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

Author: Malgosia Kostecka

Earlier this year, I attended the International Forum for Visual Practitioners, an annual convening of people who use visuals to build understanding. Among the keynote speakers was cartoonist and cartoon theorist Scott McCloud, a personal hero of mine. Here are my visual notes from his presentation.

As a graphic recorder, I especially resonate with Scott’s point that “there are no neutral visual decisions, and every decision matters.” When choosing shapes and col...

Author: Tiffany Forner

I’ve worked on many Grove Storymap® projects during my 18 years at The Grove. In the beginning, it felt like wading through a swamp of data, struggling to find a way to communicate a client’s complex situation in a clear and simple way. This kind of information design was not like anything I learned as a design major in college.

After years of practice and collaboration with my esteemed colleagues, Laurie Durnell and Rachel Smith among others, it has gotten easier. ...

Editor’s Note: Luis Moura is a project-management consultant for The City of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. He has worked as an internal consultant on projects for Calgary’s information technology, emergency response, facilities management, transportation, water, utilities, waste and recycling services.

Luis attended The Grove’s Visual Facilitation for Project Managers workshop in June. A few weeks later, we caught up with him to learn more about how he uses visual practices in his work.

This article was co-written by The Grove and Gyung Hee Han, a longtime HR business partner at W. L. Gore. Based in Korea, Gyung Hee is the Team Performance lead for Gore’s Asia-Pacific region. The article is the fruit of a conversation in which she shared stories and insights from her extensive experience working with Asia-Pacific and global teams. 

As W. L. Gore has grown, its teams have become bigger and the teaming dynamics are more challenging. The team environment in the Asia-Pacif...

Author: Rachel Smith

I used to dislike using video in remote meetings. All the social cues we get from following another’s gaze simply don’t work on computer video. No matter where other people look, they seem to be captivated by something just out of view.

Surprisingly, I’m getting comfortable using video—sometimes I even enjoy it. Still, I’ve noticed that it often is used ineffectively. Since I’ve found myself in more video conferences than usual lately, I have been noticing what wor...

Author: Laurie Durnell

Is strategic planning on your horizon? In my consulting work with organizations over the years—across sectors and from a single team to enterprise-wide—I have seen extraordinary results using Strategic Visioning (SV), a Grove visual-planning system. I have used it to facilitate many creative, engaging, agile and effective planning processes for client organizations.

Here are nine common planning challenges that Strategic Visioning can help you r...

Autodesk provides a great case study for tapping the full potential of The Grove’s Storymap® offering. Being so at home in a design-oriented milieu, the software company intuitively understood the power of visuals and was quickly able to leverage that power when it came time to roll out a visual communication within the organization.

Michele Wolpe, director of Employee Communications at Autodesk, was the project lead. She joined the company at a time when it was experiencing quite a bit of...

At The Grove we see the importance of strong, thoughtful internal leadership when undertaking a Grove Storymap® process (1). We spoke to one of our recent clients to hear her perspective on how to make the process go smoothly and get a fulfilling result.

If your organization wants to align on its strategy and vision and is thinking about doing a Storymap process, here are seven tips to set your organization up for success:

1. Engage a great team of people and a great outside partner wh...

Author: Rachel Smith

Have you ever been in the Despondent Pit of Techno-Despair?

You know what I’m talking about if you’ve been there. You’ve been trying to get some type of technology to work, usually in front of other people. It probably worked yesterday, or even earlier today when you tested it by yourself, but the controls are now mysteriously incomprehensible and you’d swear they look different from how they did just an hour ago.

Possibly a lot of people are waiting to do some v...