Welcome to The Grove’s Blog

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...

More than 50 authors joined in a three-day global book sprint to create The Visual Facilitation Field Guide, a project launched by Jeroen Blijsie in The Netherlands. The book’s co-editors are Jeroen, Tim Hamons in Singapore, and Rachel Smith in the United States. The authors represent a broad spectrum of the field of visual practice. Their goal: to write a book that raises the profile of these methods and makes them accessible for both practitioners and clients.

Contributors...

Author: Laurie Durnell 

What can you do to get your team in sync for 2018? When people get lost in the details of week-to-week implementation, it is easy for them to get disconnected from the big-picture strategy. Early in the new year is a natural time to reconnect, review, and renew. Here are three ways to focus your organization or team and develop strategic insight for the coming months.

Option One: A “Bridge to the New Year” Session

Time Involved:...

Happy New Year from The Grove! Our 2018 illustrated calendar is now available. The Grove’s Malgosia Kostecka and Tiffany Forner have populated each month with a playful combination of text and image. We hope the calendar inspires creativity for you in 2018.

Download / print a 1-page 11″x17″ calendar PDF

Download / print a 14-page 8.5″x11″ calendar (1-page-per-month) PDF

The Digital Workspace Communication Challenge

Recently The Grove worked with VMware to develop a Grove Storymap® about its digital workspace product, Workspace ONE. VMware developed an amazing product but was running into some communication obstacles. As Kevin Strohmeyer, senior director of Solutions Product Marketing, describes, “We had been talking about the digital workspace both internally and in the marketplace for 18 months, but there was little consistency. More...

Author: David Sibbet

I was saddened to hear that my friend and colleague Allan Drexler passed away recently. He was 88. In the 1980s, he and I co-developed the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model® and the facilitative methods and tools connected with it. Without Allan, we would not have this model. The depth of his field experience with teams, coupled with his deep understanding of group dynamics developed in sensitivity training at National Training Labs, kept the work...

Author: Laurie Durnell

Increasingly teams are being mashed together: different specialties or functions, or different parts of organizations being merged as a result of leadership experimenting with cost-cutting or efficiency initiatives. This new landscape of teaming benefits from focused approaches to syncing up these newly formed teams. The goal is to integrate their efforts smoothly and achieve the organizational benefits they were reconfigured to achieve.

For example, in...

Author: Rachel Smith

In The Grove’s recent Facilitating Virtual Collaboration workshop, the topic came up about how facilitators can engage participants in a remote meeting so that they don’t check email, tune out, stop listening, and fail to … well… participate. My unusual and occasionally unpopular advice: it’s not entirely your problem.

 Let me clarify. As a facilitator, and especially as a facilitator of remote meetings, it’s my job to...

Collaboration, networking, relationship. These ideas resonate with many in The Grove’s network, from clients and associates to consultancies in places all around the world that wish to foster creativity and collaboration in their businesses. With this last group, the consultancies, we have formalized a pathway to partner with The Grove.

Who We Partner With

The Grove Partners Program is for small-to-mid-size consulting firms collaborating with The Grove on client work,...

Want to make your writing more legible when you are working on charts at work—or any other time when having readable handwriting smooths the way? Watch this short tutorial with Grove consultant Malgosia Kostecka:

In these turbulent times The Grove, like everyone else, is heading into rising levels of uncertainty. We know that uncertainty is also a challenge for all of our clients as well as the visual practitioners and change leaders we support. It feels like a perfect storm, and we’re preparing for the big waves.

Navigating Waves of Change

When change comes quickly from external forces that you can’t control, there are some imperatives. It is vital to support your...