Welcome to The Grove’s Blog

Are you needing to shift your face-to-face meetings to virtual meetings? For more than ten years we’ve been adapting our visual-facilitation techniques to address our clients’ growing need to convene people in the virtual realm. Virtual meetings have come a long way. What used to be awkward, technically challenged interactions have become humanized, technically stabilized, effective gatherings. And yes, The Grove’s virtual meetings are highly visual, making them so...

Several years ago, select directors of organizational development within the Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) attended The Grove’s Strategic Visioning workshop. These directors work for the national BGCA and support the independently operated local and regional clubs with organizational development and tools. This team interfaces with club boards and staff around national goal-setting and planning, among other things. After experimenting with the...

Author: Tiffany Forner

Happy New Year to all! Please enjoy our annual calendar.

This year, our calendar illustrates one of the most basic and effective facilitative practices—the sticky-note brainstorm. We designated one wall in our office to the activity throughout the month of December. Armed with a spectrum of sticky-note colors, staff members were asked to supply images and words that they associated with each month of the year. Like...

For three years, The Grove has supported the creation of a Global Learning & Exchange Network, or The GLEN, to promote evolving the art and practice of collaboration across disciplines, organizations, and cultures to better face the problems of our times. This learning community has been growing steadily, currently boasting 80 members worldwide. Grove workshop graduates, consultants, facilitators, artists, and activists from around the world are members. We are happy to...

Author: Laurie Durnell

Why do teams so often fail to achieve the results they were created to accomplish?

We sat down with Laurie Durnell, The Grove’s director of consulting, to get her thoughts regarding the team challenges she sees most in the field. The following is a distillation of that conversation.

Clique Mentality

People gravitate toward individuals that think like themselves or have a similar “style” to their work. Style differences can be...

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...