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

Author: Tiffany Forner 

In November of 2020, The Grove put out a call in our community to submit artwork that answered the question, “What does democracy mean to you?” We knew this may be a complex question to answer, and we were hoping for a variety of responses. What we received was a wonderful array of interpretations from around the globe. We’d like to thank our contributors for helping us ring in the new year with creativity, community, and a...

Author: Tiffany Forner

Need an idea for the virtual office party? Do a virtual gift certificate exchange using a digital whiteboard like Mural. It’s a nice way to keep the holiday party vibe alive and support some smaller retailers at the same time. Below are some basic instructions for setting up the game. The idea is very similar to a white elephant gift exchange. Look up the basic rules for a white elephant if you are unfamiliar. When the party commences, the game...

Author: David Sibbet

Coro has been a pioneer in experiential-leadership education since 1948. Well-known graduates, such as Senator Diane Feinstein and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, started their careers at Coro. As COVID-19 hit in March and shelter-in-place restrictions began, Coro centers across the country faced a challenge going virtual and asked The Grove for help. Coro needed to transform a high-engagement, face-to-face way of working to a virtual setting. They were also...

Clients and colleagues are reaching out about the work challenges they are facing in this unprecedented time. The following represents some of the questions we are hearing and the approaches we are taking.

1) How do we help facilitators and meeting participants get comfortable with virtual meetings?

 We’ve found that facilitators who were comfortable with large conference rooms, large sheets of white paper and colorful markers at their disposal, are having various...

Teaming in virtual space is challenging all of us, but recent Grove experience with teaching our Team Performance System online has left us excited and optimistic that real jumps in learning can happen in this format. In a recent certification workshop conducted for a client, participants expressed their sense of improvement in relationship building and team productivity through the use of high-engagement online activities.

Our certification workshop focuses on some key takeaways. We...

The El Dorado County Office of Education (EDCOE) reached out to The Grove early this year to assist it in some long-overdue strategic and prioritizing conversations. A plan was in place to conduct a two-day strategic-visioning offsite when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, effectively stymieing the notion of an in-person process. The leaders at EDCOE chose to push forward and move the process online, and Laurie Durnell, principal consultant, along with Kayla Kirsch, Grove associate, led...

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...