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

What Is Graphic Facilitation?

To begin, let me share a story that illustrates how graphic facilitation works. Recently, a rapidly growing human resource development consulting firm operating in China and Japan asked my company, The Grove Consultants International, to come to China and teach its consultants graphic facilitation. In spite of a tradition of using wall posters for communication and having a language based on ideographic characters, the firm had not made the leap to using graph...

On September 27th, David Sibbet and Rachel Smith conducted the first workshop in a series based on Sibbet’s bestselling book, Visual Meetings. Held at Fort Mason in San Francisco, this six-hour immersive workshop covered a range of topics from graphic templates and visual models to virtual work and new media. More than one-hundred people were in attendance.

“Visual meetings are effective because they engage people more and involve people with what’s going on,” explains Smi...

Author: Rachel Smith

I am frequently asked about the tools I use to graphically record virtual meetings. “Virtual meetings” in this case refers to web-conferencing sessions where people are connected from all over the place using computers and various software tools including WebEx, Connect, GoToMeeting, Live Meeting, Elluminate, and so forth. The web-conferencing software has to either support screen sharing or have a really, really good whiteboard feature. Here’s why I choose the tools tha...

Author: David Sibbet

Becoming Aware of Metaphor

Using metaphor consciously is another skill involved in mastering facilitation. Humans make sense out of things by comparing what they know with what they don’t know. If the comparison says one thing “is” another thing, it qualifies as a metaphor. If I say it is “like” another thing, it qualities as an analogy. For instance, I could say that the Grove Facilitation Model™ is like a mental keyboard for composing meaning along the “staff” li...

Author: David Sibbet

I want to reflect a little on why I think that personal development is essential to “mastery” in facilitation, and how we approach teaching about “mastery” at The Grove. We define facilitation as “the art of leading group process toward agreed-on outcomes with full participation, creativity, and ownership from all involved.” Facilitation is about serving the group and its collective purpose as distinguished from one’s own. Leaders and team managers are the ones wh...

Author: Rachel Smith

A few weeks ago, we put the following question to several facilitators’ groups on LinkedIn: What are the biggest roadblocks you’ve encountered during virtual or blended meetings? (We defined blended meetings as those where some participants are face-to-face and some are attending virtually.) In the lively discussions that followed the question, expert facilitators shared the issues they have encountered—as well as some tips for dealing with them. This summary was prepared f...

Author: David Sibbet

We’ve all heard of the term “team building”—based on the industrial-age metaphor that people are like construction blocks. You might not even think of this as being a metaphor, but it implies you start with nothing and somehow, after a group process, teams are “built” and everything works. When Allan Drexler and I set out to create a comprehensive model for team development in the 1980s, we agreed that the building metaphor doesn’t capture how groups really work. Te...

David Sibbet recently graphically facilitated a meeting between Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the United States appointed by President Obama, and a collection of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and technology innovators, including Mint.com, Mozilla, and Facebook, at IDEO Labs to discuss how government can improve how it is delivering services to the American people.

Doug Solomen, an old colleague of David’s from Apple, now works at IDEO and invited David to participate. Vivek subseq...

An uncertain economy requires resetting your vision, assumptions, and plans. And tight budgets mean you’ll probably need the tools to do it yourself.

The Grove has developed the Strategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit to help you apply our Strategic Visioning Visual Planning System™ (VPS) to your most pressing organizational planning challenges. It’s flexible and even fun, and based on more than 30 years’ experience guiding organizations large and small through periods of change and new bu...