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

The National Parks Institute (NPI) Executive Leadership Program has made a comeback, and The Grove is once again centrally involved. Over the course of ten days, 22 leaders from 11 countries and eight U.S. Parks immersed themselves in a learning journey, taking them from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the S.F. Bay Area, to UC Merced, and then to Yosemite National Park. It was a powerful experience for those involved, and David Sibbet, The Grove’s founder, was the...

In the past decade, the rapid evolution of technological advances has made it much easier for people to work, meet and team virtually. Some organizations have jumped right into the virtual space and revolutionized the way they work, while others are struggling to create virtual-work processes for a mix of co-located and remote staff. As global teaming becomes more essential and workers of all ages—especially millennials—increasingly make employment choices based on...

Author: Gisela Wendling

Recently The Grove engaged in a yearlong project with the Metropolitan Council (Met Council or Council) in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, focused on building internal process leadership capability. The Metropolitan Council is a regional body that oversees all of Minneapolis-St. Paul’s wastewater, metropolitan transit, housing projects, and regional-planning efforts.

One of the Met Council’s major goals is to work more systemically and...

Recently Stanford scholar Bob Horn, longtime friend of The Grove and fellow pioneer in visual thinking, led a GLEN Exchange * introducing his “mess mapping” process for exploring social messes and their causes. Author of Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, he is a specialist in mapping complex social problems. Currently, he is writing a book called The Little Book of Wicked Problems and Social Messes.

In mess mapping, a group of diverse stakeholders tackles...

At The Grove we help people come together to create something new. Clients work with us to begin new initiatives, create or refresh new teams, or set a new direction.

Whatever the facilitative challenge, there are patterns in the way we approach our work. Through metaphoric imagery, this year’s Grove calendar illustrates some of the basic practices that we use to facilitate a creative group process. Please follow along with our visual story, then download The Grove’s 2019...

Authors: Dick and Emily Axelrod 

Editor’s Note: Recently The Grove’s Tiffany Forner worked with Dick and Emily Axelrod to create a visual template and Leader’s Guide for their meeting planning process, The Meeting Canoe, which they describe in their book, Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get More Done. We thought the following tips in the Leader’s Guide were so fundamental to good meetings that we asked if we could...

From its inception to the present day, The Grove has helped design and lead large organizational- and community-change projects by successfully applying its visual facilitation, teaming, strategic-visioning, and process-leadership methods. Now Grove founder David Sibbet and Gisela Wendling, vice president for global learning, have written Visual Consulting: Designing and Leading Change, the fourth book in the Wiley & Sons Visual Facilitation Series. It includes several new...

Recently the dean of The College of Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona called The Grove for help. The college of six academic departments and more than 5,000 students needed to move beyond a culture of silos, update some of its administrative processes, and address what seemed to be a lack of opportunities for innovation. As the college was getting ready to celebrate its 50th anniversary and was shifting from a quarter-based to two-semester-based system, the timing was ripe...

For more than 40 years, The Grove Consultants International has pioneered and supported a worldwide wave of interest in visual learning and facilitation. Now The Grove has launched The Global Learning & Exchange Network (GLEN), a network of process consultants, facilitators, team leaders, change practitioners, organizational leaders and more. Its mission is to increase people’s ability to collaborate across organizations and cultures by providing a learning community...