use of structured collaborative practices can add a vitality and clarity to remote work that is often missing in informal, ad-hoc processes. In addition, the use of graphic frameworks, in the absence of the visual stimuli of face-to-face meetings, provides a clear focal point for exchanges and literally gets team members on the same page.  

Practices for “different time, different place” meetings (via e-mail, social media and shared websites). 

1. Use pre-work documents on a portal ...

Authors: Gisela Wendling, Ph.D. and David Sibbet 

These times of continuing instability demand that we focus on how we work with change. In this article, Gisela Wendling, Ph.D., and David Sibbet explore how to work with the seven challenges of change they identified in their book Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change. The Seven Challenges of Change™ Framework is an integration of the Theory of Process, on which all of The Grove’s process frameworks are based, and the Wendling Liminal...

Strategic Visioning combines hindsight drawn from visually facilitated strategic thinking sessions with foresight arising from aspirational, visionary exchange and dialogue. This process is grounded in the present through alignment on priorities and action plans.

Visual templates used in this process provide light structures for deep engagement. In-person meetings become information theaters. Online sessions simulate this with a progression of perspectives in whiteboard programs. Both approa...

Author: David Sibbet

As the sun rose over the south shoulder of Mt. Shasta on the fourth morning of my vision quest solo, I found myself doing the “Standing Like a Mountain” pose. The theme of constancy in the face of change emerged as a big takeaway from days of reflection, and I would like to share some of that thinking.

Shasta felt almost like a partner on this quest, as my purpose circle looked directly across a large meadow and up to the peak. On the last night of the three-day sol...